History backs Lincoln’s role as pioneer for racial equality

Nearly 160 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, his place in history as “The Great Emancipator” of Black slaves is firmly established. Nevertheless, a defense of Lincoln is a required response to the fallacy-ridden “1619 Project” in which The New York Times seeks to rewrite American history through a racist lens.

In “1620: A Critical Response” to the “1619 Project,” Peter W. Wood performs documented research that “1619” neglected by citing no sources and providing no footnotes or bibliography. Readers of “1619,” including school children who find its “curriculum” woven into their classrooms, are expected to accept this wholly-biased account on faith.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, lead author of “1619,” claims Lincoln was a racist. She arrives here, Wood writes, not through intense scholarly research but because in high school she became enamored with the writing of Lerone Bennett Jr., an editor at Ebony magazine who wrote an article titled, “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?”

Her evidence is Lincoln’s August 1862 meeting with five Black leaders in which he discussed shipping freed slaves out of the country.

“Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence,” Lincoln said. This single episode, we are to believe, supersedes all other evidence from Lincoln’s life.

Lincoln lived at a time when slavery was a historic norm but clearly contradicted the principles defined in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.”

Lincoln’s priorities were complicated by the times in which he lived. His chief concern was to preserve the Union. To do that, he famously told Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune that he would be willing to free all slaves, some slaves or no slaves.

The full article is available in our e-Edition. Click here to subscribe.