The Power of Words: Analyzing Mlk's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and His "I Have a Dream" Speech.
David Deulofeu
The Power of Words
America in the 1960’s was far from what the Great Emancipator idealized when he issued a declaration in which all slaves were granted their unconditional freedom. Society lived in contradiction to the 14th and 15th Amendments of the Supreme Law of the Land, deliberately putting barriers on the Black vote and implementing the ‘Jim Crow Laws’. United States was polarized, no doubt, and the Black community was the target of segregation and inequality. Blacks everywhere suffered from inhumane treatment, violence and poverty. In that Dark Age of American ‘Civil Rights’ a man rose to be a city on a hill, a light in the dark. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rose to fight injustice and oppression, not with violence, but with words and pacific demonstration. In his famous speech “ I Have a Dream” Dr. King affirms the urgency of the African Americans to obtain what for so long has been denied to them. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” justifies and validates not only his presence in Alabama, but also the actions of the Civil Rights Movement to the clergymen who wrote the newspaper article “ A Call for Unity”. In both his speech and his letter King employs Biblical allusion, emotional appeal and imagery, of which the last mentioned is most appropriate for a speech.
King, a Baptist Minister, was more than familiar with the Holy Scriptures, and he applied his knowledge of it to “I Have a Dream”. In his speech, King insists that the United States must lift itself from the “quicksand” of racial injustice and turn to the “solid rock” of brotherhood in order to make true the promises in which this nation was built (Dream 533). King alludes to Jesus of Nazareth’s “Parable of the two Builders” in order to attribute the Civil Rights Movement with the wisdom of the builder who constructed on the rock, and his house did not fall; society’s injustice and racial prejudice are compared to the “quicksand” and with the foolishness of the builder who
The Power of Words
America in the 1960’s was far from what the Great Emancipator idealized when he issued a declaration in which all slaves were granted their unconditional freedom. Society lived in contradiction to the 14th and 15th Amendments of the Supreme Law of the Land, deliberately putting barriers on the Black vote and implementing the ‘Jim Crow Laws’. United States was polarized, no doubt, and the Black community was the target of segregation and inequality. Blacks everywhere suffered from inhumane treatment, violence and poverty. In that Dark Age of American ‘Civil Rights’ a man rose to be a city on a hill, a light in the dark. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rose to fight injustice and oppression, not with violence, but with words and pacific demonstration. In his famous speech “ I Have a Dream” Dr. King affirms the urgency of the African Americans to obtain what for so long has been denied to them. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” justifies and validates not only his presence in Alabama, but also the actions of the Civil Rights Movement to the clergymen who wrote the newspaper article “ A Call for Unity”. In both his speech and his letter King employs Biblical allusion, emotional appeal and imagery, of which the last mentioned is most appropriate for a speech.
King, a Baptist Minister, was more than familiar with the Holy Scriptures, and he applied his knowledge of it to “I Have a Dream”. In his speech, King insists that the United States must lift itself from the “quicksand” of racial injustice and turn to the “solid rock” of brotherhood in order to make true the promises in which this nation was built (Dream 533). King alludes to Jesus of Nazareth’s “Parable of the two Builders” in order to attribute the Civil Rights Movement with the wisdom of the builder who constructed on the rock, and his house did not fall; society’s injustice and racial prejudice are compared to the “quicksand” and with the foolishness of the builder who