What Is Ethos In Martin Luther King's Speech

The Vietnam War of 1954 was a long and costly fight between North Vietnam, who was communist, and South Vietnam, who was allied with the United States. Author George Black stated, “Between 1961 and 1971, about 20 million gallons of herbicides were dropped on South Vietnam, exposing as many as 4.8 million people to toxic chemicals” (Black 19). The conflict of the war led to division among the Americans, before and after the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers in 1973. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an American that spoke out against this war. By using ethos, pathos, and repetition in his speech, Dr. King encouraged his fellow Americans to speak out against the war. Ethos is the writer’s authority to deal with a topic, while pathos appeals to the listeners’

King’s second tool was pathos. He used this tool to show concern and appeal to the emotions of the audience by pointing out the number of deaths the war was causing. Dr. King stated, “It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population” (King). He mentioned here that Americans were sending the men in their lives to fight and die in the war. He also made sure that he emphasizes the amount of lives lost without stating the actual number by using the words “extraordinarily high proportions” (King). He showed more emotion by doing this. Dr. King mentioned that the government was taking the poor men from before and sending them far away from home to fight and die for liberties of another nation that they have not yet received. He stated, “We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem” (King). Dr. King said that he could not sit back and watch as they burned villages and killed innocent citizens and not speak out by stating, “And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor” (King). Dr. King would not be silent about the

King used was repetition. In this paragraph, Dr. King used repetition to reinforce his goal of getting Americans to break the silence. Dr. King stated,

“We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak of the -- for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours”(King).

Dr. King repeats the words “I speak”(King) to show that he is speaking out against the war for the people who cannot, and to show how he was speaking out for what he believes in. Dr. King used this repetition to encourage his audience to speak out against the war as well. This final tool helped in completing the speech and making it more