Pathos is one of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion, and it essentially refers to a speaker's or writer's attempts to appeal to and convince their audience by eliciting an emotional response from that audience. One way in which Dr. King uses pathos in his speech is by employing word choices that are heavily laden with emotional connotation. He describes the Emancipation Proclamation as a "great beacon light of hope" as well as a "joyous daybreak to end the long night of ... captivity" to enslaved peoples (my emphasis).

Word choices such as hope and joyous help to show what an indescribable relief it must have felt like for a person who had been enslaved to believe that they would now experience real freedom. Dr. King goes on to describe how, even a century later, Black Americans are still "badly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination" (emphasis added). Such word choices seem likely to elicit sympathy from white members of his audience, perhaps people who have not given much thought to the continued effects of racism and discrimination in the twentieth century.

Comparing their effects to being physically crippled and invoking language associated with slavery—in manacles and chains—is another way of eliciting a favorable emotional response from his audience. Dr. King insists that Black Americans still live on a "lonely island of poverty" while watching those around them enjoy "material prosperity," and he claims that Black Americans "languish in the corners of American society" and feel like "exile[s]" in their home. Again, the choice of lonely, languish, and exile would likely compel an audience member's sympathy and persuade them that something unjust is taking place in America.