What is the Emancipation Proclamation?

My Dungeon Shook, by James Baldwin, was a letter written to his nephew on the hundred-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. In his letter, Baldwin criticizes the persistently poor treatment of Black Americans, even a century after their so-called liberation. 

The Emancipation Proclamation was a document written by Abraham Lincoln and issued on the first of January, 1863. The purpose of the document was to emancipate, or free, all enslaved people in the Confederate South. The Proclamation strengthened the attitudes of the American people that the Civil War was one fought for the right to freedom-- alternately, a war fought for the "right" to own humans as property and a source of labor. Unfortunately, the Proclamation only liberated enslaved people in the Confederate states. Slaves in the border states or those southern states which had been captured by the north were not liberated by the Proclamation. Though the Emancipation Proclamation is a historic document and an important text for human rights scholars, it remains problematic for the fact that it did not liberate all enslaved Americans.