[Peace-discuss] July 4th float -- okay, seriously...

[Ron Szoke]

Excerpt from review of recent Lincoln/racism book:

NY Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 10 · June 11, 2009
Lincoln's Black History

By Garry Wills

Lincoln on Race and Slavery
edited and with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and coedited by 
Donald Yacovone
Princeton University Press, 343 pp., $24.95

Abraham Lincoln was born into a racist family, in a racist region of our country, 
during a racist era of our history. It would have been amazing if he had not 
begun his life as a racist. Piety toward his memory suppressed that fact for 
generations. Most of us wanted Lincoln to be free of racism, and we read the 
evidence to arrive at that conclusion. No one wanted that more than blacks. 
Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor, notes that blacks—from Booker T. 
Washington to Ralph Ellison—did even more than whites to enshrine Lincoln as 
"the American philosopher-king and patron saint of race relations." Gates 
writes of himself (born 1950), "Like most African Americans of my generation, I 
was raised to believe that Lincoln hated slavery because he loved the slaves." 
Black freedmen raised $17,000 for the 1876 statue of Lincoln freeing the slaves 
that stands in Lincoln Park, Washington.
.   .   .

See:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22750

Something honoring Frederick Douglas would seem another possibility in 
harmony with the "legacy of Lincoln" theme.  

-- Ron



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