A Day After MLK Day: What is Rhetoric?

"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. ~Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, "Beyond Vietnam--A Time to Break the Silence"

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." ~Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, "Beyond Vietnam--A Time to Break the Silence"


This semester, I am teaching two classes and taking one in this field of "Rhetoric and Composition." The meaning of the word composition is fairly obvious; rhetoric on the other hand, not so much. I have always associated the word with speech. About a political candidate's speech, we may say: "Ahh, it's just rhetoric." But the speech, I am learning, is only part of the rhetoric, not the whole.

In the class I'm taking as a student, we defined the word, stealing from Aristotle: "the faculty of finding the available means of persuasion." It's a heady definition, but we were told that the Greek word for persuasion was more than just an exercise in intellectual convincing, but rather an attempt to compel us to action. So we can consider one's chosen appearance, a social interaction, a Facebook post, a letter to the editor, a martyr's death, and a commercial different types of rhetorical acts, but what better example could we look at than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose life (and rhetoric) yesterday's holiday celebrates?

So in day III of my teaching this semester, we listened to MLK's speech "Beyond Vietnam--A Time to Break Silence." As you would expect from King, it's beautifully crafted and brilliantly argued; you should check it out if you have a half hour to spare. I used that particular speech because a colleague pointed me to it, and it was my assumption that my students would already be pretty familiar with King's "I have a Dream" speech.

After listening, we evaluated what we heard in light of three Greek concepts: ethos (appeal to credibility), pathos (emotional appeal), and logos (logic). King succeeds in all three areas. For example, he appeals to his own credibility by reminding his church audience that he is "a preacher by calling" and that he won a Nobel Peace Prize. He affects his audience emotionally by reminding them that the Vietnam War "(sends) their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population." He points out the logical flaws of "taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."

Yes, rhetoric is so much more than speech (or writing). The means of persuasion, indeed. And few were better at it than King.