SOURCE: '"Dialect Determinism': Ed Bullins' Critique of the Rhetoric of the Black Power Movement," in Studies in Black American Literature, Volume 2: Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism, edited by Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot, Penkevill Publishing Co., 1986, pp. 161-75.

Sanders is an American-born Canadian critic. Below, she analyzes the use of rhetoric in several of Bullins's works.

It was Black Power rhetoric that signaled the end of the Civil Rights Movement. In the earlier movement, the language of the Black Church predominated, notably the exceptional oratory of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in which the language of the Church and that of American social ideals were brilliantly combined. In King's rhetoric, the injustice American blacks suffered and the justice they sought were made vivid; made vivid also was the mode through which their fight was conducted: confrontation through non-violence combined with the discipline...