African Americans and the Executive Power Coursework

African Americans and the Executive Power - Coursework ExampleHowever, terzetto times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presidents made executive locates which helped overturn the accepted design of racism against black Americans. This paper will look at Abraham Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Franklin Delano Roosevelts Executive Order 8802 of 1941, and Harry S. Trumans Executive Order 9981 of 1946, to show that these three situations were ones in which the executive power was used to create the less racist society of modern America. In 1863, the United States was in a horrific racial situation it was the year of the New York Draft Riots, in which countless black people were murdered and lynched on the streets of the city on a larger scale, the ground was torn in a genteel war over the fate of black slaves. It was into this context that President Lincoln introduced the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, an executive order which was more symbolic than effecti ve the Proclamation stated that slaves in the Confederate States of America were to be set free, an area over which Lincoln had no serviceable power at the time. Furthermore, it specifically did non suggest emancipation in the northern states which, ironically, were fighting in order to obtain the freedom of black slaves. Lincolns steer was to starve the southern forces of free labor by popularizing this message to encourage black slaves to escape and be granted their freedom in the north it was a purely tactical maneuver, and in truth not much more than a stepping stone on the way to true abolition, which was achieved with the Thirteenth Amendment at the end of 1865. Sadly, it was not until this point that the fifty thousand or so remaining slaves in the northern states were emancipated. Nonetheless, the Emancipation Proclamation remains an important milestone for black civil rights, and one of the few which was granted exclusively by the President through an executive order. In fact, the three Executive Orders discussed in this paper were not really as powerful as they are often thought of they were merely baby steps along a path to increased civil liberties and low discrimination.