Pathos In Jfk Speech

Words: 1334
Pages: 6

On June 11, 1963, at the oval office in Washington D.C, John F. Kennedy delivered news about the discriminatory events that occurred at the University of Alabama. This was broadcasted all across the nation, on every television, radio, and eventually making it’s way to the major national papers the next day. On that day, several protesters, some violent, had gathered at the University of Alabama due to a series of protests, which were caused by the fact that two African American students had just been accepted into the school. That night, Kennedy informed the people of the country of the protests and asked the American people to take a call to action to end racial discrimination towards the African American population. In his speech, Kennedy …show more content…
Kennedy then followed with a vision of the modern America during the time of discrimination, ”Today, there are Negroes unemployed, two or three times as many compared to white, inadequate education, moving into large cities, unable to find work young people particularly out of work, without hope, denied equal rights and denied the opportunity to eat at a restaurant or a lunch counter or go to a movie theater.” This is he using both emotion and the truth to convey his message, which occurs multiple times throughout the speech; this represents the fact that African Americans were unable to gain even the most simple of rights that almost all of the white population could have obtained. One of the final representations of pathos in this speech occurs when he says, “The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” This was Kennedy’s use of the …show more content…
This Nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds.” This is Kennedy asking the people of the US to ask oneself if what the country was founded on was still being used, whether or not that those men of many nations and backgrounds and their ideas were still thought or had their morals and ideas faded with time. Then Kennedy leads into a form of speech that almost shows itself as a rant when he says, “We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say the word, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes.” Here is Kennedy representing that even though we “preach” that all countries in the world should be free, it makes us a hypocritical country all together because we don’t let a certain group of people have the same rights that almost everyone else has available to obtain, along with not allowing groups of people to have the same rights, us as Americans would discriminate against these groups of people. Finally, Kennedy puts the fact that he is President on stage when he says, with a surprising amount of humbleness, “I am, therefore, asking