Neither Martin Luther King, Jr. nor Frederick Douglass were extremists; both argued that African-Americans have a natural right to equality. King and Douglass claimed that black people had been robbed of their equality by white Americans who refused to acknowledge their own hypocrisy by not affording people of color the liberties that were guaranteed them in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. In using America's stated ideals as the basis for their appeals for equality, King and Douglass sought to influence reasonable Americans, not hard core racists.
Both King and Douglass were recruited into their leadership roles as spokesmen for racial equality. King rose to prominence as a result of his involvement with the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott during the 1950s: "Although King had been in Montgomery for only a year and was just 26 years old, he was educated, the best speaker, and a minister, all assets which would pull the black community together" (Anderson 45). Douglass was persuaded by white abolitionists to become a lecturing agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society. The abolitionists were correct in their assumption that this runaway slave would be an effective tool in the anti-slavery cause. As one of Douglass's contemporaries writes, "As a public speaker, he excels in pathos, wit, comparison, imitation, strength of reasoning, and fluency of language" (Douglass 5).
The civil rights movement, as led by King, was conservative and associated racial equality with the American Dream. This ideology is evident from an examination of King's most famous speech "I Have a Dream." The chief strategy that King uses in his speech is to the appeal to the sense of pride that Americans have for their country. Considering that many of the African-Americans who had participated in the Civil Rights Movement had been severely brutalized and even killed by racist wh...