Editing Emancipation Proclamation (section)

===President John F. Kennedy===
On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy spoke on national television about civil rights. Kennedy, who had been routinely criticized as timid by some civil rights activists, reminded Americans that two black students had been peacefully enrolled in the [[University of Alabama]] with the aid of the [[Army National Guard|National Guard]], despite [[Stand in the Schoolhouse Door|the opposition of Governor George Wallace]].

John Kennedy called it a "moral issue."<ref name=Peniel/> Invoking the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation he said,

{{blockquote|One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes? Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise. The [[Birmingham campaign|events in Birmingham]] and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or State or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.<ref>{{cite web |title=237 – Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights |date=June 11, 1963 |author=John F. Kennedy |url=http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9271&st=&st1=#}}</ref>}}

In the same speech, Kennedy announced he would introduce a comprehensive civil rights bill in the [[United States Congress]], which he did a week later. Kennedy pushed for its passage until he was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Historian [[Peniel E. Joseph]] holds Lyndon Johnson's ability to get that bill, the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]], signed into law on July 2, 1964, to have been aided by "the moral forcefulness of the June 11 speech", which had turned "the narrative of civil rights from a regional issue into a national story promoting racial equality and democratic renewal."<ref name=Peniel>{{cite news |title=Kennedy's Finest Moment |author=Peniel E. Joseph | author-link=Peniel E. Joseph |date=June 10, 2013 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/opinion/kennedys-civil-rights-triumph.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220101/https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/opinion/kennedys-civil-rights-triumph.html |archive-date=2022-01-01 |url-access=limited|newspaper=The New York Times}}{{cbignore}}</ref>