The NYS Museum, in partnership with the State Library and State Archives, will celebrate Black History Month with a special exhibition, The Moral Arc Toward Freedom: Lincoln, King, and the Emancipation Proclamation. This exhibition opens Tuesday, February 13 and runs through Sunday, March 3. It focuses on the historical connections between President Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Emancipation Proclamation.
This exhibition includes two historic documents: President Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and select pages from a speech Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered in New York City in September 1962 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. This draft of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in the collections of the New York State Library is written in Lincoln’s own hand. The annotated script of Dr. King's speech is in the collections of the New York State Archives.
More to Explore at the NYS Library
During February, on the 7th floor of the New York State Library, a special exhibit, Understanding Lincoln through Primary Source Documents, will feature cases with selected books and primary source documents from the Library’s collections on President Abraham Lincoln and the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Topics of the exhibit will include Lincoln’s life, the writing of the proclamation, how the State Library came to have the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and Lincoln’s death.