On New Year’s Day in 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed an audience of more than 7,000 black Americans in Oakland, California; this was an observance of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. His speech highlighted two challenges.
He called for a nationwide boycott of corporations that refused to hire black employees and sent a direct message to President John F. Kennedy to issue an updated Emancipation Proclamation that would end the second-class citizenship experienced by the nation’s black population.
