According to Dr. King in his "I Have a Dream" speech, what is tragic about the Emancipation Proclamation? What connection does he make?

In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. does not actually say that there is anything tragic about the Emancipation Proclamation.  However, we can infer that he does actually think there is something tragic.  The tragic aspect of the Emancipation Proclamation, we can infer, is that it did not actually make African Americans free.

At the beginning of the speech, King mentions the Emancipation Proclamation.  He says that it was a “great beacon of light.”  He says that, for African Americans, it represented “a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”  In other words the Emancipation Proclamation was a great moment in African American history because it represented the end of slavery.  It meant that African Americans would now (ostensibly) be free.

This is what made the Emancipation Proclamation tragic.  It was supposed to make African Americans free but, about 100 years later, “the Negro is still not free.”  King connects the Proclamation to segregation and discrimination.  He says that segregation and discrimination meant that the promise of the Proclamation had not been fulfilled.  It was tragic that Lincoln’s great Proclamation had not ended up doing what it was supposed to do and that, therefore, African Americans were still in a position of subjugation in the United States.