Rhetorical Analysis Of March On Washington For Jobs And Freedom

In the famous 1963 speech following the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to a large crowd of Civil Rights sympathizers with the intent of persuading them to take action and bring about equality for African Americans. This speech was particularly effective due to its emphasis on key concepts and its appeal to the audience’s reasoning, which work together to captivate the audience and sway them to take action for the Civil Rights movement.
One way that Dr. King persuaded his audience was via recurring phrases which helped to emphasize key points. One example of this is when he reiterates an important phrase a few times:
But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later,

King’s persuasive prowess in the speech is how he used logical and sensible arguments. A great example is when he states that their children are “stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity” by segregation laws and policies (King). He is alluding to the fact that African American children feel singled out and embarrassed by the fact that they are segregated from the white children. Most parents would never want their children to suffer through that kind of embarrassment, and yet African Americans experience it daily. A second example of King using logic and reasoning is when he states, “But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination,” (King). He uses the phrase “one hundred years later” to reference how it has been one hundred years since the Emancipation Proclamation. However, even one hundred years after this momentous occasion for African Americans, their lives have hardly changed for the better, as they are still held down by “the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination” which afflicted them all those years ago. These snippets from the speech make it evident how King often used cerebrally appealing arguments in order to convince people to help him fight for