We are right to celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King but often neglect what a brilliant mind he was. In the spirit of reigniting King’s philosophy of non-violent direct action students in Grade 7 enriched their reading class by making text to text comparisons of the play they are currently reading, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun with two of Dr. King’s most famous speeches, his “I Have A Dream” speech and his final speech, the Memphis Speech or “Mountaintop Speech.” The students were analyzing King’s main ideas and discovering what rhetorical devices he used to make his arguments in speeches of in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
