Martin Luther King I Have A Dream Speech Summary

The Light in the Dark In one of the largest civil gatherings in American history at the time, 250,000 Americans, black and white, marched on Washington, meeting around the National Mall to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. While he had given many a speech, across the southern United States, this one was to be the most famous and prominent of his life, set before the stature of the Emancipator himself, Abraham Lincoln. A rousing orator, King’s powerful tone shone brightly in his address to the devoted crowd assembled before him, his seminal “I Have A Dream” speech. Through the use of expert syntax, intense diction, and intelligent allusions, King creates a tone of insistent hope throughout his speech. By using anaphora, supplemented by varying sentence length, King builds on his tone and message of insistent hope. Throughout much of the middle of his speech, King states, “I have a dream” as a beginning to many long sentences, each describing a particular dream of unity, equality, and brotherhood he has for
At one point, King alludes to the writing of Amos, a Jewish prophet who lived during a flourishing of Judah, and one who said much on the value of social justice, like King himself. King spoke in reference to the point at which the Negro race could be satisfied, saying, “when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” This allusion reinforces King's tone of insistent hope because it states that the civil rights he and those who marched with him hope for are going to come to the black population of America as inevitably as the flowing waters of a stream come to a delta. The literary trope of simile is present within King’s allusion to Amos when he explicitly compares justice to the waters and righteousness to a mighty stream. King’s powerful allusion to Amos only acts to empower his tone of insistent hope