Friday, May 30, 2014

Martin Luther King's speech: "We are free at last"

As you know, Martin Luther King was an American Pastor, born in Atlanta, 1929 and died in Memphis, 1968. He is known for being a defender of civil rights, because since he was young he became aware of the situation of social and racial segregation of black people in their country, especially the ones in southern states.

In this post, I want to focus in his fairly well known speech "I Have a Dream”. What do are the topics he talked about? What does it make the speech so memorable?

Here's the speech if you haven’t see it. (You can read it too)


At first, Luther King reminds to the Americans the Emancipation Proclamation, a fact that would set free black people, but 100 years later there’s still discrimination in the society and he mentions that now is the time that black people will “cash the check”.
The most important thing of this speech is that Martin Luther King talked about nonviolence and not hate all white people, because  it’s also important their support and it’s unnecessary the negative feelings for the soul.
For me, this speech has emotional power because of the conviction with which he is standing there, the confident that his dream of living in a free country will come true and that security makes the audience feel that his dream will come true. It’s also important that he tries to gets his message across the whole United States (New Hampshire, New York, Alabama, Colorado, etc.).


If we talk about Martin Luther King and black people’s requests, I think that many of them were fixed, but the mentality of some people has not changed. Globally, you could easily see discrimination in the work, social field and school. The worst think, it’s that now it’s not only with black people, we can see discrimination with any ethnicity different from ours and we need to fight for their rights too.


Personally, I don’t believe that one day this reality will completely change, but I think this may decrease if you stop believing on some stereotypes, and people around you will do the same.
My opinion is not the only one, so I would like to know, do you think that this negative discrimination will finish? If so, how and when?

1 comment:

  1. I think that is very difficult to think from our current culture that this kind of injustice, serious or superfluous, will ever be erradicated, but I also tend to think that in those times it was also something unimaginable to ever happen, but that's how now we can see a difference in this aspects, although slowly, the changes are working in our society, just how they worked before with our grandparents and older generations. We just have to be pacient and give everything we can to make our contribution to get this changes done.

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