Felipe Antonio Pinilla Torres

African American Identity in American Literature

Response Paper: Civil Rights Movement
27/02/2018

“I refuse to accept despair as a final response to the ambiguities of history… I refuse to

accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life unable to influence
the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so
tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of
peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.”
-Extract from MLK’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Oslo, Norway.
Delivered Dec. 10, 1964.

The figure of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is well known for his importance in shaping the
African American civil rights movement during the 50s and 60s. In this sense, his role as a
leader has been highlighted, on one hand, in relationship to the acts of nonviolent protest and
civil resistance which he led, and, on the other, through the study of the thoughts, goals, and
analyses that he communicated in his speeches, letters and other public pronouncements. In
the study of the former, Dr. King's renown as a public speaker could be said to stem both
from the effects that his words had on the masses -bringing crowds of thousands to the point
of ecstasy- and from the implicit philosophy that nourished his struggle throughout the years
it lasted. In this brief paper, I would like to address the connection between these two aspects
of King’s discourse as it is presented in the famous “I have a dream speech”, given in 1963
to over 250,000 people in Washington, D.C., during the March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom. Precisely, this intersection, examined through the lens of the figure of nature,
allows the enlightenment of the ontological dimension of King’s political philosophy. In
other words, the literary inquiry on the naturalistic elements of King’s speech reveals that
these lead to the key concept of “interrelatedness”, providing us with clues for the analysis
of the particular ecological nature of his conception of the struggle for racial and social justice
in 1960s’ USA.

Dr. King was not only a rhetorician of great skills but a powerful thinker who built up his
conception of the African American political struggle with the aid of several literary devices
in his written and spoken word. In a basic level, these devices could be considered as tools
and techniques of language that authors use to convey meaning, bringing richness and clarity
to the discourse (Witerson). For example, the “I have a dream” speech is composed of
different literary devices: metaphors, used to highlight the contrast between two abstract
concepts ("The Negro lives in a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of
material prosperity"); parallelisms, in which the repetition of the same pattern of words or
phrases helps to organize and emphasize ideas (vid “Let freedom ring…”); similes, or
comparisons between dissimilar elements that help vivify the content of the speech (“No, no,
we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and
righteousness like a mighty stream”); and imagery, which consists in elaborately describing
an element—visually in this case—to create sensory stimulation and help evoke an emotional
response in the audience (“Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of
segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice”).

Deliberately, all of the previous examples have something in common: the presence of nature
or natural figures in them. Furthermore, King's usage of these elements could merely be seen
as a mechanism that allowed the masses to understand and relate to his ideas in a simple, yet
effective way (Reverie). Consequently, this analysis would argue, King’s success in using
nature imagery is assured by the fact that it addresses a dual audience (less and more
educated, black and white, and so on; vid Boan) by sticking to basic images and universal
symbols with which practically everyone can relate from their own experience. Ultimately,
this approach argues that King frames issues in the terminology of the natural world with
rhetorical purposes in mind. Nevertheless, this approach fails to fully recognize the degree to
which Dr. King portrayed a certain political philosophy in his words. Accordingly, when we
regard the aforementioned literary devices as mechanisms that structure and are structured
by King’s Weltanschauung, he is presented as an ecological political thinker (Dellinger).
Namely, the literary devices in “I have a dream” do not only have rhetorical purposes, as
addressing and engaging a double audience, but they also work as conditions for the
configuration of King’s conception of what his struggle is: the fact that he refers to hills and
mountains, waters and streams, days and nights, desolate valleys and sunlit paths, quicksands
and solid rocks, unbearable heats and relieving oasis, and so on, reveals that nature functions
as a structuring component of the way that he understands and assumes the African American
political struggle. This means that the struggle itself is entangled with and within nature. Commented [FAPT1]: Structure

This said, another dimension is added to the analysis, an ontological one. What characterizes,
then, this ontology? The answer is to be found in King’s literary production as well. Both in
the speech I have so far taken into account and in other writings such as the “Letter from
Birmingham Jail”, the concept of interrelatedness plays a central role in his political thought.
In this sense, he famously pronounced during the “I have a dream” speech that “many of our
white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their
destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is
inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone” (King 3). In the same manner,
when answering to the clergymen who wrote to him while he was in jail, King writes that
“[he is] cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. (…) Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all
indirectly” (King 1986). This vision of connectedness is also correlated to the way nature
appears in his discourse. Here, everything is also connected, every element is related to the
other, whether as its antithesis or as its complement: for example, the “dark clouds of racial
prejudice” and the “deep fog of misunderstanding” will give place to the “radiant stars of
love and brotherhood” (King 1907-8).

As a final commentary, it must be said that this entanglement of nature and political struggle
in King’s political thought nature shares another important characteristic: not any of them
are self-functioning mechanisms which don’t need the action of external forces. On the
contrary, the role of, on one side, God and, on the other, humans, is essential to attain
progress. This is notably exposed in King’s words on time: against the “tragic misconception
of time” that believes that “there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably
cure all ills”, he opposes a believe according to which “time itself is neutral”, meaning that
“[human] progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless
efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself
becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation” (King 1902). Hence, it is God and humans
who are in command of the changes that they witness in nature and in the struggle for justice
and for their wellbeing. Commented [FAPT2]: Agency

References
 Boan, Devon. The Black “I”. Peter Lang, 2002.
 Dellinger, Drew. Martin Luther King Jr. Ecological Thinker. drew dellinger,
https://drewdellinger.org/pages/mlk.
 King, Martin Luther. “I have a dream”.
 King, Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail”.
 Reverie, Marie. Imagery in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream". Owlcation,
https://owlcation.com/humanities/Imagery-in-I-Have-a-Dream.
 Witerson, Sam. Analyisis Of Literary Devices In I Have A Dream By Dr. Martin
Luther. SAMWITERSON, http://samwiterson.blogspot.de/2011/07/analyisis-of-
literary-devices-in-i-have.html.