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Rhetorical analysis of speech
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King’s letter was structured in such a way, to address all the concerns of the clergymen. Since it was such a long letter, King wanted the clergymen’s major points to be refuted towards the end, effectively showing his audience the racial injustice that occurs with the Birmingham police. In the public statement addressed to King, the Birmingham police were mentioned towards the end. With the way the letter was structured, there is a possibility that King addressed their arguments in a chronological order. King easily refuted this point with an appeal to emotion, showing the appaling image of the Birmingham police force.
To start, Dr. King’s use of metaphors allows his audience to understand his viewpoint better. Since the founding of the Americas in the late 1400s, slavery was a problem; until the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. Then the segregation of African Americans and White Americans started. In his essay, Dr. King uses the metaphor “America has given the Negro people a bad check, which came back marked “insufficient funds” (46). King uses this metaphor to emphasize the treatment of African Americans in America.
This equal standing is one of the many points King tries to make, but certainly not the only one. King’s letter is written as a means of justifying his cause, as well as a means of displaying the unfair treatment of blacks in America. With his use of pathos, saying things such as “when you have seen hate-filled policeman curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters” makes an extremely heavy impact on the audience. Through his many uses of appeals, mainly his emotional appeal, he is able to convince his audience that not only are blacks not animals, but they are just like everyone
King stated that the black community has waited long enough. “We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights” (King 5). These are rights that everyone should have yet people had been neglected of them just because of their skin color. Other countries were making progress while they were stuck on an unnecessary issue. King uses a great analogy to explain this “The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter” (King 6).
He mentions he is “compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond” his own home town.(807) When King says, “We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights,”(809) he refers to blacks suffering at the hands of whites for hundreds of years. He emphasizes with “vicious mobs” that “lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brother at whim,” to invoke emotion. King calls out the city’s injustice when he mentions being denied “the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.”
For dozens of years, black people were treated like animals, even decades after they were “freed” from the shackles of slavery. It wasn’t until the mid-1950’s that one man took it into his own hands to make a change, and his name was Martin Luther King, Jr., a name with which virtually the entirety of America is familiar. King did a lot of monumental things, and almost all of his influence lay within his mastery of word manipulation and rhetoric. Perhaps one of the greatest examples of his use of rhetoric happens to be in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”, written to a group of white clergymen in 1963 after they criticized his campaign.
After establishing creditability, King shifts to explaining the grievances of African American through pathos. He gives examples of personal experience to bring forth the real truth of racism in Birmingham. He pushes for acceptance, oppression, and change for African Americans. If he did not push for those things, racism will still be an unsolved problem today. King stated, “Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts”.(IN TEXT CITATION)
King used words in the following quote to connect his current issue to one of the past, “We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungry was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” (King). When talking about the cruel actions of white people against African-Americans, he uses words associated with crime. Through this, he shows his audience that when he says these acts were inhuman, he means it.
We live in a world with currently many conflicts from the racial disparity in high incarceration rates to gun violence and the war over gun rights. In his letter, King describes that Black Americans have no identity and that the oppressed cannot remain oppressed forever. King implies that they cannot be told to “wait for justice” because if they simply
In King’s speech he says, “We have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice” (King). This section in his speech is similar to Lena Younger’s action of cashing in her insurance check to put a down payment on a house for her family. Mama, “She went out and she bought you a house”(Hansberry 91). Cashing in the check shows that this check of reality will give African Americans an opportunity for freedom and justice especially since the Younger family is the only African American family in the Clybourne Community.
King’s dialect showed the audience civil right issues, involving many rhetorical strategies using ethos, logos, and pathos, to a racially tempered crowd whom he viewed as different, but not equal. From the very beginning of it , King brings his crowd back to the origin of America when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, that freed all slaves and gave hope to the former slaves. But immediately after Dr. King speaks out on how after 100 years Blacks still do not have the free will that is deserved. He points out the irony of America because Black Americans were still not truly free.
He places the strong authority of the declaration on his side to show how the American people are in contradiction to their own “sacred obligation” and the Negros have gotten a “bad check.” A metaphor representing the unfulfilled promise of human rights for the African Americans. King skillfully evokes an emotional response from all races with the use of religion: “Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.” By doing this he finds a common ground that brings black and whites closer with a common belief in God they share, as well as the mention of
King’s speech through his use of logic and evidence. Dr. King says, “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” This is an analogy. He reasons that everyone can relate to and understand this because money is such a predominant thing in life.
This reference in particular evokes the strongest emotional response from black people because many African Americans revered Lincoln for his decision to sign the revolutionary Emancipation Proclamation, and how the document symbolized a free future for slaves--the ancestors of the blacks in the crowd. But the next few lines following this allusion also persuades those ignorant of how little things have changed by highlighting the “manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination” that blacks still suffer from despite the hundred year gap. Here, he uses the connotations of “manacles” and “chains” to evoke a negative emotional response from the audience, especially from those unaware of the need to change, causing their opinion to match the speaker’s: against segregation. Additionally, King weaves biblical allusions into his speech to appeal to the Christians within the crowd. He uses the “dark and desolate valley of segregation” to illustrate the injustice African Americans have endured for centuries and juxtapositions it with the “sunlit path of racial justice” to exemplify a future where true freedom exists for
King also used a number of figures of speech which includes allegory and parallelism. He applies allegory in the beginning of the speech, comparing banking to the rights of black U.S. citizens, “America has given the Negro people a bad