I Have A Dream Speech By Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: Critical Analysis

In Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s famous I Have a Dream speech he displays an extraordinary use of parallelism, repetition, and a crescendo ending to exhibit a message of hope, peace, and progress to America and the black community. As one of the most famous speeches in American history, this speech ushered an already tired African-American population into an era of overwhelming and overdue civil change.

Dr. King begins his celebrated speech with the quote “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation” the structure of this sentence alone mirrors that of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which begins with “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” King began his speech this way to show a parallel between the freeing of blacks in Lincoln’s time and the freeing of black Americans in the time of the civil rights movement. This essentially labels the civil rights movement as a second, more successful emancipation of sorts. This speech is also given in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, this can be a symbol for how many Americans see the emancipation of slaves as the end of the struggle of blacks in America; it also can show how Lincoln helped to pave the path for them to the steps of this memorial by allowing emancipation when most of the south was against it. Many did not understand why he would choose to allow the freeing of slaves, the backbone of free labor and America’s capitalist system, to them the system was working well enough. Slaves, obviously, did not see this situation the same way, similar to how blacks in the south did not see segregation in the same light as many whites in the south. Beginning this speech by embodying Abraham Lincoln helped to begin the most revolutionary freedom march in American history with an air

In Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s famous I Have a Dream speech he displays an extraordinary use of parallelism, repetition, and a crescendo ending to exhibit a message of hope, peace, and progress to America and the black community. As one of the most famous speeches in American history, this speech ushered an already tired African-American population into an era of overwhelming and overdue civil change.

Dr. King begins his celebrated speech with the quote “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation” the structure of this sentence alone mirrors that of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which begins with “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” King began his speech this way to show a parallel between the freeing of blacks in Lincoln’s time and the freeing of black Americans in the time of the civil rights movement. This essentially labels the civil rights movement as a second, more successful emancipation of sorts. This speech is also given in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, this can be a symbol for how many Americans see the emancipation of slaves as the end of the struggle of blacks in America; it also can show how Lincoln helped to pave the path for them to the steps of this memorial by allowing emancipation when most of the south was against it. Many did not understand why he would choose to allow the freeing of slaves, the backbone of free labor and America’s capitalist system, to them the system was working well enough. Slaves, obviously, did not see this situation the same way, similar to how blacks in the south did not see segregation in the same light as many whites in the south. Beginning this speech by embodying Abraham Lincoln helped to begin the most revolutionary freedom march in American history with an air of change.

This disquisition is divided into two sections, half of the speech is addressed to the nation and the other half is addressed to the black community. After about seven paragraphs Dr. King changes from speaking to America as a whole, explaining how contrary to popular belief the nation has not completed its duty to the negro population. The Reverend Doctor uses the analogy of freedom as a bounced check to explain to the nation how they have failed blacks. He then transitions to speaking to the negro population with the sentence “But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice.” In the succeeding paragraphs, he not only calls for non-violent protests, but he tells the audience to take what they have heard in his speech back to the south and the “slums and ghettos of our northern cities” in order to “let freedom ring” across the nation and allow hope to thrive. Dr. King ends with his most famous lines about his dream, the women in the background say “well” and “tell them about your dream Martin” reminding me of how far we have come yet we have so far to go; if you walk into a black church in the south on any given Sunday you can hear these same ad-libs from the parishioners, passed down from generation to generation. Martin tells the marchers about his dream of his children one day being judged not by their skin color, but by their character and black children being able to hold hands with white children in unity. Although this speech is most well-known as a speech calling for the freedom of blacks in America, King also mentions the “Jews and Gentiles” and “ Protestants and Catholics” through this he shows that promoting freedom for one is promoting freedom for all. Freedom should not and will not be exclusive to one group. The speech ends with a rousing crescendo ending and Martin singing “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

The 1963 I Have a Dream Speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. brings a new perspective to the civil rights movement today as it brought new energy to the movement at the time. The parallels between this speech and the Gettysburg Address show similarities between the abolitionist movement and the 20th-century civil rights movement. Repetition and crescendo ending create a dramatic effect that allows the speech to generate hope and anticipation. The preceding elements aided in forging in one of the most well-known, revolutionary, and inspiring speeches in not only United States history but global history as well, impelling the true beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.w.