Abraham Lincoln, African Americans,
and the Pursuit of Racial Equality
by Michael
Burlingame
Frederick Douglass called the martyred president "emphatically the
black man's president” as well as “the first who rose above the prejudice of
his times and country.” This narrative history of Lincoln’s personal
interchange with Black people over the course his career reveals a side of the
sixteenth president that, until now, has not been fully explored or understood.
In a little-noted eulogy delivered shortly after Lincoln's assassination,
Frederick Douglass called the martyred president "emphatically the black
man's president," the "first to show any respect for their rights as
men.” To justify that description,
Douglass pointed not just to Lincoln's official acts and utterances, like the
Emancipation Proclamation or the Second Inaugural Address, but also to the
president’s own personal experiences with Black people. Referring to one of his White House visits, Douglass said:
"In daring to invite a Negro to an audience at the White House, Mr.
Lincoln was saying to the country: I am President of the black people as well
as the white, and I mean to respect their rights and feelings as men and as
citizens.”
But Lincoln’s description as “emphatically the black man’s president”
rests on more than his relationship with Douglass or on his official words and
deeds. Lincoln interacted with many other African Americans during his
presidency His unfailing cordiality to
them, his willingness to meet with them in the White House, to honor their
requests, to invite them to consult on public policy, to treat them with
respect whether they were kitchen servants or leaders of the Black community,
to invite them to attend receptions, to sing and pray with them in their
neighborhoods—all those manifestations of an egalitarian spirit fully justified
the tributes paid to him by Frederick Douglass and other African Americans like
Sojourner Truth, who said: "I never was treated by any one with more
kindness and cordiality than were shown to me by that great and good man,
Abraham Lincoln.”
Historian David S. Reynolds observed recently that only by examining
Lincoln’s “personal interchange with Black people do we see the complete
falsity of the charges of innate racism that some have leveled against him over
the years.”
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