“Your tools are really the people”: The rhetoric of Robert Parris Moses

Abstract

The highly intellectual, ethereally quiet, and always enigmatic Robert Parris Moses acquired legendary status as a civil rights leader in the first half of the 1960s. Although he successfully addressed African‐American listeners in Mississippi and college audiences at elite national universities, prominent observers viewed him as anti‐rhetorical and unskilled in oratory. By analyzing Moses's substantive message, personal persona, and second persona as synergistic and reciprocal elements of reconstitutive identification, and by understanding his rhetorical goals and. the strategies he developed to reach those goals, we attempt to illuminate the rhetorical dynamics of his discourse. Application of our critical method elevates Moses into the pantheon of African‐American civil rights orators of the 1960s and may capture the power of other speakers whose messages seek to redefine the character of their audiences.

Key words:

• First Persona
• Identification
• Reconstitutive
• Second Persona