Civil Rights Comparison

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Audience Analysis- MLK

In this picture, Martin Luther King Jr. is shown addressing a large crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial. What do we know about this crowd? What could we gather from this picture?

It is hard to gather information on this crowd through the picture, but our knowledge of the March on Washington can easily lead us gathering the crowd's information.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s crowd had one thing in common that day: they all decided to congregate on a fairly hot day in Washington, DC, to hear an influential and moving man speak. For the most part, King's crowd was homogenous- although there were some whites in the crowd, the majority of the crowd consisted of people of color. Whether his crowd was colored or not, they all shared the same ideologies; they all believed in King's mission, and that is why they showed up that day.

The audience viewed Martin Luther King Jr. as a respected and dignified leader. He represented his crowd in many ways. King was an African American male fighting for freedom. His audience longed for freedom, and viewed King as a savior for the black community.

Overall, the audience expected a moving and influential speech, and they got it. The audience knew of King's mission and what he stood for, so therefore they were expecting a moving speech regarding the Civil Right's Movement.

Michael Fernandes

2 comments:

UnknownMarch 1, 2015 at 6:37 PM
This is a good analysis of the audience's motivations for being at the march, but who exactly were the people there and how do those kinds of facts influence how the message was interpreted?
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UnknownMarch 1, 2015 at 9:40 PM
The audience was all those present, for sure. Indirectly, his audience was also the rest of the nation; his speech stood to illustrate that there was not only a huge amount of supporters, but also a very significantly powerful group of supporters. It was a message to the government as well: if not to incite reform, at least to realize the gravity of the movements at hand.
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Critical Introduction

Mike (Intro/Ethos)

Our names are Mike, Tommy, Ian, Jack, and Noah and we are five English 101S students at the University of Maryland, College Park. We have been studying rhetoric this semester and have been slowly becoming familiar with various rhetorical appeals. Although we are not experts on rhetoric, we have enough familiarity with the appeals to expand on them. We chose the Black Panthers 10-Point Plan and a picture of Marin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington because we felt that both of these works greatly contributed to the Civil Rights Movement through completely opposite perspectives. The Black Panthers’ 1966 “10 Point Plan” radically and aggressively depicted the wants and beliefs of the Black community, while Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington addressed the Black community’s needs through eloquence, peaceful protest, and sophisticated rhetoric. The Black Panthers’ 10-Point plan was aggressive in nature, often expressing radical views. They were not necessarily bad, as many people followed the regime. Martin Luther King Jr.’s approach was obviously more peaceful and sophisticated, thus creating more of a politically correct movement.

Jack (Major argument/Stasis)

Our blog shows that the Black Panthers’ 1966 Ten Point Plan radically and aggressively depicted the wants and beliefs of the black community, while Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington addressed the black community’s needs with eloquence, peaceful protest, and sophisticated rhetoric. We compare these different approaches to the Civil Rights Movement by analyzing the ethos, pathos, and logos of each of the texts. Furthermore, we contrasted the types of audiences each text targeted and the audiences with which each text was more successful. Overall our blog analyzes and compares the effectiveness of differing approaches used by MLK and the Black Panthers.

Tommy (Kairos)

The issues represented by the texts are still very relevant today, especially considering the events of the past year such as the riots caused by the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other similar cases. Racially charged protests are not simply a thing of the past. Determining which method of protest, whether it be a more aggressive and assertive stance of the Black Panther Party or the hope-filled non-violent stance of Dr. King, still remains a long unanswered question. Ultimately the answer probably lies in some happy medium between the two. However, we leave it up to the readers to decide which method has been more historically successful, and which approach would work better on the readers themselves.

Noah (Logos)

Our blog begins with analyses of the rhetorical situations of our texts and the major rhetorical arguments in each. We did this to introduce the texts, their backgrounds and the messages they convey to the audience. We then wrote about the rhetorical appeals used in each text to show how the authors intended to impart their arguments. Finally, we analyzed the audience that each text was designed for and the visual elements of each text. We used the analysis of the audience to show how each text was designed to target them. Overall, we introduced the texts and why they were important to get readers interested and engaged in our topic. Then we went into detail about the texts and the methods behind their reasoning and arguments to give readers insight about the texts. Lastly, we showed how the audience and visual elements of the texts further contributed to their purposes and show the impact of each text.

Ian (Pathos)

Although our blog focused on all of the appeals, we found that Dr. King and the Black Panthers especially appealed to the Pathos of their audiences. We not only wanted to examine the pathos of each text individually, but how they related to each other in a time of great social turmoil. We wanted to convey that the March on Washington was a sort of emotional high water mark of the civil rights movement; more progress towards equality was made in the coming years, but not quite to the level of expectations set in 1963. This sense of a letdown with the work of Dr. King was a strong influence in the creation of the Black Panthers. Tired of waiting, he Panthers worked to improve the lives of blacks directly rather than working for racial equality. The causation between the failures of Dr. King and the birth of the Black Panthers, especially in relation to their respective appeals to pathos, was very important, and we tried to highlight it in our blog.