Within the Limits of Our Authority

Everyone knew that President Kennedy would wax poetically at the appropriate juncture in late September about Abraham Lincoln and the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Few could have guessed, however, the enormous political impact that resulted from the President's remarks. Recording his words for usage at the Lincoln Memorial on Sept. 22, the President wonderfully captured Lincoln's signing as "one of the most solemn moments in American history." The meaning could not be clearer; the Emancipation Proclamation symbolizes not an end but a new beginning-even if the populace did not anxiously await details of the "somber story" ("the struggle to convert freedom rhetoric to reality"). Acknowledging the past as "bitter years of humiliation and deprivation" for African-Americans, President Kennedy started to find his voice on civil rights and began to move in a different direction. In his next two paragraphs, the President appropriately expressed his admiration for what one scholar later termed "a grace undeserved" for how "the Negro retained his loyalty to the United States and to democratic institutions, displayed by his valorous conduct in two world wars," and how "the Negro never stopped working for his own salvation."