How Did Martin Luther King Contribute To The Civil Rights Movement

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a minister and a civil rights activist during the mid 1950s Civil Rights movement. Dr. King was one of the major influencers in changing federal and state laws in the betterment, by removing segregational laws, of the African American community. Dr. King won a Nobel Peace Prize along with other awards for his involvement in raising awareness of the civil liberties being taken away from the African American community. One of the reasons why Dr. King was so influential in his movements, along with his speeches, was because he was able to communicate his and the African American community’s feelings towards segregation and use his orating and writing abilities to move that community into action. King was highly motivated …show more content…

The first moment when King begins to use language to get the white church sympathetic is when he speaks on negotiations and promises made to the African American community but that “as the weeks and months went by, [they] realized that [they] were the victims of a broken promise” (King, par. 7). Through King’s word choice, the use of “victims”, he addresses the issue that the African American community has been wronged and that they are not at fault for the immoral acts that are being implemented on them. King continues to poke for sympathy of the white church by describing gruesome acts such as “vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim” (King, par. 14), “ hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters” (King, par. 14), and “the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society” (King, par. 14). Every example uses descriptive and emotional language to depict victims of hate crimes, insecurity of being safe and being economically deprived; no decent human being would ever want to endure this, yet the African American community knows through experience how these scenarios feel. King wants the white church to ask themselves how can anyone allow for these things to occur. He has used emotionally vivid examples to get the white church to listen and open its eyes to the issues that the African American community has had to go through. He pushes on with his examples to make sure that every decent human being will agree that these issues are of great concern for the well being of the whole country. He does so by speaking directly to the reader and pushing for the ultimate sympathy card

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