First, American civil liberties are no longer a major issue because all races have equal rights. In Frederick Douglass’ speech ‘What To The American Slave is Your Fourth of July’, he uses ethos to explain how law gave “equal manhood of the Negro race” long ago (Doc C). Douglass uses a neutral …show more content…
By referring to an entire race with the term ‘Negro race’ separates races clearly in the reader’s mind, but the context breaks that idea, emphasizing the point that we are equal in today’s world. Looking at this speech 165 years later, it can only be assumed we are in a superior environment. This is because when someone opposing this idea their entire life supports it, it becomes self-evident. From the perspective of Douglass, a very powerful Civil Rights Activist, we see the legal racial inequality lines shattered in his eyes. In his speech ‘A Time to Break Silence’, Martin Luther King uses ethos to define the state of racial equality in a modern America. He recalls an idea he had that America will be saved when the “descendants of … slaves [lose] the shackles they still wear” (Doc A). The ‘shackles’ worn by these descendants are the weight of inequality and suffering the