War and The African American Community

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of America's desperate poor Black men, who could not afford a university education to obtain a deferral, and did not have the political connections to obtain service in the National Guard. Dodson's mother weeps for a son whose death is only for a nation that hates him. Yet King's non-fictional speech and Dodson's fictive Black mother of the world of his poetry also highlight, however foreign both authors might find the debate regarding the draft and the Iraqi War today to their ideological understanding of the American dream, the same essential truth and theme. Black Americans have fought and died for America, without the same 'payback' as White Americans with the rewards both within the military structure and also in the larger reality of the American dream.
Early on in his speech, King highlights the dangerous divide that America is causing by going to war in Vietnam, stating that the war was doing far more than "devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending ...

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in Dodson's poem, but in the voice and prayers of a single individual, rather than casting this idea across the hearts and minds of a whole span of people. The poem focuses on those left at home, while King parallels the boys fighting in war in Vietnam with the young men of the inner cities fighting at home, both for a freedom of a kind, but both ineffectively. Both King's speech and Dodson's poem are also in the religious 'register' of rhetoric, as King portrays the grief of a woman left at home whom has lost her son to a war that does not even recompense her with freedom in exchange and Dodson calls his poem a kind of a prayer.
Read in consort, both King's speech and Dodson's ...

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