Preview

Pathos In I Have A Dream Speech

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
964 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Pathos In I Have A Dream Speech
Martin Luther King Jr’s speech was the greatest example of freedom in the nation’s history, by word of mouth. Martin Luther King Jr. was a model leader for our nation through times of civil rights hardship. He was an equal opportunity advocate and was also a powerful dominant speaker. In the 1950’s racism was at its worst, especially in southern states. Martin Luther King had a point to prove with his “I Have a Dream” speech. He needed to persuade the nation at the time being that the “Negro was not free”. Martin Luther King wanted freedom through peace. He believed that freedom should be achieved without violating ones dignity. Dr. King was about respect and equality. He believed that despite race, gender, and age everyone was entitled …show more content…
He was a strong believer that one day regardless of your skin tone we will all form together and become one. In the mid 1950’s America was suffering from segregation. Colored people were set apart from the rest. Martin Luther King opened up his speech by using pathos. He appealed to his emotion in the early stage of his speech. “This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hopes to millions of Negro slaves who have been seared in the flames of withering injustice”. He started to give his audience the idea of what he is getting ready to talk about. He wants his audience to feel his words “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished”. Dr. King used repetition to emphasize the importance of what he is telling the audience. It makes you realize the degree of his point of view. Also reading the same phrase over and over makes you feel it emotionally, He’s stressing it by repeating himself, so the audience must feel his emotion through his

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Martin Luther King, Jr., a Civil Rights Activist of the 1950s, delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 to advocate for equal rights for all ethnicities and to convey the message that unity is essential to the strength of society. Martin Luther King, Jr. starts his speech by uniting the audience under a similar belief that, “all men would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the…

    • 1057 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister, activist and more importantly, a leader in the African American Civil Rights Movement hailing from Albany, Georgia. The audience consisted of mostly African American activists and supporters but also white elected officials and government officials as well as average white citizens. The purpose of King’s speech was to convey the difficult life African Americans have been faced with ever since Americans forcibly brought African natives to become slaves and work for the white men. King is speech, he effectively succeeded in motivating and aspiring the nation to ponder giving equal rights to their fellow African American citizens.…

    • 499 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Martin Luther King Jr. a Civil Rights Movement leader, who believed in non-violent protest. King was different compared to Malcom X. These two leaders held various ideas on how African Americans should fight for their rights. Back in 1963, King delivered the famous speech I Have a Dream to his followers in Washington D.C. His speech created hopes to the people. King says that back in the days when our ancestors were still working as slaves; they got no freedom at all. However, after a hundred years we, Black people, are still having similar issues and still looking to have a peaceful life in this country. King's ideology was to peacefully make impacts to the African American community and hoping one day they will be treated equally as the White…

    • 149 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Baptist minister and civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of civil rights supporters as a call to end racism in the United States as well as civil and economic rights for all races. In the introduction of the speech, he discussed the day that America’s forefathers signed the Emancipation Proclamation was a beacon of light for enslaved African Americans, as they would one day be free and seen as individuals rather than slaves. King states, “But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” Continuing, Dr. King believes that the origin of racial inequality lies solely with America and the refusal to view all races as equal, like the forefathers who wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of…

    • 915 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    King calls upon the African American with phrases like, “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred” to emphasize the fact that he understands how simple it is to be filled with “bitterness” and “hatred.” Also, he doesn’t want others to suffer from hatred and be sucked in with the non-supporters of the civil rights. Another viewpoint is he doesn’t want people to take the shorter road out to get freedom. He wants both blacks and whites to be able to hold hands together and greet each other without malevolence and…

    • 547 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    tried to correct in the corrupt society in the early 1960’s. He wanted to make the United States one community with all of its many faces. Jr. had become very tired of these laws called the Jim Crow Laws. Jim Crow Laws were segregation laws that took rights away from black people and gave more rights to white people. Martin Luther King Jr. was a powerful speaker and a great motivator. Jr. learned a lot from his experiences growing up. These rough times gave him the guts and the will to stand up for what he believes in. No matter what Martin Luther was always motivated to help the cause for the right thing. In martin Luther King Jr. speech “I Have A Dream” King declared that he and the colored men and women deserve to not be crippled with their civil rights and it has been one hundred years that they have been living under these…

    • 1187 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Mr. King’s speech is about the fight for justice and equality. In Mr. King’s speech he talks about the signing of the emancipation proclamation 100 years ago and how the Negro is still not free. In his speech Dr. King repeats the phrase “100 years later” to list the difficulties of the Negro. In King’s speech he also talks about how we should change and how we should keep moving forward and not turn back. In the last parts of King’s speech he talks about his dreams for the world. King says that he has dreams that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” King wanted there to be equality amongst everybody.…

    • 611 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech is one of the greatest speeches of all time. He achieves this status because the speech is brilliantly written and flawlessly presented. The speech’s clear purpose is to persuade the audience of the problem that is segregation and to call people to fight for civil rights. King’s language is simple and direct, yet very powerful and well-chosen. The speech itself appears to be easily understood. However simple, it very impactful. He uses analogies throughout the speech, these prove the speech to be more accessible to everyday people. He also treats his audience with a huge amount of respect, acknowledging their troubles, as well as, encouraging them to keep going. His use of the phrase “I have a…

    • 247 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Believe it or not Martin Luther King almost didn’t give the “ I Have a Dream” speech. Mahalia Jackson encouraged King to go ahead and tell the people watching about the speech. King decided to go for it and improvised the rest of the speech. The speech gave people a realization on how different black people were treated compared to the whites. He had a dream that one day everyone would be able walk and communicate without being discriminated against. He wanted to point out that your skin color shouldn’t make you any different than anyone else. Everyone should be able to walk the same streets, interact with whom they like. King teaches one that all of this starts with the children. If you teach a kid from a young age to be a certain way then that’s what he’ll turn out to be but if you tell them they can have the freedom to interact with any kid they like to that’s a change. In the speech he said that he’ll like for the children of a slave and the children of a slave owner to be able to grow up together, in the same environment and not feel any different.…

    • 509 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The key phrases that I have identified are Negro and America from the beginning sentences. The correlation that I notice with the use of these phrases is that he is expressing to the public that a change needs to occur for America to create unity and equality for the Blacks to be included in society. In the following sentences from his speech, he expresses how no change has happened over the course of time towards the Black population. “But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.” “One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” These key phrases express the main objective in his speech and that is the division between the Whites and Blacks in society. Mr. King is emphasizing that Blacks are still not free in society even though slavery has been abolished. He addresses the segregation that still exists which is promoting a form of discrimination among society. The end goal of his speech was to open the eyes of the nation to identify the problem and to act on this issue of discrimination by not engaging into the problem anymore.…

    • 649 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Martin Luther King Jr. was a man who wanted to do away with racial discrimination. He wanted to do whatever he could, he started groups of men; black and white, he started to preach out in public and started to inspire many people all over the nation, from newspaper writers to the high priest of North Carolina.. One of his most famous speeches was “I have a Dream” speech. Before his speech he delivered about 250,000 men and women and they marched to the Lincoln Memorial. During his speech he said many things but a few of which caught men, women, and even children’s undivided attention. He alluded, “Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still am told to sit in the back of the bus because whites were sought to be better than blacks. On December 1 ,1955 a woman named Rosa Parks was on a part of a bus where…

    • 1048 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Martin Luther King Jr. was a significant leader who played a tremendous role in the move for equality. He gave his famous speech “I Have A Dream” at the March…

    • 930 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    On August 28, 1963 all eyes were on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he took the stage and spoke before a crowd gathered just outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.. Nearly 250,000 people came to hear the great civil rights icon deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for jobs and freedom. Dr. King's words were nothing short of awe-inspiring when he stood before those gathered to march for freedom and justice as a beacon of hope. A prominent figure in the civil rights movement and a most eloquent speaker, King's words are certainly those that will carry the spirits of those seeking righteousness.…

    • 350 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Famous Thinkers

    • 1418 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was famous for his “I had a dream” speech, which was given in 1963 during the ‘Freedom Walk in Detroit” (Brown, 2012). He was a contributor to pushing the Civil Rights Act, in which, Dr. Martin Luther King attended the signing ceremony of the bill in 1964 (Burro Jr., 2002). He was a person who believed in freedom of all people regardless of race or color of their skin. He was passionate about what he believed in and used god as a tool to guide him through the road that he walked. Martin Luther King Jr., not only a spiritual man but also one that would leave a legacy in history.…

    • 1418 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    All in all Martin Luther King Jr. was an amazing man, and an amazing speaker. His use of rhetoric devices and references to both historical documents and scripture made his speeches both relatable, and very moving. To this day we still use this speech for examples of the fight for liberty, and for incredible…

    • 907 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays