Clinton's 1993 Memphis Speech: A Critical Rhetorical Analysis

Overview and Context

Clinton's 1993 speech "What Would Martin Luther King Say" was presented to an audience of Black ministers in Memphis. The speech focused on the president's perception of social decay in America and its relationship to civil rights. On the surface, the speech seemed like an attempt to build racial bridges, as emphasized by the white, upper-class president referring to himself as "one of" the assembled Black pastors. He appears to urge morality and peace — noble enough goals. However, critics have pointed out that beneath the surface of his words lie some very troubling social assumptions.

Clinton, in this speech, subtly argues that the civil rights movement and the integration of society were causes of the social decay he perceives in America, and that the main problems afflicting Black Americans are of their own making. It is somewhat curious that the speech would contain such strong biases, considering that Clinton credited as his speechwriter a Latina woman who, for her part, denies having written the text, saying that she "only gave him talking points, not text" (Bogue). All in all, the speech was relatively well received and has been credited as one of Clinton's most eloquent orations, despite its rather obvious historical and social flaws.

Summary of the Speech's Main Arguments

The speech begins with Clinton's generalized remarks about his successes in office — passing family leave laws, NAFTA, tax reform, and his ill-fated health plan. It quickly moves into speculation about what Martin Luther King Jr. would say about the state of America at that time. Clinton claims that the great civil rights leader would be very proud of the state of American politics regarding race. According to the speech, race relations are quite favorable, and America has done a fine job electing people regardless of race, sharing political power across racial lines, creating a Black middle class, promoting Black Americans in the armed forces, and desegregating its neighborhoods. The precise words used were "letting people who have the ability to do so live wherever they want to live" — a subtle acknowledgment of the fact that neighborhoods remain remarkably segregated. According to a peer-reviewed report, urban segregation has decreased by less than 9% in the past fifty years (Denton). But, as Clinton points out, at least it is legal to live anywhere one can afford and is willing to endure the social pressures to do so. This praise, conveniently placed in a dead man's mouth, quickly turns to criticism.

The president does not criticize continued educational inequality, disparity in income and treatment within the justice system, or continued racial segregation across most sectors of society — except, perhaps, the military, where lower-income Black soldiers serve and die in disproportionately large numbers, representing 22% of soldiers while comprising approximately 12% of the population. Instead, his concern is directed entirely at a perceived moral decay in the Black American community. He focuses on stories of young Black males committing crimes and young Black women having children out of wedlock, speaking out about the lack of "structure, role-modeling, discipline" in Black families.

After discussing Martin Luther King's supposed pride in the strides made so far, Clinton moved immediately to discussing a recent case in which a thirteen-year-old Black child committed murder with an automatic weapon, killing other children. He continued to suggest that Martin Luther King would be outraged if he knew how Black people supposedly abused their freedoms. Clinton imagined King saying: "I fought for freedom… But not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon, not for the freedom of children to impregnate each other with babies and then abandon them, nor for the freedom of adult fathers of children to walk away from the children they created and abandon them, as if they didn't amount to anything."

Clinton then offers several moving stories meant to illustrate the terrible conditions facing young Black people — for example, he describes an eleven-year-old girl planning her own funeral. This story is emphasized by Clinton noting it took place "right here in Washington," presumably to demonstrate his personal connection with the case. From this emotional position, Clinton continues to moralize that "it is our moral duty to change this around."

He proposes to do so with a sweeping crime reform law that would not only ban assault weapons and put more police on the streets, but also increase penalties for criminals across the board — something he appears to present as welcome news to a community in which more than a quarter of adult males will spend time in prison. He also exhorts the ministers to take action in changing their communities.

Rhetorical Strengths and Weaknesses

Clinton then explains that there are two sources of change: one from outside a person or community (listing all the branches of government, which he claims are doing a fine job — "From the outside, we're doing our best…") and the other from inside a person or community. It is this internal work that is at fault for the state of affairs, Clinton seems to suggest, as he urges the pastors to hold their parishioners to higher standards of inner morality. "We have to make a partnership — all the government agencies, all the business folks. But where there are no families, where there is no order," he says, effectively placing the blame for the problems of the struggling Black community firmly on a lack of family values — a position that had previously been the exclusive domain of conservatives since the civil rights era.

This moral crusading is peppered with somewhat out-of-context political buzzwords. Clinton briefly discusses the need to create more jobs and inserts a reference to military expenditure cuts mid-sentence: "…where there is no order, where we have lost jobs because we had to reduce the size of the armed forces after the end of the Cold War, who will be there… [for] these children?" He tells the pastors that they will, in fact, be responsible to these children, and that he intends to help by serving as a role model of discipline and love.

Fatal Flaws in Logic and Historical Accuracy

As this summary may indicate, the speech did not sound particularly convincing on careful analysis. Technically, it has many strengths. The pathos generated by the children's stories and the appeal to Martin Luther King's noble legacy made one emotionally inclined to agree with whatever might be justified by such vivid examples. The ethos-based arguments for stronger community morality also seemed compelling in the light of such horrors. However, the logical and factual dimensions of the argument were somewhat lacking.

Technically, the speech erred by inserting buzzwords and unrelated political topics at random into the dialogue — as when the president casually and somewhat unexpectedly suggested that military budget cuts were responsible for the flagging morale of inner-city youth. Even apart from such technical weaknesses, the speech contains three rather fatal flaws.

First, it failed to address the fact that the destruction of Black families, which Clinton condemns as a cause of crime, is closely tied to a racially discriminatory war on drugs, overwhelming poverty, lack of access to reproductive health resources, and other structural issues. Nowhere in the speech is there any indication that outside forces may be contributing to this cycle of violence — no mention of shockingly high poverty rates or institutionalized racism. In failing to address these factors, Clinton directly created the speech's second major flaw.

This second flaw is historically painful. Throughout the speech, Clinton places words in Martin Luther King's mouth that King himself would never have spoken. For example, Clinton condemns ghetto violence while simultaneously implying that the military is the answer to the Black man's problem — both when he equates military service with equality and when he links the erosion of family stability to cuts in military funding. This is in direct opposition to some of the basic tenets of King's philosophy. As Sam Husseini has pointed out, "The words Clinton put in King's mouth would ring hollow if mainstream reporters had checked what King — a critic of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War who encouraged conscientious objection to military service — had said on the matter" (Husseini). In 1967, King weighed in on precisely the same issues Clinton dealt with here, saying quite the opposite of what Clinton seemed to expect. King's actual words were: "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government" (quoted in Husseini).

The third and final major flaw is that Clinton addresses the Black ministers with a severe racial hubris. He makes no mention of the racial differences that would call into question his naively brotherly demeanor. He carefully avoids drawing attention to the fact that he is not, as he claims, "one of" these Black ministers — he does not actually share in their pain or their calling. That he preaches to them about their moral duty, rather than engaging them in dialogue and addressing them honestly as equals who might have as much to teach him as he does them, is particularly troubling.