Martin Luther King Rhetorical Analysis

The world is shocked once again by a senseless act of violence in the United States. One after another, Negroes have died in the long struggle to bring racial justice to the American continent. Most have died unsung - lynched, murdered, and buried in the swamps of the American South. Until recently their deaths awoke the conscience of few Americans and brought no change to the racialist structure of the Southern economic and social system.

Now to their number is added Dr Martin Luther King. No other Negro leader had such a following among his own people, not even Medgar Evers, who was shot in the back on his own front door in Mississippi, or Malcolm X, who died at the hands of a fellow-Negro in New York. King's message of non-violence, his relentlessly courageous pursuit of justice, the wisdom and tolerance of his appeal, made him a leader throughout the United States and a respected figure in the world arena. His award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 was justly earned.

He tried all the time to interpret the black man to a cynical or uninterested white society. As he wrote in his last book "Chaos or Community", "the cries of Black Power and the riots are not the causes of white resistance, but the consequences of it." And for all his heartfelt commitment to non-violence he was far too aware of the degradation of the Negro ghettoes in the North to indulge in any glib condemnation of