Lincoln a Racist? What, You’re Kidding me!!

Perhaps I am not aging like a fine wine (nearing 40 in a few weeks) and I am therefore becoming cranky, no stinky.  I am starting to lose patience with certain things and this is one of them, questions like “Was Lincoln a Racist?”

Hello, did he live in the 19th Century!? How could he have not been to some degree racist!? The entire North American Continent was white supremest in some form. Sure, you could have been an abolitionist, but that don’t mean you’d want a black person as a neighbor. It’s the sad fact of the day. Can we move on please? Can we see the progressive thinker that Lincoln was and appreciate him for that. Lincoln was indeed not perfect, no one ever is, but he sure became about as fine a President as we ever had!

Here’s a chunk from the article I am loathing (note, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the author doesn’t take this peace 100% where I thought he was, but it still irritated me.)

One rainy Sunday afternoon in 1960, when I was 10 years old, I picked up a copy of our latest Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and, thumbing through, stumbled upon Jim Bishop’s The Day Lincoln Was Shot, which had been published in 1955 and immediately became a runaway bestseller. It is an hour-by-hour chronicle of the last day of Lincoln’s life. I couldn’t help crying by the end.

But my engagement with the great leader turned to confusion when I was a senior in high school. I stumbled upon an essay that Lerone Bennett Jr. published in Ebony magazine entitled “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” A year later, as an undergraduate at Yale, I read an even more troubling essay that W.E.B. Du Bois had published in The Crisis magazine in May 1922. Du Bois wrote that Lincoln was one huge jumble of contradictions: “he was big enough to be inconsistent—cruel, merciful; peace-loving, a fighter; despising Negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves. He was a man—a big, inconsistent, brave man.”

So many hurt and angry readers flooded Du Bois’ mailbox that he wrote a second essay in the next issue of the magazine, in which he defended his position this way: “I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed. ….”

To prove his point, Du Bois included this quote from a speech Lincoln delivered in 1858 in Charleston, Ill.:

“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Say what? The Lincoln of 1858 was a very long way from becoming the Great Emancipator!

So which was the real Lincoln, the benevolent countenance hanging on the walls of black people’s homes, the Man Who Freed the Slaves, or this man whom Du Bois was quoting, who seemed to hate black people?

Yes, the 1858 speech Lincoln gave in Charleston, Ill. was a just crazy if you’re not cognizant of history and what was going on at the time. But that last comment is new to me. Lincoln hated black people? What? Was he racist or a white supremacist, sure and maybe. I have covered this before. I am just so tired of this hyperbole. Lincoln’s now a hate monger.

Final tidbit from this peace:

In the collective popular imagination, Abraham Lincoln—Father Abraham, the Great Emancipator—is often represented as an island of pure reason in a sea of mid-19th-century racist madness, a beacon of tolerance blessed with a cosmopolitan sensibility above or beyond race, a man whose attitudes about race and slavery transcended his time and place. These contemporary views of Lincoln, however, are largely naive and have almost always been ahistorical.

I can’t recall in recent time, the last 20+ years, where I read a newly published book or was in a classroom where a teacher talked about Lincoln on such simplistic terms as the “Great Emancipator.”

Can we give this a rest!!!