Rhetorical Analysis Of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have A Dream Speech

Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of the most memorable speeches in American history on August 28, 1963, titled I Have a Dream. His speech focused on expressing the neglect of freedom and rights the country had promised to his people, the African Americans, that were never fulfilled. The exposition of his speech is constructed with allusions that reveal of important governmental documents and speeches that were important to the freedom of slaves. He starts the first sentence with an allusion, “Five score years ago,” almost identically structured to the most known part of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address , "Fourscore and seven years ago,” (Lincoln, Gettysburg Address). Martin Luther King Jr. used this allusion because Lincoln’s speech addressed