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Why We Can T Wait Rhetorical Speech

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In this passage from Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King Jr. argues that equality for black must come immediately, not in 15 years, but right now and blacks need to stand up and fight for it. His tone on this subject is passionate and righteous. Rather than just stating facts, Martin Luther King Jr. makes the choice to make his argument based around the lives of a black girl and a black boy. He uses anecdote, appeals to logos, and repetition to make his point. Martin Luther King Jr. opens with two anecdotes, one about a young black girl's life in Birmingham and another about a young black boy’s life in Harlem. He describes their lives saying the girl lives in a “rickety wooden one-family house” (paragraph 2) and “can no longer attend an …show more content…

In paragraph four and five, Martin Luther King lays down example after example: “the first American to shed blood in” (paragraph 4) the revolutionary war was “a black seaman named Crispus Attucks” (paragraph 4), “one of the team who designed the capital of their nation, Washington D.C., was a Negro, Benjamin Banneker” (paragraph 4), and black slaves “built the homes, made cotton king and helped, on whip-lashed backs, to lift this nation from colonial obscurity to commanding influence in domestic commerce and world trade” (paragraph 4). All these examples blatantly prove that blacks have done more than their fare share in founding the nation we call home. If they have done more their fair share in creating this nation, should they not, logically, at least reap the same rewards as they other they worked alongside. This reward that they deserve is the freedom on which the nation was founded and which was granted to all the whites. Martin Luther King Jr. also brings up the Emancipation Proclamation in paragraph 6 which gave freedom all blacks. If all blacks were technically freed over one hundred years ago, shouldn’t they have freedom? By presenting a logical case for why equality for blacks is not only necessary but also long overdue, Martin Luther King makes the reader

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