Metaphors And Allusion In Speech By Martin Luther King

INTRODUCTION

In the distance you could hear the sound of people chanting, there were families with their children, and others were full time workers still in their greases cloths with sweat in their eyes. There were groups of African Americans shouting in protest to in response to King’s speeches. They too were outraged about the injustice of segregation. There were banners, cardboard boxes, and picture of relatives that have been abused in the past. These people have been moved and motivated to take action, by not only the wrongdoings of the government. But with the help of people like King who give his speeches to people about segregation and how they should end it. Martin Luther King uses Metaphors and Allusions in his "Letter from Birmingham

Although there isn’t as many as metaphors they are harder to find. He used these Allusions to make people think about the past and how people before they responded.On of the major examples of people that he indirectly mentions is, HItler. King talks about how what Hitler did in germany was completely legal, and that everything that the the freedom fighters from Hungaria tried to to do, was illegal.Now this lets whoever is reading the letter think about the past and question things that other people think. King does this to make the person reading question the ethics of people and how they behave in certain circumstances. And as King mentions in the excerpt, he says that if he lived, “in a communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws.” What he means by this is if he was in that country where they suppress religious acts, he would have prefered to break the law to follow his religion. However in a country like the united states, we are allowed to believe in any religion, especially when it involves peaceful protest. In another Allusion, this time from a recent period. King then brings a dark image based on recent events: “There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than any city in this nation.” Where he continued to talk about how these are hard cold facts about how African American’s are treated in this country. King does this to make the reader question if what people are doing the to African Americans are the right thing. After all, why would you bomb someones house just because of their skin color? Not only that, but even after people are harassing their race, they decline any action towards making a peaceful