Further reading
- Dallek, Robert (2003). An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 . Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. ISBN 978-0-316-17238-7.
The Second Emancipation Proclamation is the term applied to an envisioned executive order that Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement called on President John F. Kennedy to issue. As the Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln to free all slaves being held in states at war with the Union, the envisioned "Second Emancipation Proclamation" was to use the powers of the executive office to strike a severe blow to segregation.
Writing in The New York Times, Professor David W. Blight and Allison Scharfstein point out, "During the 1960 presidential debates, Kennedy had suggested that he would address equality of opportunity by the 'stroke of the president's pen.'" [1] Although President Kennedy opposed segregation and had shown support for the civil rights of African Americans, he originally believed in a more measured approach to legislation, given the political realities he faced in Congress. [2] The white Southern Democrats in Congress were a powerful voting block and many of the congressional committees were chaired by Southern segregationists. [1] [2]
Noting this lack of progress, King told his legal adviser Clarence B. Jones, "What we need to do is to get Kennedy to issue a second Emancipation Proclamation on the anniversary of the first one." On June 6, 1961, King announced this idea during a New York news conference, saying "Just as Abraham Lincoln had the vision to see almost 100 years ago that this nation could not exist half-free, the present administration must have the insight to see that today the nation cannot exist half-segregated and half-free." [1] Jones and a team of legal scholars (which would include members of the Gandhi Society for Human Rights) began to prepare the proposal, while King continued to publicize the idea. [1]
During a tour of the Lincoln Sitting Room with Kennedy in October 1961, King pressed Kennedy for a proclamation "outlawing segregation". Kennedy said he would take it under consideration and asked King for a draft of the proposal. Two months afterward King, while campaigning against segregation in Albany, Georgia. sent the President a personal telegram urging him to take action. National newspapers took up the story and a debate began over whether such an executive order would be legal outside of wartime. [1]
On March 24, 1962, King announced that he had been invited by President Kennedy to submit for the President's signature a "second Emancipation Proclamation". [3] King and his legal staff declared that they would have the document ready on May 17, 1962, the eighth anniversary of the decision of Brown v. Board of Education . [1]
On May 17, 1962, Kennedy received King's work in a document presented "On Behalf of the Negro Citizenry of the United States of America in Commemoration of the Centennial of the Proclamation of Emancipation". [4] It called "For National Rededication to the Principles of the Emancipation Proclamation and for an Executive Order Prohibiting Segregation in the United States of America". [4] The document opened, "Mr. President, sometimes there occur moments in the history of a nation when it becomes necessary to pause and reflect upon the heritage of the past in order to determine the most meaningful course for the present and the future. America today, in the field of race relations, is at such a moment.... Thus, as we approach the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, eight years after the unanimous United States Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, we want to present for your consideration our thoughts on the way in which the legal and moral responsibility to end state enforced segregation and discrimination can be met.... We believe the Centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation is a peculiarly appropriate time for all our citizens to rededicate themselves to those early precepts and principles of equality before the law." [4] Historian David W. Blight points out that King's preamble in the document made reference to many "cultural precedents of American freedom, including Bruce Catton's popular Civil War books, Woody Guthrie's folk song "This Land Is Your Land", the Gettysburg Address, the autobiography by Frederick Douglass and Kennedy's own 'Strategy for Peace.'" [1]
King went on to review the historical events around Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, including a quote from Frederick Douglass on awaiting word of President Lincoln's announcement. King linked this with the America of his and Kennedy's day, writing, "we believe the time has come for Presidential leadership to be vigorously exerted to remove, once and for all time, the festering cancer of segregation and discrimination from American society. The struggle for freedom, Mr. President, of which our Civil War was but a bloody chapter, continues throughout our land today." [4] Reviewing the limitations of the Judiciary branch, and invoking the memory of Lincoln, King wrote "The conscience of America looks now, again, some one hundred years after the abolition of chattel slavery, to the President of the United States." [4]
King proposed "in glorious commemoration of the Centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation" that the president use "the full powers of your office ... to eliminate all forms of statutory-imposed segregation and discrimination", to declare that all school districts desegregate by September 1963, with "the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to immediately prepare, in consultation with local school officials, a program of integration in compliance with the mandate of Brown v. Board of Education." [4] The document also proposed that Kennedy prohibit racial segregation in "Federally assisted housing" and announce "That any and all laws within the United States requiring segregation or discrimination because of race or color are contrary to the national policy of the Government of the United States and are detrimental and inimical to the best interest of the United States at home and abroad." [4]
The document went on to cite legal precedents by the hundreds, making special note of Harry S. Truman's military desegregation order of 1948. [1]
Kennedy did not take the opportunity to issue a second Emancipation Proclamation "and noticeably avoided all centennial celebrations of emancipation." [1] In November 1962, Kennedy did issue Executive Order 11063, prohibiting racial discrimination in federally supported housing or "related facilities", [5] and months afterwards introduced an omnibus civil rights bill to Congress after his civil rights address on national television and radio. [1] [6] The fulfillment of the vision of King and the Civil Rights Movement against segregation came with the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was pushed through a bitterly divided Congress and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. [7]
In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1964 King spoke of the Civil Rights Act, saying "Then came that glowing day a few months ago when a strong Civil Rights bill became the law of our Land. This bill, which was first recommended and promoted by President Kennedy was passed because of overwhelming support and perseverance from millions of Americans, Negro and White. It came as a bright interlude in the long and sometimes turbulent struggle for Civil Rights: the beginning of a second Emancipation Proclamation providing a comprehensive legal basis for equality of opportunity." [8]
Historian David W. Blight points out that, although the document calling for an executive order to act as a second Emancipation Proclamation "has been virtually forgotten", the manifesto that King and his associates produced showed his "close reading of American politics" and recalled how moral leadership could have an effect on the American public through an executive order. [1] Despite its failure "to spur a second Emancipation Proclamation from the White House, it was an important and emphatic attempt to combat the structured forgetting of emancipation latent within Civil War memory." [1]
The Emancipation Proclamation, officially Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War. The Proclamation had the effect of changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free. As soon as slaves escaped the control of their enslavers, either by fleeing to Union lines or through the advance of federal troops, they were permanently free. In addition, the Proclamation allowed for former slaves to "be received into the armed service of the United States". The Emancipation Proclamation was a significant part of the end of slavery in the United States.
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century and had its modern roots in the 1940s, although the movement made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.
Desegregation is the process of ending the separation of two groups, usually referring to races. Desegregation is typically measured by the index of dissimilarity, allowing researchers to determine whether desegregation efforts are having impact on the settlement patterns of various groups. This is most commonly used in reference to the United States. Desegregation was long a focus of the American civil rights movement, both before and after the US Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, particularly desegregation of the school systems and the military. Racial integration of society was a closely related goal.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and employment discrimination. The act "remains one of the most significant legislative achievements in American history".
Executive Order 9981 was issued on July 26, 1948, by President Harry S. Truman. This executive order abolished discrimination "on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin" in the United States Armed Forces. The Order led to the re-integration of the services during the Korean War (1950–1953). It was a crucial event in the post-World War II civil rights movement and a major achievement of Truman's presidency. Executive Order 9981 was passed primarily due to an attack on Isaac Woodard Jr. who was an American soldier and African-American World War II veteran. On February 12, 1946, hours after being honorably discharged from the United States Army, he was attacked while still in uniform by South Carolina police as he was taking a bus home. The attack left Woodard completely and permanently blind. President Harry S. Truman ordered a federal investigation.
Racial equality is when people of all races and ethnicities are treated in an egalitarian/equal manner. Racial equality occurs when institutions give individuals legal, moral, and political rights. In present-day Western society, equality among races continues to become normative. Prior to the early 1960s, attaining equality was difficult for African, Asian, and Indigenous people. However, in more recent years, legislation is being passed ensuring that all individuals receive equal opportunities in treatment, education, employment, and other areas of life.
Samuel Ernest Vandiver Jr. was an American Democratic Party politician who was the 73rd governor of Georgia from 1959 to 1963.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is a leading United States civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.
This is a timeline of African-American history, the part of history that deals with African Americans.
The Birmingham campaign, also known as the Birmingham movement or Birmingham confrontation, was an American movement organized in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring attention to the integration efforts of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often referred to by his initials JFK and by the nickname Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. He was the youngest person to assume the presidency by election and the youngest president at the end of his tenure. Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his foreign policy concerned relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. A Democrat from Massachusetts, Kennedy served in both houses of the U.S. Congress prior to his presidency.
Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, 64 MCC 769 (1955) is a landmark civil rights case in the United States in which the Interstate Commerce Commission, in response to a bus segregation complaint filed in 1953 by a Women's Army Corps (WAC) private named Sarah Louise Keys, broke with its historic adherence to the Plessy v. Ferguson separate but equal doctrine and interpreted the non-discrimination language of the Interstate Commerce Act as banning the segregation of black passengers in buses traveling across state lines.
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, "Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. Such laws remained in force until 1965. Formal and informal segregation policies were present in other areas of the United States as well, even if several states outside the South had banned discrimination in public accommodations and voting. Southern laws were enacted by white "Redeemers"-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. Such continuing racial segregation was also supported by the successful Lily-White Movement of Southern Republicans.
The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door took place at Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963. George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, in a symbolic attempt to keep his inaugural promise of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" and stop the desegregation of schools, stood at the door of the auditorium as if to block the entry of two African American students: Vivian Malone and James Hood.
The Report to the American People on Civil Rights was a speech on civil rights, delivered on radio and television by United States President John F. Kennedy from the Oval Office on June 11, 1963, in which he proposed legislation that would later become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Expressing civil rights as a moral issue, Kennedy moved past his previous appeals to legality and asserted that the pursuit of racial equality was a just cause. The address signified a shift in his administration's policy towards strong support of the civil rights movement and played a significant role in shaping his legacy as a proponent of civil rights.
June Shagaloff Alexander was an American civil rights activist.
This is a timeline of the civil rights movement in the United States, a nonviolent mid-20th century freedom movement to gain legal equality and the enforcement of constitutional rights for people of color. The goals of the movement included securing equal protection under the law, ending legally institutionalized racial discrimination, and gaining equal access to public facilities, education reform, fair housing, and the ability to vote.
The Youth March for Integrated Schools in 1958 was the first of two Youth Marches that rallied in Washington, D.C. The second took place the following year. On October 25, 1958, approximately 10,000 young people, mostly of high school to college age, marched to the Lincoln Memorial to promote the desegregation of American public schools. The event was organised by a committee led by A. Philip Randolph, a prominent civil rights activist, who published a statement detailing the purposes and motives for the demonstration. Randolph described the primary purpose as giving 'dramatization to the God-given right of every child, regardless of race or color, religion or national origin or ancestry, to receive an education in the public schools, free from the insult of segregation and discrimination.' He further requested that a delegation led by Harry Belafonte, consisting of five white members and six black members of the Youth March, meet with President Eisenhower to promote the desegregation of schools; however, this delegation was blocked.
The New Year's Day March in Greenville, South Carolina was a 1,000-man march that protested the segregated facilities at the Greenville Municipal Airport, now renamed the Greenville Downtown Airport. The march occurred after Richard Henry and Jackie Robinson were prohibited from using a white-only waiting room at the airport. The march was the first large-scale movement of the civil rights movement in South Carolina and Greenville. The march brought state-wide attention to segregation, and the case Henry v. Greenville Airport Commission (1961) ultimately required the airport's integration of its facilities.
