Rhetorical Analysis Of Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence

During the 20th century, the Vietnam War had a profound impact on Americans, but there was a side of the story that was less known- voices from the poor. In Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech “Beyond Vietnam- A Time to Break Silence”, delivered at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, he claims that the American involvement in the Vietnam War is unjust. King uses personal anecdotes, elaborate word choice, and reliable facts to persuade his audience of the injustice of the war. In multiple paragraphs of his speech, King effectively appeals to emotion by using personal anecdotes that involve him speaking to people of poverty directly. In his second paragraph, he connects with his audience by saying “we have been repeatedly faced

For instance, in the second paragraph of his speech, he says, “I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.” The words “silent”, “cruel”, and “manipulation” speak out to an audience, especially for one that has faced hardship themselves in times of need. More importantly, King states that, the poor has been manipulated into believing a type of reality that simply isn’t accurate or fair on their part. Later in his speech, King writes again using an advanced vocabulary to reinforce his academic background with, “America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear.” By using the word “shackles”, the reader can easily create a vivid image in their mind of how restricted the poor must feel, and whether it be physically or mentally, they can understand how much the restrained are longing for a sense of freedom. Finally, as the speech comes to a close, King writes, “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.” King goes so far as to suggest that the war will bring America to its death if it continues overlooking the problems Americans are facing at home. This convinces the reader to fully consider how the war has brought detrimental consequences, and through King’s diction, he is capable of convincing his audience to

When speaking about how the war had initially seem to have brought opportunities, he says, “Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor.” Evidently, the program for the poor was meant to be used in helping the poor, but as soon as the funds were directed to the Vietnam War, resources were no longer cast in their direction. In other words, the resources were used for the soldiers, yet the poor still needed them just as so. A few lines after, King writes about the injustice the African-American community has faced, by stating, “We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” To further show to the audience how his community has been suffering from the war, he uses a comparison statement between the facts to illustrate how freedom has been hard to attain. In a sense, he dives right into the idea that it is unrealistic for them to find freedom in a region halfway across the world when they couldn’t even find it in America. He proves that the government has been manipulating the poor when he writes, “It was sending