On August 28, 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of the most influential speeches of all time. He spoke to thousands of people, and on one of the most debated issues of its time. It spoke to the hearts of many, and was a precursor to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He used Lincoln’s ground-breaking Emancipation Proclamation; the Founding Father’s Declaration of Independence, that first broke our ties to Britain as we forged out on our own; and the patriotic song My Country ‘Tis of Thee. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech uses patriotic imagery to make his point of racial equality during the March on Washington. The first historic document used is the Emancipation Proclamation. While these freed the slaves in the sense they were no longer owned, but MLK makes the point that even 100 years later, they still are not free. He uses imagery and metaphors to describe what the Emancipation Proclamation was to the slaves, he describes it as a great beacon light of hope to those who had been in captivity. But he goes on to say that they are still in the manacles of segregation, living on a lonely island of poverty in an ocean of material prosperity. While they may have been physically freed so many years before, they still aren’t free in sense that other races are. …show more content…
The founding fathers realized that this would and should be for all men, but left it to coming generations to account for it. But he says that they were given a ‘bad check’, that came back marked ‘insufficient funds’. Throughout the speech he uses imagery of this sort to give his listeners a better idea of what he is