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Martin Luther King I Have A Dream Rhetorical Analysis

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We all know Martin Luther King Jr. ,right? We know him as the man who gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. Which was a step in the civil rights movement to fight for African American rights. Well, besides that monumental speech, he also wrote “Letter From Birmingham Jail”. The letter was a response to a newspaper article that he read while in jail, where eight white clergymen were criticizing his recent actions that sent him to jail. Now we are going to look more in depth at M.L.K’s speech and the letter. One item that I realized is that Martin Luther King Jr. uses a ton of logical and emotional appeal. Throughout both the speech and the letter, Martin Luther King Jr. does a better job strengthening his logical appeal over emotional appeal.
First off, we will start with examples from the “I Have a Dream” speech. While analyzing I discovered that M.L.K brings up many different types of historical evidence that many people know to support his arguments. “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men,yes,black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life,Liberty,and the pursuit of Happiness (King,262).” In this quote he is bringing up the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
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