[The Federalist] Why Abraham Lincoln Still Towers Over His Critics

another bull shitte piece of right-leaning Nazi-like propaganda from the totalitarian source everyone here loves to hate.

Why Abraham Lincoln Still Towers Over His Critics

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/12/why-abraham-lincoln-still-towers-over-his-critics/

excerpt:

How Leaders Handled Racism Then
Another high-profile speaker was Robert Russa Moton, president of Tuskegee University. Shamefully, his audience was segregated, with African-Americans shunted off to the side. Equally disgraceful was the Lincoln Memorial Commission’s censorship of his remarks.

In his original draft, Moton warned “that this memorial which we erect in token of our veneration is but a hollow mockery, a symbol of hypocrisy, unless we together can make it real in our national life, in every state, and in every section, for the things which he died.” Moton thereby challenged the nation to live up to Lincoln’s ideals lest the monument become a hollow vessel devoid of transcendent meaning.

Such brazen rhetoric was too much for Taft, especially for the dedication of a memorial in what was largely still a southern city. Moton had little choice but to comply, and the speech was revised for him. Gone were the condemnations of racism and its attendant poverty and hopelessness, replaced by praise for Lincoln as the healer and uniter and for the South and its role in sectional healing. One can scarcely imagine the gall Moton must have felt in having to praise a region then steeped in Jim Crow laws.

Why did Moton cave into such humiliating demands? He, like Lincoln, had to navigate through a perilous era. For African Americans, particularly in the South, the 1920s were the proverbial worst of times. One year before the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated was the infamous Tulsa race riot. Lynchings were still occurring throughout the region, and the majority of African Americans were relegated to sharecropping and menial jobs while also being disfranchised from the political system.

Yet Moton did not give in to despondency, instead declaring that black men and women were “proud of their American citizenship.” He movingly quoted from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural “Let us, therefore, with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right: as God gives us to see the right” — then added “let us strive on to finish the work which he so nobly began, to make America the symbol for equal justice and equal opportunity to despair.”

In other words, Moton did not give up on Lincoln or his memorial. As Martin Luther King Jr. would do a half-century later, he beseeched Americans to live up to the ideals and aspirations of the 16th president. The memorial could thus serve as inspiration to exhort white Americans to follow, in Lincoln’s famous words, “the better angels of our nature.”
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