Speeches: Martin Luther King

Speeches can transcend time in their relevance to people as they provide an insight into the struggles and passions of those in their context, allowing others to learn from their mistakes and challenges. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”, and Vaclav Havel’s “A Contaminated Moral Environment” speech, though being presented in greatly varying contexts provide a powerful perspective of the universal human struggle for freedom and equality.

Martin Luther King’s historic “I have a dream” speech of 1963 was a powerful and moving call for freedom against racial injustice and segregation in a period of a turbulent civil rights movement, and political upheaval. In his speech, King preaches the need for non-violent protest against the social injustices endured by Negroes in America, using a variety of rhetorical techniques.

The speech opens, in typical Jeremiad structure, with allusions to the Abraham Lincoln speech spoken at the same point ‘five score years ago”,...