“I Have a Dream” In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream”, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C. His dream was to make America realize that one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, “… the Negro is still not free” and continued to be shackled by segregation and discrimination. King utilized several examples of repetition, symbolic figures, and different literary of appeals to convey the fact that African Americans were condemned to the corners of society. Children often repeat the same phrase several times until they know they are acknowledged. Repetition is generally used to emphasize a certain point. By applying this method, King repeated the phrase “I have a dream…” to convey the fact that all men are created equal and should not be discriminated because color of their skin. He had a dream that all men would become equal as they are in the eyes of God and the American nation would be transformed into a “oasis of freedom and justice”. Many great speakers use symbolism to get a point across; King made a spectacle of this in his speech. He stated that “… the bank of justice is bankrupt…” because he believed that “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has comeback marked with “insufficient funds”.” The insufficient funds referred to the funds in the “great vaults of opportunity” in the American nation. King used a void check to symbolize the lack of job, education, and personal opportunity for the black race. Opportunity and justice has been deposited into this great vault. The bank of Justice, signifying the freedom that was gained in 1776, was bankrupt for the African America people because of they were not granted the freedom that the white race possessed. Discrimination and segregation separated them from the rest of the nation and would continue until equal rights and opportunity were established. The majority of well-known speeches contain at least one of the following literary appeals: emotional, ethical, or logical. In King’s speech, he utilized all of them. By appealing to the audiences emotions, MLK proclaimed that his dream for his children would one day “… live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by content of the character.” Applying to ethics, King stated, “… all men, yes, black men as well as white men would be guaranteed the
