Mlk Ethos Pathos Logos

Neftali Montalvo
Professor Andrew Spencer
English 1301
October 2, 2014
WA 2 Freedom
Nineteen sixty-three was a year of unprecedented social unrest in the United States of America. The civil rights movements were in full swing and continued to escalate. The social divide between the black and white communities had reached a state of crisis. No solutions were readily apparent and the incidence of violence was so great that it was hardly appalling to hear of it. It was amidst all of the turmoil during this year of instability that Martin Luther King Jr. wrote and delivered his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream”. Exactly one hundred years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, right on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The world could not have heard a better plea for peace and equality at a better time. Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr’s rhetorical choices stressed the importance of remaining non-violent as well as trying to view the world in the perspective of the opposition. Those choices proved powerful to people of all races. Martin Luther King Jr. incorporated all three modes of persuasion in his speech but it is clear that pathos is the primary vehicle in which he chose to move his audience. Martin Luther King Jr. uses pathos because of the diverse audience itself. If he were to spend all of his time writing his speech on the legislative aspect of the civil rights movement, his speech would not have had the same impact as it did. Many might be bored and as a result disillusioned. In order to appeal to as many people as he could, he focused on patriotism and spirituality. This passionate rhetoric filled with allusion and metaphor set the golden standard of American rhetoric that makes his “I Have a Dream” so memorable. It is the reason every