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

Martin Luther King Jr. was an African American Civil Rights activist from the early 1950s until he was murdered in the late 1960s. King mainly focused on the use of nonviolent protests, which came from his deep Christian beliefs. Some of his most notable protests are the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, March on Washington (I Have a Dream Speech), the Birmingham Campaign, “Bloody Sunday”, and Selma’s Voting Right’s. Specifically, Kings “I Have a Dream” speech was given on the steps on the Lincoln Memorial. This is ironic in two ways: the first is that the year he gave the speech, 1963, marked the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation; two is that Abraham Lincoln is the President who put the Emancipation Proclamation into effect. King, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, uses all four of the analytical strategies (logos, ethos, pathos, and kairos) extremely well together; however, Kings use of pathos and logos together is what makes his essay effective. In “I Have a Dream”, King argues that racism is still very prevalent in the United States and calls for an immediate cease of the issue. King uses ethos in his paper to persuade his audience to agree with and trust him. He then goes on to use kairos to set the tone of the …show more content…
However, King did strategically plan when he gave the speech. In fact, the speech was given one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation was singed into effect by Abraham Lincoln. By doing this, King argued that one hundred years have passed since African Americans were supposed to be free, but they still technically were not. Another way King used kairos was the physical location the speech was given at; the Lincoln Memorial. As stated before, Lincoln was the President who signed the proclamation into effect. These are some of the ways King subtly uses kairos to make his speech