Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday is an opportunity to learn from his strategic thinking and mastery of rhetoric.
Consider King’s powerful words about the civil rights struggle, which echo today in the climate battle:
We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’
Note how King repeatedly uses key figures of speech — alliteration, metaphor — and extends the metaphor of another master of rhetoric, Shakespeare (Julius Caeser), all of which are classic oratorical strategies (see “How to be as persuasive as Lincoln, Part 1: Study the figures of speech and Shakespeare“).
I think science has mostly told us what it can about the fiercely urgent need to act swiftly to avoid adding the bleached bones and jumbled residues of our civilization to the pile (see “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice“). Our urgent need now is for much more persuasiveness (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1 and Part 2: Why deniers out-debate “smart talkers”). I have a dream that progressives will some day have the winning words to match their vital ideas.
King’s most famous speech illustrates the rhetorical principle of foreshadowing, as I discuss in my unpublished book on rhetoric, excerpted below:
As a theatrical device, the essence of foreshadowing can be found in Anton Chekhov’s advice to a novice playwright: “If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.” Create anticipation and then fulfill the listener’s desire.
Foreshadowing is related to the figure of speech ominatio (Latin for omen), which, one Renaissance rhetoric text explains is “when we do show & foretell what shall hereafter come to pass, which we gather by some likely sign, and in ill things we foretell it, to the intent that heed may be paid, and the danger of avoided; and in good things to stir up expectation and hope.”
In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare has a soothsayer famously and futilely warn Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March”-a foreshadowing ominatio that Caesar famously and fatally ignores: “He is a dreamer,” shrugs Caesar. “Let us leave him.”
Bob Dylan’s tragic “Like a Rolling Stone” heroine is similarly warned, and by many: “People’d call, say, ‘Beware doll, you’re bound to fall’ “-which she also unwisely pays no heed to: “You thought they were all kiddin’ you.”
Dramatic foreshadowing has an even more important rhetorical counterpart. The golden rule of speechmaking is “Tell ‘em what what you’re going to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” The first part of that triptych is the rhetorical foreshadowing of the main idea of your speech, the introduction of the dominant theme of your remarks.
I HAVE A DREAM
I can think of no more remarkable combination of dramatic and rhetorical foreshadowing in a modern public address than the opening lines of Martin Luther King’s keynote address at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (video above and text here).
The speech is often presented without his introductory sentence, which is unfortunate since it is an essential element of his message. King began, “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” This opening line foreshadows that the intellectual focus of the speech will be “freedom,” a word that, with its partner “free,” King repeats twenty-four times in his 1500-word oration. As we will soon see, it also anticipates his optimistic message.
King uses the word “history” twice in this simple prefatory line, foreshadowing that he will be taking a historical perspective, which he does from the start.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.
Echoing Lincoln’s famous formulation, “fourscore and seven years ago,” in the literal shadow of the Lincoln monument, King here combines the verbal with the visual to turn Lincoln’s two great 1863 acts of communication-the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg address-into a symbolic foreshadowing of his own remarks 100 years later. In doubling this historical connection, he underscores what will be his main theme: Emancipation has not yet been realized:
But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.
We hear again King’s favorite rhetorical device in this speech, anaphora, in the repetition of “one hundred years later” to help him refine the central idea that “the Negro is still not free.” King’s speech makes the words “Emancipation Proclamation” cruelly ironic: The Negro was proclaimed free, but still is not.
The body of the speech lays out King’s nonviolent approach to fulfilling the “quest for freedom” and restates again and again both his dream and his demand for freedom. He says that “in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream “¦ a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” An essential goal of the speech is to instill hope, optimism, and faith in the listeners that the dream of freedom will be achieved, to urge with a powerful metaphor that they “not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.” He describes his stirring dreams, which are themselves ominatio, foretelling a future without racism, a future of freedom for all. He builds to the climax using the phrase “Let freedom ring” a dozen times and ends with the final repetitions of the key word as he says we can “speed up that day when all of God’s children “¦ will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”
Now we see what was powerfully foreshadowed in the opening line: “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” He is foreshadowing-prophesying-the success of this demonstration and the realization of his dreams. Through the figure of ominatio King did “show & foretell what shall hereafter come to pass “¦ in good things to stir up expectation and hope.”
That King would be a master of rhetoric and foreshadowing is not unexpected since he was, after all, a Reverend, a preacher, a student of the Bible. Foreshadowing and ominatio are the foundation upon which the Bible’s scaffolding of rhetoric was built-and the power of dreams to foretell the future is a Biblical truism. For Christians, the words in the Old Testament foreshadow the coming of the Messiah in the New Testament. The gospels are clearly written to echo the prophecies and promises and proverbs in the Old Testament. If you are a believer, that is because Jesus is the Messiah, the fulfillment of the words in the Old Testament. If you are not a believer, that is because the writers of the New Testament were trying to portray Jesus as the Messiah. Either way, by God’s design or man’s, the Old Testament foreshadows the New Testament again and again.
Jesus himself makes many prophecies that show and foretell what shall hereafter come to pass. He foretells events that happen very soon, such as when he tells Peter, “Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.” He foretells events a long time off: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” And he foretells events that have not yet come to pass-his return.
Foreshadowing and ominatio are key elements of poetic justice. Consider the story of Joseph. His brothers hated him because their father loved him the most, which the gift of the coat of many colors showed only too clearly. Joseph dreamt that he and his brothers were collecting stalks of grain, and when his own grain stalk stood up, those of his brothers bowed down before him. “Shalt thou indeed reign over us?” his brothers said. The text goes on, “And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words.” Dreams are classic foreshadowing in the Bible as well as many other holy books.
One day, when Joseph’s brothers saw him in the field, “they said one to another, ‘Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit “¦ and we shall see what will become of his dreams.’ ” This is best labeled ironic foreshadowing, a favorite device also of Shakespeare’s and other great writers. The final line is intended as sarcasm, that the dreams will be dashed in death, but it soon becomes dramatic irony.
Instead of killing him, his brothers sold him into slavery. Joseph ended up in the Egyptian prison, but using his power to interpret dreams, he not only won his freedom but soon became Pharaoh’s right hand man, after predicting that Pharaoh’s dream of seven lean cows eating seven fat cows meant there would be seven good harvests followed by seven years of famine, and thus, during the good years, Pharaoh would need to store up the grain. Every single thing Joseph said comes true. Then, during the famine, Jacob sent his sons to Egypt for grain so the family would not starve. Joseph thus gained power over his brothers, whom he put through various trials. But instead of seeking revenge, he saved his family from starvation.
This is poetic justice, that Joseph’s dreams of having power over his brothers came true precisely because they abandoned him, making their words dramatic irony that foreshadowed the end of the story. This is irony of fate.
The enduring power and poignancy of this story can be found in the words on a plaque at the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, Tennessee, the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination (with a slightly different translation than the King James): “Behold the dreamer. Let us slay him, and we will see what will become of his dream.”
King’s dream did survive him, and, some might argue, in the election of Barack Obama, witnessed its apotheosis, though not its completion.
Whereas the civil rights movement was trying to undo a terrible multi-century-long moral wrong, the challenge for climate science activists (the future generations rights movement?) is that we are trying to prevent a terrible multi-century-long moral wrong. That mission will require even more eloquence, even more commitment.
I have a dream of clean air and clean water for my daughter and all the children of the world. I have a dream of clean energy jobs for millions of Americans and tens of millions of people around the globe. I have a dream we saved this garden of Eden for generations to come, saved it from the greed and myopia of the few.
Related Posts:
- How to be as persuasive as Abe Lincoln, Part 2: Use irony, the twist we can’t resist
- “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor”: How to be as persuasive as Lincoln, 3
- How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address, 4: Extended metaphor
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Very moving words, Joe.
Thank you for challenging us.
Thanks for this post. There is a lot to think in this speech about given our current moment and methods. I want to note that there is complete version of the speech which runs 17:28 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk to which you can relink. This 11:50 video version leaves out a significant couple of paragraphs about the urgency of the moment.
Foreshadowing -
In Deadly Frog and Bat Plagues, Eerie Similarities
“The impact of chytridiomycosis on frogs is the most spectacular loss of vertebrate biodiversity due to disease in recorded history,” wrote the authors.
“Chytridiomycosis is probably the best empirical example that we know of to demonstrate disease-induced extinction,” Voyles told LiveScience in an e-mail. Other examples of devastating disease exist, she wrote, “But in this sense, I think chytridiomycosis has led to a paradigm shift in how we view infectious diseases in wildlife.”
http://www.livescience.com/animals/plague-of-bats-and-frogs-110114.html
Mail onboard….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1347863/Shrinking-Arctic-ice-reflecting-sunshine-space-adding-global-warming.html
I have a dream that the vast majority of humans come to realize that the world is not a stage for our actions, but that it is an integral part of our actions and we of it.
I have a dream that humanity will cease to think that there is something special about us in this universe and that we are but part of the fabric of life in this universe.
I have a dream that our rational brains can soon come to override our emotions and reactionary nature to let us see what our true relationship is with the rest of creation.
I have a dream that we will come to really understand our place in the universe before the universe “decides” we must be eliminated.
Finally, I have a dream that maybe my pessimism might be misplaced and that we will in fact realize our true potential as organic beings in this world.
Very good Joe, I could not agree more – it is the subtle power of poetry rather than mere rhetoric or facts articulated in rational (scientific) discourse that moves the soul, and that is the vital level at which peoples’ lives can find the way to change. When enough people demand change the political and economic rationale of the system can be changed. We have a lot to learn from the homiletical art of great orators and preachers like King. These are the type of people who ultimately change the direction of cultures and civilizations, not technicians, nor politicians.
“Procrastination is still the thief of time.”
There are few more powerful statements made in 7 words.
Cheers – John
It’s good to have the mail on our side.
They are headline champs….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1347917/Was-climate-change-responsible-rise-fall-Roman-Empire.html
What would Martin Luther King Jr do? Christians and climate change
By Jarrod McKenna
ABC Religion and Ethics | 17 Jan 2011
The legacy of Martin Luther King Jr and the reality of climate change are both victims of western culture’s remarkable capacity to accommodate and neutralise that which is most critical of it.
Early in the civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin said to King, “I have a feeling that the Lord had laid his hand upon you. And that is a dangerous, dangerous thing.” Similarly, the FBI once described Martin King as the “most dangerous man in America” – and yet, as Martin Luther King Jr day rolls around again in the United States, we are often presented with a figure that seems more like a cheerleader for the status quo rather than a prophetic challenge to it. Somehow, it seems we have made this dangerous figure very safe.
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/01/17/3114379.htm
‘Increased climate variability from AD 250 to 600 coincided with the demise of the Western Roman Empire and the turmoil of the Migration Period.
‘Distinct drying in the third century paralleled a period of serious crisis in the western Roman Empire marked by barbarian invasion, political turmoil and economic dislocation in several provinces in Gaul.’
The scientists said ‘unfavourable climate may have contributed to the spread of the second plague pandemic, the Black Death, which reduced central Europe’s population after AD 1347 by 40 to 60 per cent.’
However we are ‘certainly not immune to the predicted temperature and precipitation changes, especially considering that migration to more favourable habitats as an adaptive response will not be an option in an increasingly crowded world.’
Good one, Ed Hummell.
Let’s not forget King’s actions, including marching and imprisonment. Scientists above all should remember King’s courage, which was driven by love for all people.
I wrote an article over the weekend that also looked at the lessons we can all learn from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as it pertains to current political discourse. The speech, and his life, taught us that we’re all in this together, we can be passionate without the vitriol, and it is the power of our words and ideas that win the day, not who yells the loudest. As you point out, the speech is a rhetorical tour de force. We can all learn from his ability to communicate.
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978927411
You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…
Joe: Thank you for your words and your witness in today’s post.
A curious connection to the Beatles’ tune was in a recent show of GLEE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNl91QXws7o
And oddly connected… to the right-wing hate-spin-machine this weekend was their lunacy of “closed captioning” of the words ‘applause’ for the hearing-impaired at the memorial service in Tucson.
To quote Lily Tomlin, no matter how cynical you get, you can’t keep up.
MLK Jr on GOP 2011: “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,” Strength to Love, 1963
I am going to play a humble Devil’s Advocate here. I recommend that everyone watch Adam Curtis’ documentaries “Pandora’s Box,” “The Century of the Self,” and “The Power of Nightmares.”
The first talks about all the technocratic failures of the 20th century, the second talks about the perfection of marketing as a driving force in how people think about themselves and relate to the public and the latter is about how positive oriented visions have no political power any more so fear is the primary driver…this is presented in the context of terrorism.
Oh and also “The Trap” which talks about our current idea of “freedom” based on radical ideas of negative liberty as justified by the homo economicus model developed in the 1950s.
Taken together, Curtis’ overarching thesis is compelling: positive humanistic idealism developed in the 19th century failed repeatedly in the 20th century because it became co-opted as just another rhetorical device to be used by the corrupt and cynical to justify their power. As the societies stagnated due to their internal rot, the distance between the rhetoric and reality grew and grew until society largely associated positive idealism with the corruption itself.
The 80s was the triumph of negative idealism and had powerful messaging both in the marketing and rationalist academic world (particularly economists). This triumph had other unforeseen circumstances that made fear not hope the primary motivator.
So in short, I appreciate what people are saying about MLK and inspirational and all that. God knows it works on me. But whenever I try to articulate a positive vision for an environmental response, I instantly see the backlash that Curtis comments on, and am transported to the pre-1980s culture war (which is odd considering I wasn’t even born then). The whole Baby Boomers refighting the 60s over and over again phenomenon…
But even amongst my peers we are deeply cynical about positive visions. All the technical trained people I know my age agree what we must do, but are fatalistic that we won’t do it and point to historical failures and charlatans. I too admit that it’s hard to maintain motivation because I constantly think, “well even if I help develop a sustainable solution, it will surely be captured by the corporatist environment and twisted beyond all recognition, possibly even making things worse.”
In any case, my larger point is that society as a whole has periods where they quest towards higher ideals, then watch us fall short and become cynical until things really stop working…reinvigorating ideals, etc.
Lincoln was the beginning of a rebirth in positive idealism and MLK was near the end…I’m not sure how we should respond considering that society is reflexively against that type of messaging these days.
Sorry, I was in Memphis, watching MLK live on TV, just two hours before James Earl Ray shot him. MLK was spewing hatred, racism and sedition to a fawning media! My good friend sitting next to me (who happened to be black and the two of us had literally intertwined our blood, sweat and tears meeting our Military obligations since boot camp) turned to me and said: “That nigger is going to get himself shot!” Two hours later that came to pass and Jesse Jackson was running around spewing to the SAME fawning media with blood on his shirt (documented: NOT MLKs), repeating the same crap we had heard from MLK earlier! MLK plagiarized his Doctoral thesis, cheated repeatedly on his wife and stirred riots. Jesse Jackson simply picked up from the same point. To this day, I seethe at the thought that this Country made a hero of such a spiteful loser, ignoring the truth! Correta King is the REAL hero in my book! Had he not been shot, MLK would have faded into history, probably not even mentioned in the history books.
Ohio’s new parks director also has a dream:
The new director of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources is leaving open the idea of drilling for oil and gas in the state’s parks and preserves
http://www.wdtn.com/dpp/news/ohio/natural-resources-chief-open-to-drilling-in-parks-
I’m with mikkel #15. The masters never cease plotting and scheming to maintain their dominance. When popular leaders emerge, they are co-opted, framed, subjected to media vilification and, occasionally, murdered. In his last months MLK grew increasing radical, attacking US foreign policy and the war in Vietnam in particular. I imagine that sealed his fate. And, of course, he failed. Afro-Americans are now even poorer, more down-trodden, than in the 1960s. Faced with the victories of the Civil Rights movement, that reversed the ‘Betrayal of the Negro’ that unfolded after Emancipation, the US Establishment simply adopted a new tactic to keep the Afro-Americans down. Black neighbourhoods were flooded with drugs, jobs were withdrawn to more business friendly areas, mass incarceration meant most adult men were in prison, on parole, had been imprisoned at some time, or were at risk of imprisonment. Of course there was also Bill Clinton’s regressive ‘welfare reform’. So today African-Americans are the poorest group by far, in the US, and the particular victims of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, where they get foreclosure, and the banksters get trillions.
The only way to save the planet is to throw up leaders alright, but we can be certain that they will be attacked. No change is even remotely possible while power remains in the hands of a ruthless, hereditary, infinitely vicious ruling class, who buy and sell politicians by the gross, who control the media and who care not a whit what happens after they are dead. And ‘He who hesitates is lost’.
“When popular leaders emerge, they are co-opted, framed, subjected to media vilification and, occasionally, murdered. In his last months MLK grew increasing radical, attacking US foreign policy and the war in Vietnam in particular.”
The Boondocks’ MLK episode where he didn’t die and instead woke up from a coma this decade hit these points pitch perfectly.
Joe, this is beautiful. Thank you.
Just before I read this, I was thinking of the Latin writers — Cicero and Ovid — and how much I had enjoyed their logical thinking and the precision of their language. Regretting how much our current ‘orators’ lack the logic, lack the understanding of the great speakers of the ages… MLK did draw of the best voices and grow them.
Often I can’t figure out why the modern politicians don’t understand the dream of Joseph… They overspend in good times, and worsen bad times by tightening fiscal belts.
The biggest thing in life I regret I didn’t do — going to the Lincoln Memorial the day Martin Luther King spoke. I feared colleagues would twit me for my absence.
How could you omit the most important part of his speech. King didn’t have a nightmare: he had a dream. The power of the positive message.
The struggle between maintaining jobs, maintaining GDP growth and securing cheap fossil fuelled energy and the need for such basic things as clean air, water and food will always be an issue. Canada exports such an expensive oil to the U.S., damaging our beautiful environment with oil-sand digging on a gigantic scale. And nature won’t just watch with hands folded tight. It has mechanisms of it’s own to cope with it, and there comes Katrina and the others. Such a shame. Beautiful words:
“I have a dream of clean air and clean water for my daughter and all the children of the world. I have a dream of clean energy jobs for millions of Americans and tens of millions of people around the globe. I have a dream we saved this garden of Eden for generations to come, saved it from the greed and myopia of the few.”
Thanks.
#23, Heather,
You hit the problem right on its head: the dreams are fairly east to come by but it is reconciling them with the entrenched realities of our economic activity that is the big challenge. Economics is supposed to be the study of how to make best use of scarce resource but the way we account for our activity makes the ludicrous assumption that not only are the Earth’s resources and services unlimited, they are cost free to use. I believe the best hope we have for making a real and immediate improvement is to make activities like restocking oceans, protecting biodiversity and taking carbon put of the atmosphere have an economic value. But getting people to act is the key and in my book I paraphrase the words of another great American orator in what I have called the Arrhenius Rice Declaration.
‘We choose to reinvent accountancy so that the Earth-cost of consumption is included in the price of production. In doing so, we will quickly lay aside the use of fossil fuel in favour of renewable energy. We choose to do this so the concentration of CO2 can return to below 350 ppm, a level we know allows for a climate safe for humans. We choose to reinvent accountancy in this decade so that our civilisation may prosper in decades to come. We choose to reinvent accountancy not for our children’s sake but for our sake, not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.’
G’day,
I’ve found the later years of his life to be quite interesting. Towards the end he had lost the support many after his ‘hollow victory’ standing next to the president and signing a piece of paper. King spoke out against the war in vietnam and was working to bring together the peace movement and the civil rights movement. I think there is a powerful nexus where we can all get together and not let the ‘masters drive the slaves to fight each other’ and the point is where the equality movement, the environmental movement, the workers movement, the peace movement, the civil rights movement, and the women’s rights movement come together to be such a force that those top 1% of thieves and scoundrels will not be able to build a wall big enough out of all their trillions of dollars.
Listening to his last speech about being on the mountaintop this morning on the radio it is hard not to notice his audience. He was there in solidarity and support of the sanitation worker’s strike at the time.
I know a lot of people love to put all kinds of words into King’s mouth that are debatable, but I for one think he would see the savage destruction of our land, water, and air which we have subjected ourselves to and I think he would speak out against it. In his spiritual tradition we were meant to be stewards to the land, not locusts.
cheers,
spiritkas
I think someone should respond to KutterSark’s comment.
KutterSark:
I deduce you are white, since you make a point of mentioning that your best friend is black. (You use the past tense. Is he gone, then, like Rambo’s black buddy in First Blood? Or did he stop being your friend?) One thing I can’t deduce is what you replied when he said to you “That nigger is going to get himself shot!” I have got some idea, but it’s too vague to post here.
However, your perception that Dr. King was “spewing hatred, racism, and sedition” is explicit enough to challenge. If this perception is accurate, why is it that the worst riots erupted after Dr. King was killed?
Let me suggest another perception:
A little study of history will show that while the Sixties was a turbulent era, things were far more peaceful with Dr. King around. There are always those who thrive on fomenting disruption; they had a freer hand after he was erased from the scene.