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Essay on Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream
King's rhetorical strategy is a combination of what Edwin Black (1978) has termed the genres of exhortation and argumentation. King excelled at both the articulation of principle and the positing of concepts and categories to compete with counterclaims in the minds and hearts of listeners. Resting comfortably in both genres, King's rhetoric displays a method of exhortation by synthesis and of argument by transcendence. The most comprehensive example of King's rhetoric was his speech to the Fellowship of the Concerned in 1961. This speech came at the beginning of civil rights as a national movement, a time of flux and conceptual uncertainty about the meaning and direction of civil protest. King had successfully spearheaded the Montgomery bus boycott in 1958 and adopted the tactic of nonviolent resistance. Here was the moment of transition, ripe with rhetorical potential, for establishing larger and ultimately moral connections between the specifics and immediacy of Montgomery and public issues at the center of social and political experience. The transition required a context, a philosophy, and an overall direction for the future.
King began with a direct discussion of the context and philosophy of civil rights. After linking "the new sense of dignity, a new self-respect, and a new determination" of American blacks with the aspirations of "oppressed people all over the world," King identified the context as a continuing struggle. "The question," he said, "is how will the struggle be waged?" In this definitional statement, King had already subsumed a number of opposing positions. Even his choice of the term struggle is vital to his strategy.
Struggle operates at a much different symbolic level from conflict, for example. Conflict implies factions and hostility, with little prospect for positive and cooperative resolution. Struggle, by contrast, involves relentless determination, the posing and counterposing of positions in an atmosphere of mutual interaction, buttressed by the expectation of eventual prevalence.......
