Word: lincoln
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...connected idea attracts us to Lincoln: as we remake ourselves, we remake our surroundings. He didn't just talk or write or theorize. He split rail, fired rifles, tried cases and pushed for new bridges and roads and waterways. In his sheer energy, Lincoln captures a hunger in us to build and to innovate. It's a quality that can get us in trouble; we may be blind at times to the costs of progress. And yet, when I travel to other parts of the world, I remember that it is precisely such energy that sets us apart, a sense...
Still, as I look at his picture, it is the man and not the icon that speaks to me. I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice. Scholars tell us too that Lincoln wasn't immune from political considerations and that his temperament could be indecisive and morose...
...weeks ago, I spoke at the commencement at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. I stood in view of the spot where Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held one of their famous debates during their race for the U.S. Senate. The only way for Lincoln to get onto the podium was to squeeze his lanky frame through a window, whereupon he reportedly remarked, "At last I have finally gone through college." Waiting for the soon-to-be graduates to assemble, I thought that even as Lincoln lost that Senate race, his arguments that day would result, centuries later, in my occupying...
...giants could have ignored each other or become enemies. So how is it that Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the most famous black man of the 19th century, became friends? And what difference did their friendship make...
...answer is that Lincoln recognized early on that he needed the ex-slave to help him destroy the Confederacy and preserve the Union. And so at a time when most whites would not let a black man cross their threshold, the President met Douglass three times at the White House and found a startling way to enlist him in his cause. What was in it for Douglass, who at the midpoint of the Civil War came to believe that Lincoln was a racist who argued that blacks and whites should be kept apart? Douglass came to realize that Lincoln...