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

Open Document