Civil Rights Comparison: Kairos - March on Washington picture

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Kairos - March on Washington picture

Many might consider the March on Washington to be the most influential and most memorable event of the Civil Rights Movement, but a lot happened before Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed a huge crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. The original March on Washington was planned in 1941 by A. Philip Randolph to protest discrimination and exclusion of African Americans from defense jobs. But this march was canceled when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order forbidding discrimination by defense contractors and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee. As unfair discrimination continued throughout the '40s and '50s, African Americans decided they'd had enough. Demonstrations took place across the country in the form of protests, sit-ins, and boycotts. For example, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955, leading to her arrest. Days later, the black community of Montgomery, Alabama backed Parks and began the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted for 381 days. By the time he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, MLK himself had already been arrested and written his famous "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."

More than 200,000 black and white Americans gathered on the National Mall at the culmination of the march in 1963. President John F. Kennedy had discouraged the march because he feared that legislators would vote against the proposed Civil Rights Act if they perceived a threat. Consequently, the organizers of the march aimed to keep the mood hopeful and positive by persuading John Lewis, another speaker at the march, to leave out his most harsh criticisms of the government. All of this set the scene for MLK to take the stage and deliver one of the most famous speeches in American history.

2 comments:

UnknownFebruary 25, 2015 at 8:06 PM
It is interesting to see how many different events contributed to creating the perfect moment for MLK to deliver his speech. The timeliness of his speech certainly had a great effect on its impact. The speech was heard by thousands of people who had faced unrelenting discrimination and their emotions at this time made the speech that much more powerful.
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Sarina HaryantoMarch 1, 2015 at 10:09 PM
I think you did a nice job discussing what made MLK's speech an opportune moment in the civil rights movement, especially the chronology of significant events that demonstrated the fight against prejudice. You could also mention other milestone events such as Brown vs. Board of Education supreme court case and the murder of Emmett Till (both occurred before Rosa Parks bus boycott). These events aroused widespread controversy and made the "I have a dream" speech the most powerful, non-violent step towards racial equality that captured the attention of the protestors.
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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.