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Rhetorical Analysis Of I Have A Dream Speech

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On the Lincoln memorial in Washington D.C on August, 28th of 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. broadcasted his famous, “I Have a Dream” speech to a crowd full of civil right activists and protesters striving for an end to discrimination. King provided his powerful dream of “all of god’s children”(para.6 &24) being equal no matter their skin color or religion. Martin Luther King endeavored to promote the awareness of political, economic and social discrimination against African Americans using vivid imagery and powerful parallel sentence structure. In Martin Luther Kings “I Have a Dream” active rhetoric speech, he portrays more than just a symbol of hope but a step forward to make equality a reality. He begins his speech he does into detail of the hardships “Negros”(para3,7,9,10&23) have faced such as “the manacles of segregation and the chains of discriminations.” During the civil rights movement. In this speech Martin Luther King uses strategic organization, parallel structure, anaphora powerful imagery, omnipotent metaphors and demanding rhetoric to deliver his words in the most prevailing way. In Kings language he kept repeating the theme of justice and anti-discriminatory patterns to emphasize his speech even more so. Martin Luther King organized his speech in a …show more content…

He uses imagery such as in paragraph three, “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 in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.” (para 3) He uses metaphors of island and oceans to show the depth of his words. Another example of imagery shown in his speech quoted from the bible “Justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” (para 10). King uses powerful visuals that are easily relatable to help activists in vision

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