Abstract

This article reconstructs the Birmingham civil rights mass meetings of 1963 as one setting for reengaging the theoretical tensions between canonized and marginalized rhetorics. I consider how Ralph Abernathy's May 3rd speech epitomizes one way blacks used religious oratory to destabilize the boundaries that proponents of standardized writing have traditionally attributed to African-American discursive strategies. After summarizing the history of the mass meetings from Montgomery to Birmingham, I advance the claim that during his speech Abernathy functions as a folk preacher and a “revisionist historian.”

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
2013-04-01
DOI
10.1080/07350198.2013.766851
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