Along with men such as Mahatma Gandhi and Steven Biko, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stands out as a prominent civil rights activist, relying upon peaceful protest and civil disobedience. King was an eloquent and persuasive writer and speaker. Two of his most well known works, his letter from Birmingham jail, and his I Have a Dream speech have remained examples for rhetorical strategy and argument for decades. After his opening greeting, he opens his speech with "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation." This is an allusion to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address, the first of many literary devices and argumentative strategies used in the speech. He then employs a parallel structure to convey the idea that although emancipation was the first step towards freeing blacks, they were still not free from inequality. In the next paragraph he uses a metaphor of a bad check to describe the injustices faced by blacks. He urges that now is the time to cash the check. Equality must come now, not gradually. But at the same time he stresses nonviolence on the part of his followers. However, the most memorable part of his speech comes at the end with two parallel structures beginning with "I have a dream" and "Let freedom ring" coupled with vivid imagery and and an overwhelming appeal to pathos.
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