The Three Evils of Society by Martin Luther King Jr

Text Speech Analysis Paper with Annotated Reference Page In a three to four page paper, analyze the rhetorical strategies of one of the speeches chosen from a list provided by the instructor. Prompt: How does the speech work to convince its audience, what kind of rhetorical strategies does the speech use to convince its audience? Do not summarize the content of the speech. Analyze its rhetorical and argumentative strategies. The thesis driven argument can be substantiated by providing an examination of any combination of rhetorical modes, argumentative appeals, figurative devices, persuasive strategies, moral reframings, fallacies, pillars, analogies, specious diction or propagandistic techniques. One should quote from at least two outside sources and provide an annotated bibliography of the paper’s source material. The speech that will be analyzed: “The Three Evils of Society” by Martin Luther King Jr. https://www.scribd.com/doc/134362247/Martin-Luther-King-Jr-The-Three-Evils-of-Society-1967 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8d-IYSM-08 “And so the collision course is set. The people cry for freedom and the congress attempts to legislate repression. Millions, yes billions, are appropriated for mass murder but the most meager pittance for foreign aid for international development is crushed in the surge of reaction. Unemployment rages at a major depression level in the black ghettos, but the bipartisan response is an anti-riot bill rather than a serious poverty program…. We cry out against welfare handouts to the poor but generously approve an oil depletion allowance to make the rich, richer. Six Mississippi plantations receive more than a million dollars a year, not to plant cotton but no provision is made to feed the tenant farmer who is put out of work by the government subsidy. The crowning achievement in hypocrisy must go to those staunch Republicans and Democrats of the Midwest and West who were given land by our government when they came here as immigrants from Europe. They were given education through the land grant colleges. They were provided with agricultural agents to keep them abreast of farming trends, they were granted low interest loans to aid in the mechanization of their farms and now that they have succeeded in becoming successful, they are paid not to farm and these are the same people that now say to black people, whose ancestors were brought to this country in chains and who were emancipated in 1863 without being given land to cultivate or bread to eat that they must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. What they truly advocate is Socialism for the rich and Capitalism for the poor… we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice; the fact is that Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor– both black and white, both here and abroad… Somewhere we must see that justice is indivisible, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and I have fought too long and too hard against segregated public accommodations to end up at this point in my life, segregating my moral concerns…So let us stand in this convention knowing that on some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “is it safe? Expediency asks the question, “is it politic?” Vanity asks the question, “is it popular?” But conscious asks the question, “is it right?” And on some positions, it is necessary for the moral individual to take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but he must do it because it is right. And we say to our nation tonight, we say to our Government, we even say to our FBI, we will not be harassed, we will not make a butchery of our conscious, we will not be intimidated, and we will be heard.”