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Martin Luther King Rhetorical Strategies

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Martin Luther King helped lead the Civil Rights movement in 1960’s America. In order to lead the advocates of racial unity, he needed be an effective speaker. With in Dr. King's multitude of speeches, he utilizes the rhetorical strategies of repetition as well as he appeals to the audience’s pathos in order to capture the audience's attention and help them to understand his message.
With in his speeches, Dr Martin Luther King Jr implements the rhetorical strategy of repetition in order to guarantee that the audience understands the message he attends to portray. In his “Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing”, he incorporates the problem of racial discrimination and importance of racial unity within the …show more content…
King implements the rhetorical strategy of appealing to audience's pathos in order to capture their attention and draw them into the speech. A majority of King’s speeches were delivered in front of an enormous crowd, therefore in order to persuade a majority of the crowd, he implements these pathos appeals. Dr. King knew how to appeal to his audiences in a way that they were more willing to connect and agree with his message. When four girls died in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Alabama, Dr. King spoke an eulogy at their funeral. He used this opportunity to speak out against racial segregation. He used the situation as a way to personally connect the bombing to this topic, which he knew would draw more people into supporting his cause. He appealed to the audience's pathos by referring to the girls as “innocent, and beautiful...victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrates against humanity...they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity” (1). By connecting the issue to the death of these innocent young girls, he makes the issue of racial discrimination a personal issue for the audience. The victims were young members of this community which allowed Dr. King to appeal to the community’s pathos. King appeals to pathos within his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as he references children seeing “vicious mobs lynch [their] mothers and fathers at will and drown [their] sisters and brothers at whim” (3). No one should have to watch their family members’ deaths, especially a child having to watch these atrocities. The mention of these horrors draws the listener's mind into imagining how it would feel if they had to go through that awful experience, and sympathies for the thousands to negro children who have to live with those memories. In touching the audience's emotional side, King creates a stronger connection with the listener, and heightens the chances of the them joining the

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