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I think Lincoln was one of the worst presidents ever. He pissed all over peoples civil rights having people wrongfully jailed without trials or charges etc. Anybody who believes the Civil War was about freeing Slaves needs to do some real research.
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Was Lincoln a racist!!!!!
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Is this the ghost of Nathan Bedford Forrest?Originally posted by Dick Valentine View PostI think Lincoln was one of the worst presidents ever. He pissed all over peoples civil rights having people wrongfully jailed without trials or charges etc. Anybody who believes the Civil War was about freeing Slaves needs to do some real research.
I agree with your last sentence.
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I would say this quote is the basic answer to your question.Originally posted by PBDS View PostWas Lincoln a Racist?
The Great Emancipator was far more complicated than the mythical hero we have come to revere.
I first encountered Abraham Lincoln in Piedmont, W.Va. When I was growing up, his picture was in nearly every black home I can recall, the only white man, other than Jesus himself, to grace black family walls. Lincoln was a hero to us.
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?
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.
When Peter Kunhardt—my co-executive producer in the making of the PBS series “African American Lives”—asked me two years ago to co-produce, write and host a new PBS series on Lincoln, timed to air on the bicentennial of his birth, I realized that making this film would give me, at long last, the chance to ask, “Will the real Abraham Lincoln please stand up?” I also extensively researched and analyzed Lincoln’s writings and speeches for my book, Lincoln on Race and Slavery.
Lincoln’s myth is so capacious that each generation of Americans since his death in 1865 has been able to find its own image reflected in his mirror. Lincoln is America’s man for all seasons, and our man for all reasons. In fact, over and over again through the past century and a half, we Americans have reinvented Abraham Lincoln in order to reinvent ourselves. The most recent example, of course, is captured in the journey of our 44th president, Barack Obama, who launched his presidential campaign in Lincoln’s hometown, Springfield, Ill., cited Lincoln’s oratory repeatedly throughout his campaign, retraced his train route to Washington from Philadelphia and even used Lincoln’s Bible for his swearing-in ceremony.
"Suppose it is true that the Negro is inferior to the White, in the gifts of nature; is it not the exact reverse (of) justice that the White should, for that reason, take any part of the little that has been given him?" - Abraham Lincoln
Also you shouldn't simply ask "Was he a racist or was he not a racist". Very few people then thought as we do now. Most people were racist back then by modern standards; some were just worse than others. Lincoln was farely progressive for his time.Last edited by res; 02-11-2009, 01:32 AM.
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America is kinda like Mayweather, in some regards.
We can ADAPT.
"But Mayweather is a *****.."
Nope. He can still wake up, and take that P4P crown off you.
And when I say YOU, I mean YOU.
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Originally posted by Mizzou View PostLincoln's main goal was to preserve the Union. Freeing the slaves was a step he took to achieve that. For his time period I wouldn't call him a racist.As a person with a B.S. Degree in History and a PhD in Enlish, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS documentary "Looking for Lincoln" violates some basic "Standards of History." Like as mentioned, putting the historical figure in the context of their time and not in anyone else's century.Originally posted by Eman View Postby todays standards and views he would have been considered a racist but in his time he wouldnt have been considered one
Also another violation of the "Standards of History" is the handling of the evidence. Model Historians use the whole evidence and can't be selective. The author clearly nitpicks evidence to support his case such as that Lincoln seemed to used the "N-word" 3 times.
The third violation is the lack of toleration meaning that the historian did not suspend judgement in his findings and clearly was portraying Lincoln as a racist. Good Historians have to be able to "step into the other person's shoe."
Instead of examining the whole evidence of Lincoln's life and actions, the focus was to smear the reputation of one of the most influential presidents in history. I question the motives of this historian and PBS.
PBS, has been liberal leaning for a long time. In my own opinion, I think the documentary is an attack on the Republican Party in order to completely disassociate the black community from the GOP. These revisionit historians have been already successful in protraying the GOP as the racist party. Now they want to destroy it by attacking it's greatest president.
Actions speak louder than words. Lincoln freed the slaves and his party created the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. No one can take that away from Lincoln.
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