Use Of Parallelism example essay topic

356 words
"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".

The main thesis of Martin Luther King's speech "I have a Dream" is call for abolishing of slavery and right for freedom of Black citizens in the America that must be achieved through political and social cooperation. In order to develop his thesis, Martin Luther King uses effectively parallelism. This rhetorical device is constructed with the use of two or more parallel sentences with similar structure a grammatical syntax. The use of parallelism is obvious at the very beginning of his speech when he says, "But one hundred... ". All three sentences of this paragraph start with the same phrase, "One hundred years, later" and is followed by the same subject, "the Negro".

In addition, all sentences convey the same picture of the life of Black American - "chains of discrimination", "lives on a lonely island of poverty" and "finds himself on exile in his own land". The use of parallelism here is effective because constant repetition keeps concepts of racial segregation active in audience's mind as well as it emphasizes the point in a very dramatic manner. Moreover, this paragraph is very powerful because it places emphasis on the idea of current living conditions of Black Americans as inhumane and unjust. The entire paragraph builds to a climax through use of shameful conditions of Black's that calls for change. Here parallelism effectively links powerful imagery that portrays black suffering emphasizing negative aspects of the problem that later transition towards the solution, which indeed is the main thesis of Martin Luther King's successful speech.