Press Release, Statement Calling for Executive Order Declaring Segregation Illegal
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: June 5, 1961
Location: New York, N.Y.
Genre: Press Release
Topic: Freedom Rides
Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views
Nonviolence
Details
At the Sheraton-Atlantic Hotel in New York, King urges President Kennedy to sign a second Emancipation Proclamation “declaring all forms of racial segregation illegal.”1 The order is needed, King affirms, because “the nation has moved all too slowly toward the goal of justice and equality for all of its citizens.”
There is a mighty stirring in this land. The courageous young men and women who are participating in the sit-ins at lunch counters and freedom riders on buses are making it palpably clear that segregation must end and that it must end soon.2 They are no longer willing to adjust to meaningless delays and a crippling gradualism. They know that the nation has moved all too slowly toward the goal of justice and equality for all of its citizens. The moods and the actions of these determined youth reveal that the South cannot maintain segregation devoid of chaos and social stagnation.
The time has now come for the President of the United States to issue a firm executive order declaring all forms of racial segregation illegal.3 This would be a second emancipation proclamation. While such an executive order would be rather far-reaching it would not be too much to ask, since it would be falling almost one hundred years after the first emancipation proclamation. Such a creative and forthright move on the part of the President would serve as a great beacon light of hope to millions of disinherited people and would convince people all over the world that we are dead serious in our commitment to the democratic ideal. Just as Abraham Lincoln had the vision to see almost one hundred years ago that this nation could not exist half slave and half free, the present administration must have the insight to see that today the nation cannot exist half segregated and half integrated.4
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There is a strange and tortuous logic being eloquently expressed in editorials of great newspapers and decisions of Federal judges.5 It is a reasoning that condemns the robbed as well as the robbers. It is a reasoning that equates the peaceful, nonviolent, {WITH THE} hateful mobs seeking to defy the law of the land. This strange logic is further expressed in the tendency which is so prevalent to refer to the recent violence in Alabama as a race riot. This type of thinking fails to see that a riot is when two conflicting groups are engaged in mutual violence. The freedom riders and the Negroes have not engaged in one act of retaliatory violence. So what happened in Alabama was mob actions and not a race riot.
1. “President Urged to End Race Laws,” New York Times, 6 June 1961. In a speech in Chattanooga in December 1960, King began advocating for a second Emancipation Proclamation (see note 18, King, “The Negro and the American Dream,” Emancipation Day Address Delivered at Municipal Auditorium, 2 January 1961, p. 118 in this volume). The first Emancipation Proclamation was issued by Abraham Lincoln on 1 January 1863.
2. By the end of May, forty-four freedom riders, mostly students, had traveled to Jackson, Mississippi. They were arrested for breach of peace, disobeying an officer, and breaking local segregation laws that had already been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court 1960 ruling in Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (Cliff Sessions, “27 Bus Riders Arrested on Entry in Mississippi,” Washington Post, 25 May 1961; “17 More Freedom Riders Are Jailed in Mississippi,” New York Times, 29 May 1961).
3. In an article for The Nation, King commented that “the power inherent in Executive orders has never been exploited; its use in recent years has been microscopic in scope and timid in conception” (King, “Equality Now,” 4 February 1961, p. 145 in this volume).
4. King refers to Lincoln’s “A House Divided” speech, delivered on 16 June 1858 in Springfield, Illinois (The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, ed. Roy P. Basler [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953], p. 461).
5. On 2 June, federal district judge Frank M. Johnson issued a temporary injunction preventing the Ku Klux Klan from threatening interstate passengers, and a temporary restraining order prohibiting civil rights organizations, such as SCLC and CORE, from sponsoring the Freedom Rides in Alabama. Although sponsorship of the protests “is agitation within the law of the United States,” Johnson wrote, it “is agitation that constitutes an undue burden upon the free flow of interstate commerce” (United States v. U.S. Klans, Knights of Ku Klux Klan, Inc., 194 F. Supp. 897 [M.D. Ala. 1961]).
Source: MCMLK-RWWL, Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library Archives and Special Collections, Atlanta, Ga.