Rhetorical Analysis Of I Have A Dream By Martin Luther King Jr.

In the speech entitled, "I have a Dream", by Martin Luther King Jr. he states "Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning." for the purpose of bringing a nation wide call to action toward achieving equality for African Americans. At the time this speech was given, August 28th 1963, America had made little progress ,as compared to the previous years, toward improving the segregation between the races. King acknowledged the little progress America has made but still kept his faith strong saying "And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream... I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men

Though they legally made all people in America equal when they signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 the people of color still faced severe segregation. King refuses to give up on achieving his dream saying "But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice." (King 5). As Stated in the 2nd sentence of the Declaration, The United States had already declared "all men created equal",despite the fact that they definitely aren't treating all races as equal we have to go "cash our check" that the United States wrote nearly 200 years earlier promising us an equal country. In 1890 the phrase "separate but equal" was derived from the Louisiana Law 'Separate Car Act', which legalized segregation in America. Although the country wasn't living up to its standards of equality, written in the Constitution, people argued that technically African Americans were free because they weren't