African Americans and the Executive Power Coursework

African Americans and the Executive Power - Coursework Example However, three times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presidents made executive orders which helped overturn the accepted institution of racism against black Americans. This paper will look at Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 of 1941, and Harry S. Truman's 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 country was torn in a civil 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 effective: the Proclamation stated that slaves in the Confederate Sta tes of America were to be set free, an area over which Lincoln had no practical power at the time. Furthermore, it specifically did not suggest emancipation in the northern states which, ironically, were fighting in order to obtain the freedom of black slaves. Lincoln's aim 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 really 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 we re not really as powerful as they are often thought of – they were merely baby steps along a path to increased civil liberties and diminished discrimination.