This week in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., I read, among other things, about the end of the Birmingham campaign, the famous March on Washington where King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech, and the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King and the progress he spurred continue to amaze me, but I think I've written enough about that, so I'll pick something I almost disagreed with him about. Near the end of the desegregation work in Birmingham, six black children were killed - four girls in a church, and two more children in the streets. I'm not even going to expand on how horrific that is. The point is that at the service for the four girls, King gave a speech (of course). In his speech, he emphasized that the girls died as kinds of martyrs; for the cause. King spoke, "History has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city" (231). I understand that King was a devout Christian, hence the belief in martyrdom, and that he also felt that these deaths were inhumane and horrifying. But at the same time, it bothers me that he used the funeral as a means of furthering the movement. It should have been about the girls lives, about I don't even know what, but anything but what it was. Maybe King simply should have specified that not the actual deaths of children, but the anger that people felt because of them would be channeled into nonviolent protest. I think this is only the second time I've ever disagreed with King throughout this entire book, and he probably could've come up with an eloquent, logical reasoning for his speech, too.
As we discuss poetic devices such as connotation, metaphors and similes, and diction/word choice in class, they've started popping out at me from the text in this book. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great writer, and an even better speech-writer. He used these devices continually to make his words more powerful, and he was very successful. One of the most frequently used devices is metaphor. I think King used them because if he hadn't, he might've run out of ways to say the same things about freedom and segregation over and over again. One interesting example of this can be found in the "I Have a Dream" speech. King said, "...America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt" (224). By comparing justice to a bank, King made the speech more interesting to listen to. But more than that, it sends out the message that like money in a bank, justice is extremely valuable to each and every one of us. It is what keeps society going. And if a portion of the population is deprived of it, society will not function properly. King's clear and expressive writing was and always will be a huge source of inspiration.
King, Martin Luther. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ed. Clayborne Carson. New York: Warner, 1998.
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3 comments:
I think your point about King's speech at the funerals for the African American girls killed is really interesting. I agree that, on one hand, it seems inappropriate to use a funeral to further a cause. However, if the children killed and the families of the children strongly believed in King's message and cause, it could have been comforting for people to hear that he believed that their kids' deaths weren't in vain. Either way of looking at the issue makes sense to me, but I think the right thing to do depends on what the families wanted.
About the funeral, the children died (I assume) because they were murdered by angry racists. I think it only makes sense that at the funeral (especially since the people at the funeral are probably black) MLK would say that. These children died because of the cause. They're children they didn't deserve to die, but they did and it was because of all the racism.
I can see your point, but it was a good time for king to get his point across, and he knew this event would be in the news. Seeing or hearing about little girls being killed makes anyone want to push for equality. His metaphors were what pretty much made up his speeches, and proved to be strong
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