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Why We Can T Wait Rhetorical Speech

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In this passage from Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King Jr. argues that equality for black must come immediately, not in 15 years, but right now and blacks need to stand up and fight for it. His tone on this subject is passionate and righteous. Rather than just stating facts, Martin Luther King Jr. makes the choice to make his argument based around the lives of a black girl and a black boy. He uses anecdote, appeals to logos, and repetition to make his point. Martin Luther King Jr. opens with two anecdotes, one about a young black girl's life in Birmingham and another about a young black boy’s life in Harlem. He describes their lives saying the girl lives in a “rickety wooden one-family house” (paragraph 2) and “can no longer attend an …show more content…

In paragraph four and five, Martin Luther King lays down example after example: “the first American to shed blood in” (paragraph 4) the revolutionary war was “a black seaman named Crispus Attucks” (paragraph 4), “one of the team who designed the capital of their nation, Washington D.C., was a Negro, Benjamin Banneker” (paragraph 4), and black slaves “built the homes, made cotton king and helped, on whip-lashed backs, to lift this nation from colonial obscurity to commanding influence in domestic commerce and world trade” (paragraph 4). All these examples blatantly prove that blacks have done more than their fare share in founding the nation we call home. If they have done more their fair share in creating this nation, should they not, logically, at least reap the same rewards as they other they worked alongside. This reward that they deserve is the freedom on which the nation was founded and which was granted to all the whites. Martin Luther King Jr. also brings up the Emancipation Proclamation in paragraph 6 which gave freedom all blacks. If all blacks were technically freed over one hundred years ago, shouldn’t they have freedom? By presenting a logical case for why equality for blacks is not only necessary but also long overdue, Martin Luther King makes the reader

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In the “Letter From Birmingham Jail” (1963) Martin Luther King Jr.,revered leader of the Civil Rights Movement, argues for the urgency of changing segregation laws. He supports his argument through the uses of fluent anaphora, weighty allusion, and urging imagery. His purpose is to make known the reality of a day in the life of Negro in order to compel the recipient’s to think “What if?” Dr. King addresses the white clergymen with a respectful and dignified tone although his circumstances. ‘Wait’ another word for never to the Negro.

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King’s main focus in Why We Can’t Wait is the breakthrough year, 1963, as the beginning of the Negro Revolution,

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I Have a Dream’s Rhetoric A momentous day in history is exalted by the enthralling speech and resonating imagery of a man whom wanted to make a difference. Just over 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was implemented, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a very riveting speech to over 250,000 Americans during the March on Washington, the nation’s largest demonstration of peaceful protest. With peace typically comes logic of which King very much emanated from his speech. With powerful rhetoric, King captivated an entire crowd and subsequently the entire nation with emphasizing while being freed from the travesty that was slavery people of color are still placed in chains by society’s gruesome yet commonplace demarcations.

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Nowadays, we live in such a multicultural society, that one would hardly believe that words such as discrimination and racism still exist. They are so deeply-rooted in our community that they often go unnoticed in our everyday lives. Martin Luther King Jr. was the leader of peaceful protests against the segregation of black people in America in the 1960s. Nonetheless, his nonviolent ideas failed to bring equality and he was compelled to take action. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was written 1963.

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Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. A Brief History with Documents written by David Howard-Pitney is a great history book that gives us an entry into two important American thinkers and a tumultuous part of American history. This 207-pages book was published by Bedford/St. Martin’s in Boston, New York on February 20, 2004. David Howard-Pitney worked at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University in 1986, and that made him a specialist on American civil religion and African-American leaders ' thought and rhetoric (208). Another publication of Howard-Pitney is The African-American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America.

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then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait” (5). Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. describes how he has seen many African Americans suffer from aggression and a lack of rights and explains that the African American community had to choose between suffering for many more years to come or to act on it and peacefully protest. The African American community choose to peacefully act when they did

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Martin Luther King Jr. was a strong leader in the Civil Rights movement, the son and grandson of a minister, and one heck of a letter writer. As he sits in a cell of Birmingham Jail in 1963, he responds to criticism from eight white clergymen. Though this letter was intended for the judgemental and condescending men of high faith, his response touched the hearts and minds of the entire U.S. population, then, and for years to come. In his tear-jerking, mind-opening letter, King manages to completely discredit every claim made by the clergymen while keeping a polite and formal tone. Metaphors, allusions, and rhetorical questions are used in the most skillful way to support his argument and ultimately convince his audience of the credibility behind his emotional, yet factual, claims.

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As many of us have read, it is stated in Dr. King’s speech, “But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free.” (King 1). By reading this,

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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

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According to King’s personal account, African Americans gained freedom, but there still was so much of a struggle for them to survive that they weren’t actually free. “In this ‘land of the free’ we are burned, tortured and denied a fair trial, murdered for any imaginary wrong conceived in the brain of the negro- hating white man” (Document G). Lands were being burned, and the African Americans were being tortured and denied fair trials. African Americans were not treated equally, which led to much more discrimination later. The violence that African Americans had to continue to endure after they were given their freedom proves that they still did not have the same equality as the white

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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.

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Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most influential leaders of his time and played a crucial role in the African-American Civil Rights movement. Luther was a charismatic leader who took a firm stand against the oppressive and racist regime of the United States (US), devoting much of his life towards uniting the segregated African-American community of the US. His efforts to consolidate and harmonise the US into one country for all is reflected in many of his writings and speeches spanning his career. As a leader of his people, King took the stand to take radical measures to overcome the false promises of the sovereign government that had been addressing the issues of racial segregation through unimplemented transparent laws that did nothing to change the grim realities of the society. Hence, King’s works always had the recurring theme of the unity and strength of combined willpower.

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On the 18th of September, Martin Luther King Jr. preached “Eulogy for the Martyred Children” at the service for three of the girls involved in the tragedy. For many people in the African-American community, the catastrophe of four innocent children dying was the last straw. No longer were they going to let oppression dictate their lives. By portraying the children as heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. took a terrible catastrophe and turned it into a glimpse of hope for his brother and sisters. Therefore, he portrayed the martyred children as heroes to unify African-Americans through a riverine tone.

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Racism in America has been around for centuries however it was in the 1960's that the attitudes of many Black Americans started to quickly change and they realized they wanted equality. Out of this, The Civil Rights Movement emerged which was a peaceful social movement that strove for equal human rights for black Americans. The leader of the Civil Rights Movement is no one other than Martin Luther King Jr. In his book, Why We Can't Wait, King tries to convince Black Americans to realize their reality, remember their roots and important and mainly, to seek changes to social conditions and attitudes.

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“...when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” (MLK, 276). King uses this strong sense of appeal to emotion to engross his readers and let them know how hard it is for them.

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