Repetition means Power

Our country has tried to eradicate racism for a long time. Black people were hated, and there was almost nothing they could do to pursue their long-deserved freedom. Many have tried and only a few have somewhat contributed to the evolution of the way blacks were treated. Out of these numerous efforts to take away racist discrimination, one speech made a big advancement towards the freedom that every person deserves. In his speech “I Have a Dream”, Martin Luther King is trying to persuade all the white people to grant every American equal rights and freedom by using repetitious metaphors.

Martin Luther King uses lots of repeating phrases in his speech; the most effective one is from the song "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" and the phrase is: “Let Freedom Ring”. Besides the fact that he repeats this phrase eleven times, there is also a metaphor present along with individual connotations of each word. First, repetition makes the reader, or in this case, the listener, remember that phrase. The phrase usually means a lot to the speaker, so by repeating it, he or she hopes that the listener will remember and recall this particular phrase after the speech. The verb “let” is persuading the listener to do something; it’s an action verb, meaning that the listener has to do something in order to achieve this persuasion. The phrase has a positive overall meaning; “ring” is closely related to ringing bells, which produces music with pleasing musical sounds. The speaker is also reminding the listener that bells are marvelously large and loud, so by saying “let freedom ring”, the speaker hopes that everyone will hear this important message, analogous to everyone hearing bells of a bell tower in a town. Martin Luther King put a few of the most motivating and imperative sentences in between every time he repeated the phrase “Let Freedom Ring”; in addition, the long pauses he makes after repeatedly saying the phrase put an additional emphasis on it.

All of techniques used on this phrase combined, make it a very powerful motivation device. The reader cannot possibly stay unaffected by this enormously powerful rhetoric. This phrase was used in the last few paragraphs, where motivation and persuasion to change is critical. Martin Luther King successfully accomplished the desired level of rhetoric in this speech.