Abe Lincoln, The Great Emanci-who?

Last night’s PBS documentary, “Looking for Lincoln” hosted by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., set out to de-myth-ify the Great Emancipator.
It was an attempt to reconcile the president who signed the proclamation freeing 4 million slaves with the man who also was a white supremacist who reportedly considered sending black slaves back to Africa.
I understand that there remains a generation, mostly of older people, that wants to view Lincoln as an uncomplicated saint, the revered “Father Abraham.”
But the truth is the truth. I love it that he was complicated; that it was history that pushed him forward and not necessarily his heart. What a fascinating character of one of our country’s greatest climactic dramas.


If we judge him by the standards of the 20th or 21st century, we miss how wonderfully nuanced and complicated he was and the ways his complexities played into how he later changed as a person and a president.
People (and politicians are people, too) are imperfect. They don’t change immediately just because they are forced to bow to the needs of the moment. They have to come---as they say in the black church---just as they are.
Most strategists in the civil rights organizations of the 20th century understood that. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which celebrates its 100th birthday today, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, among others, didn’t set out to change the hearts of Americans. Civil rights advocates went for the jugular, America’s laws. They hoped that the hearts would follow.
The great and imperfect black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Lincoln were friends. As the Civil War, and the atrocities it wrought, drew to an end, Douglass saw that Lincoln’s views about race were evolving. In “Looking for Lincoln,” Gates says that the president started to think about slavery, the nation and race in a different way.
But we will never know would have happened had Lincoln not been assassinated. “After a brief period of Reconstruction, the forward movement of black people abruptly stopped,” said Gates, “and for decades we were stuck in a kind of limbo, neither slaves nor fully citizens.”
So, he said, it’s impossible to know how different the country would have been. Would there have been a Jim Crow? A need for organizations like the NAACP? A need for an SCLC, or a King?
The point is that people can change. (See post on ex-Klansman below) Understanding that, it’s our duty to de-myth-ify Lincoln. It gives us hope and reminds us that nothing is static; that as long as we have breath, we have the capacity for growth.
It’s not inconsistent to view Lincoln as both the Great Emancipator and the Reluctant Emancipator. To the contrary. I think we owe it to him and ourselves to accept that a Reluctant Emancipator can still be great one.

What do you think? How do you remember Lincoln?


Source: newsblogs.chicagotribune.com