ON May 17, 1962, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an extraordinary manifesto to the White House. Constructed as both a moral appeal and a legal brief, the 64-page document called on President John F. Kennedy to issue a “second Emancipation Proclamation,” an executive order outlawing segregation — just as President Abraham Lincoln had done with slavery a century earlier.
The civil rights era, like the Civil War, produced a wealth of great writing. But unlike King’s “I Have a Dream” speech or his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” which we remember for their visionary rhetoric, this extraordinary document has been virtually forgotten.
And yet the manifesto is a wonderful example of King’s close reading of American politics, as well as his understanding of the role that moral leadership, in this case through an executive order, could have on the American public. It’s a lesson we should take to heart today, when a deadlocked Congress stands in contrast to a president willing to take a bold stand on same-sex marriage. Americans have rarely explicitly voted for equality; history, through institutions and a few courageous leaders, has enacted it.
During the 1960 presidential debates, Kennedy had suggested that he would address equality of opportunity by the “stroke of the president’s pen.” Yet when civil rights activists pressed him on this promise, his political ties to white Southern Democrats proved to be a formidable obstacle. Indeed, it was the hold of Southern segregationists on Congressional committee chairmanships that prompted civil rights leaders to put their hope in an executive order rather than legislation.Continue reading the main story
King infused his executive-order campaign with the gravitas of the centennial of the Civil War and emancipation. “What we need to do,” he told Clarence B. Jones, his trusted legal adviser, “is to get Kennedy to issue a second Emancipation Proclamation on the anniversary of the first one.”
On June 6, 1961, at a news conference in New York, King explicitly invoked the memory of the Civil War: “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.”
Mr. Jones assembled a team of legal scholars to compose a proposal, while King publicized his idea in churches, in newspapers and in the White House itself. During an intimate tour with the president through the Lincoln Sitting Room in October 1961, King paused to ask Kennedy for a proclamation “outlawing segregation.” Kennedy said he would consider it, and asked King to submit a draft of the proposal.
Two months later, King sent Kennedy a personal telegram from the midst of his protest campaign in Albany, Ga., again urging the president to prepare a “second Emancipation Proclamation.” The New York Times and other papers covered this developing story, even debating the constitutionality of such an executive order outside of wartime.
King and his lawyers, who now included members of the Gandhi Society for Human Rights, scheduled the debut of the document for May 17, 1962, the eighth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
The preamble, most likely written by King himself, referenced numerous cultural precedents of American freedom, including Bruce Catton’s popular Civil War books, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” the Gettysburg Address, Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and Kennedy’s own “Strategy for Peace.”
Citing hundreds of legal precedents, especially Harry S. Truman’s military desegregation order in 1948, as well as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and, of course, the Emancipation Proclamation, the document demanded that the powers of the executive office be used to eliminate all forms of discrimination.
“The time has come, Mr. President,” it declared, “to let those dawn-like rays of freedom, first glimpsed in 1863, fill the heavens with the noonday sunlight of complete human dignity.”
Kennedy balked, however, at the opportunity to issue the second Emancipation Proclamation and noticeably avoided all centennial celebrations of emancipation. While he did issue an executive order banning discrimination in federal housing in November 1962, and introduced an omnibus civil rights bill a few months later, the demands of the second Emancipation Proclamation were not fulfilled until President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Though King’s manifesto failed 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.
As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of the war, the legacy of the second Emancipation Proclamation lives on in a million conversations about the lasting meaning of the Civil War.
It also lives in our political agony over narrowly partisan doctrines of states’ rights and individualism, and over whether we are still a “house divided,” half-free or half-equal: in the right to vote, to marry the person we choose, to be educated, to have health insurance, to imagine immigrants’ dreams — to assume we have a secure and fair place in the modern social contract, which Lincoln introduced with those words: “then, thenceforward, and forever free.”Continue reading the main story