ipl-logo

The Ballot Or The Bullet Ethos Pathos Logos

1073 Words5 Pages

In Cleveland, Ohio on April 3, 1964 a man known by the name Malcolm X gave his famous speech called “ The Ballot or the Bullet”. This speech was about the racial difference that whites treated the African Americans and how its time that there be a change and fight back against the racial differences. Throughout the Malcolm X speech he uses his energetic personality to keep the audience interested in the point of needed change in the world. His audience is mostly towards the African American culture and for anybody that believes that this world should be made of equals instead of differences. Malcolm X may have been just a speaker but for some people he has crafted the world in to what it is today.

The speech starts by Malcolm X using …show more content…

“The year when all of the white political crooks will be right back in your and my community with their false promises, building up our hopes for a letdown, with their trickery and their treachery, with their false promises which they don't intend to keep. As they nourish these dissatisfactions, it can only lead to one thing, an explosion; and now we have the type of black man on the scene in America today -- I'm sorry, Brother Lomax -- who just doesn't intend to turn the other cheek any longer.”(6) In that statement he connects with the emotional part of the audience but with more of an anger approach. He started using anger to pull the audience in further and get them more passionate about what he is saying and as he does so he adds a famous civil rights activists by the name of Brother Lomax. The reason for that was to draw more ethos in at the same time he is using pathos to make a bigger connection to himself and the audience. Malcolm X brings emotion throughout the speech but he also brings emotion from the passion he has towards his African Americans. The way he speaks about the issues is just another way he brings in his audience and does a great job at doing …show more content…

"If they draft you, they send you to Korea and make you face 800 million Chinese. If you can be brave over there, you can be brave right here. These odds aren't as great as those odds. And if you fight here, you will at least know what you're fighting for."(7) Here he is using logos to show people what is really happening and why he is talking about the subjects he is talking about. When people hear that statement it puts in perspective on how serious this action of making a change is. He cant stress it enough that its okay to make a stand because if you make a stand then more people will follow leading to the change that needs to happen. With that statement being mostly logos there is a little pathos involved to. This is because people in the audience may have had someone they have known go to war and not make it back so this way it pulls emotion from the audience. “No, I'm not an American. I'm one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I'm not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver -- no, not I. I'm speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”(10) This statement hits all levels of ethos, pathos, and logos. He takes

Show More
Related
424 Words | 2 Pages

On April 12, 1964 Malcolm X gave his “Ballot or Bullet” speech at King Solomon Baptist church in Detroit, where two thousand people were in attendance. At this time President Lyndon Johnson was running for reelection which was the fuel to the fire for Malcom's speech. Malcolm X used the ethos approach to educate, convince, and encourage black people to get more involved in their communities to expand “Black Nationalism”, which I don’t think was successful because at the time it was not easily attainable. Ethos allows Malcolm X to convince the audience that he knows what he is talking about which persuades them to believe that what he is saying is true. In this case he is trying to convince the large crowd that “Black Nationalism”

Read More
1354 Words | 6 Pages

Patrick Henry and Malcolm Little (more commonly known as Malcolm X) were powerful spokesmen of their times. Years after Henry persuaded the United States president in time of the American Revolution to fight for the rights of Americans in his “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech, Little encouraged the black community of his time to stand for their own deprived civil rights as a race in his own speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet.” While these two men stood at the head of separate movements in different points of history, both believed in a similar goal to be accomplished through the same means: to win their battle for the rights of Americans and African Americans through fighting hard, not necessarily through violence, but through whatever

Read More
834 Words | 4 Pages

Instead of promoting peace to solve problems, Malcolm X used violence when necessary to get his points across to his audience. Little’s speech has a significant lack of logic; although, it is a clever move to predominantly use emotional appeal due to his motive - to incite anger in America and to showcase the government's faults. Through repetition of inflammatory phrases and accusatory diction both which create appeals to anger, Malcolm X effectively persuades his audience during “The Ballot Or The Bullet.” Throughout his speech, Malcolm X repeats incendiary phrases in order to kindle vexation in his audience. This tactic encourages his listeners to stand up for themselves now that they can see the issue at hand.

Read More
624 Words | 3 Pages

Malcom X claims'' Instead of airing our differences in public we need to realize we are all the same family'' ( Malcom x 69-70). In this section of his speech Malcom X uses pathos in an effort to open peoples eyes. He does this to try and unite African Americans and to show them who the real enemy is. Malcom X also uses Logos to help make his argument stronger.

Read More
1313 Words | 6 Pages

In their writings on the civil rights movements of the 1960s, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King make quite divergent arguments as to how to combat racial injustice. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King espouses the ideals of civil disobedience in his impassioned rebuke of those who criticize his methods by touting the virtues of nonviolent resistance to unjust laws. Conversely, Malcolm X, in his text The Ballot or the Bullet, takes a more radical stance by arguing that African-Americans ought to defend themselves from violence proportionally and that -- since a political conspiracy exists against the African-American population -- they should lobby the United Nations under the pretenses of human rights in order to dismantle the segregationist system. While Martin Luther King makes a sober and cogent case, Malcolm X’s arguments are impractical and undeveloped.

Read More
1745 Words | 7 Pages

Malcolm X: This man’s name is a shot at the beliefs of the typical white man of his own era. The —"X" symbolizes "the rejection of ‘slave-names' and the absence of an inherited African name to take its place." Likewise, in his speech "The Ballot or the Bullet", Malcolm X harshly criticizes the behavior of the white populace, having no intention to appeal to the ideals of the white community oppressing his people; his method of attack toward the issue of civil rights is in absolute defiance of the strategies used by other civil rights activists of his era, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. King, in his “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” attempts to protect the behavior of his organization while also trying to call upon the community of both the black

Read More
607 Words | 3 Pages

Most of the time he creates pathos by evoking feelings of pride, rage, and anger. Powerful language and vocabulary is used to bring out an emotional outcry and agreement from his audience. The pathos is so well done that even one who listens to the speech decades later can still feel the power in Malcolm’s words. He demonstrates pathos in this quote: “ They don't have second-class citizenship in any other government on this Earth. They just have slaves and people who are free!

Read More
319 Words | 2 Pages

Nicolas Rodriguez Mr.Trigg senior english 27-10-15 Malcolm x write to persuade the black people of America to put their differences aside and unite against the American racist hypocritical culture and defend themselves , so they can stay in America. Ons quote is 'forget our differences and come together' and also he calls his audience the 'same family' he then says that they need to 'defend our own people right here in this country' . This shows that Malcolm X has a strong opinion that the black people need to stick together and have a 'united front' in front of the 'oppressing white man'. Also he is trying to explain to the black people that the hypercritical fascist white people aren't part of the 'family' they're the 'enemy to all'.

Read More
964 Words | 4 Pages

Taken from “Message to Grassroots”, this speech extract is a emotive and appealing piece delivered by human rights activist Malcolm X. Malcolm X is considered one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history and famous for his idea of establishing a separate black nation funded by US government. The speech was delivered on November 10, 1963, at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan. "Message to the Grass Roots" was one of Malcolm X's last speeches as a member of the Nation of Islam. As the most "political" speech Malcolm X had delivered to that time, “Message to the Grass Roots" can be viewed as a sign of Malcolm X's impending separation from the Nation of Islam. In the speech, Malcolm spoke not as a Muslim

Read More
472 Words | 2 Pages

The speech opened the eyes of many blacks, inspiring a change to begin to occur. Through analogies, metaphors, and a vitriolic and urgent tone, Malcolm X concisely and clearly informs the audience of their mistreatment and encourages them to get their just deserts. X’s intelligence, passion, and oratorical skills helped make “The Ballot or the Bullet” one of the greatest rhetorical acts in black history. This phrase, “The Ballot or the Bullet”, truly defines Malcolm X’s stance on the current treatment of blacks and how he believes a violent response is necessary when all other means of communication are ignored or

Read More
780 Words | 4 Pages

Malcolm X was an effective leader because he had exceptional communication skills. These skills are viewed in his speech “By Any Means Necessary” and have been analyzed. The main goal of this speech was for blacks to figure out or to begin to figure out, what they can do to change the injustice, in order for blacks to gain things that

Read More
1318 Words | 6 Pages

The African American Civil Rights movement existed at large between the early fifties and the late sixties in a society that was constantly on the verge of social destruction. The black rights movement existed politically, socially, and economically everywhere in the United States. As time progressed the movement developed and saw many changes along with schisms separating activists and how they approached getting their rights. In the early fifties there was a large non-violent integration based movement spearheaded by figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. However, as the time progressed, the movement started seeing a more aggressive leadership with figures such as Malcolm X, but eventually it turned into an extremist movement

Read More
717 Words | 3 Pages

Introduction: Malcom X urges the Negro community to fight to gain the equal rights they deserve by taking action against their white oppressors. He emphasizes that blacks will gain their rights either thorough voting, with the ballot, or else through the inevitable violence with the bullet. Thesis [part a] Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., also fighting for the civil rights of black Americans in the 1960s, but in a more peaceful manner, Malcom X takes a different approach.

Read More
678 Words | 3 Pages

In America at the time The Ballot or the Bullet was given, segregation was still occurring. Malcolm X was a fighter for civil rights. In 1964 there was going to be a presidential election. Malcolm X was a civil rights leader and part of The Nation of Islam. He gave this speech on April third in order to talk about both the election and how African-American people should proceed in order to benefit from the election.

Read More
395 Words | 2 Pages

According to X, “The ballot or the bullet”... “Now in speaking like this, it doesn't mean that we're anti­-white, but it does mean we're anti­-exploitation,we're anti­-degradation, we're anti­-oppression. And if the white man doesn't want us to be anti-­him, let him stop oppressing and exploiting and degrading us”(Malcolm #2). The essence of Malcolm’s argument is that he is not anti white, he is anti whites oppressing and disenfranchising African Americans and if the white person wants to not be hated, then he should stop hating himself. In a letter written in Mecca, Malcolm X says,“on this pilgrimage, what I have seen,and experienced, has forced me to re-arrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions” (Malcolm X).

Read More

More about The Ballot Or The Bullet Ethos Pathos Logos

Related Topics

Open Document