I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King - Essay Example

He addressed America as he spoke on the behalf of his men (the blacks) accusing the nation of not being able to mete out justice to the black men and seeing its fulfillment was his dream expressed through the speech. Martin Luther King Jr. became a citizen of international repute despite his short span of life. Despite the confinement of the Afro American ghetto, the man came into the limelight of international significance by organizing his people and the country to bring them out from the bitterness of racial discrimination and subjugation towards a utopian period of freedom and fairness.

After around 10 years his speeches and skilful oratory became significant in the public arenas. He fought against the moral problem, which posed a threat to the social order. In most cases he attempted to defend his contradiction to racism by addressing the ideologies of the founding documents of United States of America and the biblical notes of love and equality. The main point of his argument centered on the fact that despite the documentation of the Emancipation Proclamation, the blacks had many reasons to be dissatisfied.

This act has freed the blacks from slavery especially whose forefathers were separated from their homeland to serve tenures of bonded labor. He justified this dissatisfaction by citing the instances of social inequality everywhere around him, which contradicts what “came as a joyous day-break to end the long night of their captivity”. On one hand blacks had to face the brutal injustice of harassment by the police, rejection at hotels and black children faced discrimination at schools. The accusation of the Civil Rights Movement could be expressed in his words as follows: “But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.

… the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination…lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity….an exile in his own land” (‘I have a Dream’). This brought out the discrimination prevailing in the society. He used a metaphor of cashing the ‘check’ which he explained as the promise held by the Declaration of Independence towards every American citizen including blacks and whites alike. He concluded on this issue, saying that the Negro people received from their native land a ‘blank check’, which was marked as ‘insufficient funds’.

He stressed on the point ‘Let the freedom ring’ from all corners of mountains and this went in line with his belief that there was actually sufficient fund in the treasury of opportunities in the nation. King preached advised his men to “drink the poisonous wine of hate” but at the same time called for non-violence to be the essence of their struggle as this is the struggle of the soul and not body (‘I have a Dream’). Later in the day the speech was transcribed for the press and the next day New York Times published, “Dr.

King touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else. He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile” (“I have a Dream”). The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 signified the unrest amongst the racial activists and civil rights campaigns. Luther King was arrested and wrote his letter from