The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Analysis

By using allusion to historical leaders and documents, he reminds the audience of the past and strengthens his argument the time for change was long overdue. Repeating the phrases “I have a dream”, “Now is the time”, “Let freedom ring” and “Free at last”, King used anaphora and repetition to bring the speech to a great climax and leave the audience completely energized. King also used parallelism to unify the movement’s effort into one group of equal parts by urging the audience to “Go back to” Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, as well as “the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities”. He also used parallelism to send a message of unification to all parts of the country by repeating the phrase “Let freedom ring” combined with names of many of our country’s mountain ranges, just as in the song “America” by Samuel Francis Smith (My Country! ‘Tis of Thee). Perhaps it was King’s use of metaphors that made the speech draw in the audience. He described the circumstances of racism and inequality with phrases descriptive of slavery including “flames of withering injustice”, “chains of discrimination” which connected the audience to their past while inspiring them to change their future.

In 1963, minister and rights activist, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech in front of Lincoln memorial to bring awareness to the unfairness of injustice for black people. King's speech was an effort to try and mandate the coming together of the black and white race and finally have the equality between us all be put into force for a free nation. As the speech left King’s mouth and entered 250,000 citizens ears, it left them to think about what point he was trying to make because he uses pathos, logos, and ethos.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is considered one of the most effective pieces of rhetoric in written literature. Doctor King was an accomplished scholar fighting for civil rights. He used the different rhetorical appeals to respond to eight white clergymen that had criticized him for his actions. Reverend King was so persuasive with his letter that he influenced others to join his fight for equality. As Osborn tells us, Mr. King’s “Letter” went on to cause problems for these eight men (32). He was very effective in portraying his undesirable situation from the point of view of someone that held authority. Along with portraying his circumstances, he provides logical arguments to contradict the white clergymen's statements. In addition to a logical approach, he uses his emotions and passion to make his readers feel for disturbing situation places upon the segregated community.. Reverend King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” provides a vivid insight to the civil rights movement along with rhetorical appeals that persuade his audience to join his fight for justice by establishing authority, reasoning with logic, and engaging our emotions.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” collectively persuade their audiences to disobey authority when it concerns social injustice. King takes a more assertive yet respectful approach, and makes it a point to explicate the intolerable treatment that the black community had to endure under the encroachment of segregation laws. In addition, Thoreau expounds why it is so important for citizens to object and take action upon the corrupt laws that the government had imposed on the blacks, insisting that civil disobedience is a means of freedom. Both of these influential men successfully utilize occasion, purpose, tone, appeals and rhetorical strategies to

The fight for civil rights and freedom is a reoccurring subject that has appeared throughout American history. Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” were written over one hundred years apart. Although they are set in different time periods, they discuss the rights the American people should have, while also criticizing the people with superior power in the government. Thoreau’s aggressive writing style and King’s peaceful, calm style help to deliver their messages. Not only their writing style but also their emotional appeals, tone, and other rhetorical strategies help to give their audience a sense of the social issues they are disagreeing strongly with.

Perhaps the reason Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is so well known even to this day is because it is a model of persuasive writing that makes great use of ethos, logos, and pathos in order to aid the readers in understanding and sympathizing with King and his followers. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was a civil rights leader, who was arrested and put in jail after being part of the Birmingham campaign in April 1963. He was the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was asked by an Alabama group to come to Birmingham. A city that at the time was known for still participating heavily in segregation even though the supreme court had ruled against it in 1954 (Brown V. Board of Education 1). King and members of his organization joined The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and organized a non-violent protest against racial segregation. Everyone involved in the protest was arrested including Dr. King. While King was in jail eight white clergy men released a public statement that was published in a Birmingham news paper, titled “a call to unity” which addressed the protests that king led and described his activities as “unwise and untimely”. King’s response to this statement was “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, in which he also tried to open the eyes and minds of the average middle class white American.

Many fantasize about invoking change in this world and to touch the hearts of it’s civilians, but few revolutionaries materialize these ambitions. Martin Luther King Jr. is a prolific figure of the civil rights movement whose non-violent words and protests became long-lasting staples of academia and elicited necessary conversations of the institutionalized racism that African Americans suffered through that conservative, white America feigned ignorance for a false sense of comfortability. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail” King illustrates a rich vision for audiences detailing the mistreatment of African Americans in America’s segregation and the importance of non-violent protest to invoke change in a system that cared very little for the sentiments of the

In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was thrown into jail due to participating in non-violent protests against racism and segregation in the city of Birmingham. There, he wrote the famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” which became one of the most important letters in history of the American civil rights movement (Colaiaco 1). The open letter covered many points to King’s arguments for why the marches, protests, and other non-violent actions were necessary and justifiable. James Colaiaco analyzes the key components to the letter and the different ways Martin Luther King, Jr. used literary devices to form a well written argument.

He questions the audience about society and what they have done for their community. “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality; we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one; we can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity,” (King). King knows how to bring the people into the speech to involve every single person standing before him and make them feel like they are apart of the speech. He mentions what has been taken away from them which creates anger within the crowd. King’s ability to appeal to the audience through emotion affected society for decades after and changed the sense of pride the African Americans had.

We have all heard Martin Luther King’s famous speech, I have a Dream. His main goal was to convince everyone across the country to comprehend racial equality and to reinforce a solution for those individuals already engaged in the Civil Rights movement. You could say his speech was part of what made the movement successful. By him taking a stand, much attention was put into the problems that were going on. He was and still is viewed as an important leader who was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. Here we will basically dissect parts of his speech and define the points he was making and trying to make. Throughout the paper, you will see how Dr. King uses Ethos, Pathos, and Logos to show his audience and make them feel what went on.

One of Dr. King's most influential devices is his pristine use of repetition in order to drill his points across and reel the audience in. He goes on by describing the poor conditions faced by African Americans due to segregation that is ultimately at the fault of the government. Also showing how their African brothers are being taken away to fight for a country that does not see them as equals. His use of repetition is seen in statements such as: “...their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die…” and, “For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence….” Dr. King intends to stress the idea of this injustice in order to rally the people against the lack of civil rights by humanizing the countless African Americans who had died fighting for a nation that will not fight for them.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is a poem and song by Gil Scott-Heron. Scott-Heron first recorded it for his 1970 album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, on which he recited the lyrics, accompanied by congas and bongo drums. The message of the song is the elusive nature of political culture in Nixons America and the inability of the mainstream to capture the real heart of the people. Heron uses cultural refrences from the 1970s to express his angerin the 1970s. What he is trying relay in his poem that In a country where everything was becoming increasingly sanitized and pre-packaged, ”The Revolution will not be televised” is partly a call to arms and partly an acknowledgement that there was an alternative, but that it wouldn’t

In the reading “Small Change : Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” Malcolm Gladwell discusses the act of four brave college students and their act of social activism. The four freshmen from a local all black college sat down at a counter in a diner near Greensboro, North Carolina and were denied service because of their race. The students refused to leave and instead started a protest there at the restaurant. The numbers of people protesting with the four young men increased as the story spreaded across states. The story of the sit in was done without the use of any technology or social network. Gladwell discussed the effectiveness of the sit-in because of the relationship between

Gil Scott-Heron presents many references to the superficial media and policies that were at the time ignorant of the struggle of African American integration. His spoken word poetry describes these outlets of references before repeating the phrase “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised…” to strengthen the claim that the consumer media is superficially choosing to pretend that all was well when in fact a revolution was happening at their doorstep. A selection of references will be analyzed from

Despite not single handedly ending prejudice with a small revolution, even the most seemingly small results provide advancement in the road toward social and systematic innovation. One of these results includes educating others and bringing awareness to the situation and problem at hand, so that citizens would ‘not be on the side of the executioners’. An example of using peace to effectively spread a message that would not only have a huge effect on obliterating the national discrimination of its time but as well being honored and remembered for decades after would be Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic ‘I Have A Dream’ speech on August 28, 1963. A century after slavery was outlawed, and nevertheless African-Americans were still regarded as less by the white American government, who allowed discrimination, separation, and exclusion everywhere - schools, water fountains, buses - between the races to be legal. Being an African-American man himself, King would not tolerate this. Rather than succumbing to violent measures in order to get his message to end racial discrimination instead, he used words as his force and in doing so educated and inspired thousands to contribute toward attempting to make a change in the nation. People are the product of what they are taught - even the most obstinate can be influenced, especially during this time period and