Rhetorical_Analysis_Behind_the_Dream - Perkiomen Valley Hs ENGLISH 101

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Martin Luther King Jr. would co-write his “I have a Dream” speech with Clarence Jones, who would publish Behind the Dream, a behind-the-scenes account of the weeks leading up to King’s deliver... y of the speech at the March on Washington. The prologue to Behind the Dream includes various rhetorical choices through his description of the gathering, analogies, and logical reasoning. Jones begins the prologue illustrating unity, as a quarter of a million people gather, people who have been suppressed and considered less than, “stood shoulder to shoulder across that vast lawn, their hearts beating as one.” From this, the reader can see that African Americans are unified as one under their shared struggles and physically stand together as everyone is shoulder to shoulder. They stood at the March on Washington with “hope on the line. When hope was an increasingly scarce resource”, emphasizing the urgency of their situation as there was little hope due to the discrimination they faced and racism they received. Jones continues on to say that there is “No dearth of prose describing the mass of humanity that made its way to the feet of the Great Emancipator that day”. The Great Emancipator refers to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C and is a reference to Abraham Lincoln himself who issued the Emancipation Proclamation that d [Show More]

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