Editing Emancipation Proclamation (section)

===Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.===
[[File:President Barack Obama views the Emancipation Proclamation in the Oval Office 2010-01-18.jpg|thumb|President [[Barack Obama]] views the Emancipation Proclamation in the Oval Office hung above a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. in 2010]]

Dr. [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] made many references to the Emancipation Proclamation during the [[civil rights movement]]. These include an "Emancipation Proclamation Centennial Address" he gave in New York City on September 12, 1962, in which he placed the Proclamation alongside the Declaration of Independence as an "imperishable" contribution to civilization and added, "All tyrants, past, present and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations...." He lamented that despite a history where the United States "proudly professed the basic principles inherent in both documents," it "sadly practiced the antithesis of these principles." He concluded, "There is but one way to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation. That is to make its declarations of freedom real; to reach back to the origins of our nation when our message of equality electrified an unfree world, and reaffirm democracy by deeds as bold and daring as the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nps.gov/anti/historyculture/mlk-ep.htm|title=Dr. Martin Luther King on the Emancipation Proclamation|publisher=National Park Service|author=Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.}}</ref>

King's most famous invocation of the Emancipation Proclamation was in a speech from the steps of the [[Lincoln Memorial]] at the 1963 [[March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom]] (often referred to as the "[[I Have a Dream]]" speech). King began the speech saying "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/i-have-dream|title=I Have A Dream|publisher=The King Center|date=August 28, 1963|author=Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. |access-date=August 29, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140723170458/http://thekingcenter.org/archive/document/i-have-dream|archive-date=July 23, 2014|url-status=dead}}</ref>

====The "Second Emancipation Proclamation"====
{{Main|Second Emancipation Proclamation}}
In the early 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his associates called on President [[John F. Kennedy]] to bypass Southern segregationist opposition in the Congress by issuing an [[executive order]] to put an end to segregation.<ref>[https://www.crmvet.org/info/emancip2.htm Draft of Second Emancipation Proclamation]</ref> This envisioned document was referred to as the "Second Emancipation Proclamation". Kennedy, however, did not issue a second Emancipation Proclamation "and noticeably avoided all centennial celebrations of emancipation." Historian [[David W. Blight]] points out that, although the idea of an executive order to act as a second Emancipation Proclamation "has been virtually forgotten," the manifesto that King and his associates produced calling for an executive order showed his "close reading of American politics" and recalled how moral leadership could have an effect on the American public through an executive order. 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."<ref>Blight, David W. and Allison Scharfstein, "King's Forgotten Manifesto". ''The New York Times'', May 16, 2012.</ref>