A Rhetorical Analysis of MLK Jr.’s “I have a dream” Speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one hundred years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which outstandingly furthered the civil rights movement. At that time, racial segregation, police brutality, and other forms of racial inequality were terribly prominent in America. The speech successfully focused the country’s attention at the need for racial equality “Now” (King, I Have a Dream). King gave the speech in order to motivate his followers to peacefully continue to demonstrate, protest, and boycott until they were fully granted the equality and privileges that any other citizen was allowed to have. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech is his most notable, and one of the most influential of Twentieth-Century-America because of his excellent rhetorical use of repetition and anaphora, contrasting metaphors, and appropriate quotations and allusions throughout the speech. Martin Luther King Jr. used a profuse amount of repetition and anaphora throughout his speech. A subtle form of repetition, the repetition of singular words, was mainly used to emphasize key themes in the speech and keep them in the minds of the audience. Such repeated key themes were “freedom”, “justice” and “injustice”, “America” and “American”, and plural nouns such as “we” and “our”. Since the preceding words were repeated so frequently in the speech, they actually reveal the main purpose of the speech, which is mainly about freedom and justice for the African-American population. The use of anaphora, a commonly used rhetorical device where a phrase at the beginning of successive clauses is repeated, was used to create an emphasis towards the key ideas in the speech, to setup a pattern that when continually repeated,