Abraham Lincoln A White Supremacist Analysis

When Abraham Lincoln was elected into office for the first time in 1860, abolitionism was spreading widely around the Northern States, while many white southerners greatly opposed the movement. In Lerone Bennett Jr.’s article titled Lincoln, a White Supremacist (1968), Bennett presented the main idea that Abraham Lincoln was not the Great Emancipator that the world thought he was, but in fact, a white supremacist. The main purpose of the article was to inform the reader of evidence that proved Bennett’s main idea and thesis to be true. Bennett was a male African American scholar, author, editor of Ebony magazine, and social historian who attended segregated schools as a child in Jackson, Mississippi. Although Bennett’s article contains some …show more content…
In his article, Lincoln, a White Supremacist (1968), Bennett argued many times that Lincoln supposedly said something racist, but many of the statements he supposedly said were never proved to be true, or given by an unreliable source, such as an eyewitness. On the other hand, author James D. Lockett, a professor in the Department of History at Stillman College, in his essay Abraham Lincoln and colonization: An Episode That Ends in Tragedy at L 'ile a Vache, Haiti 1863-1864 (1991), provided evidence in a speech by Lincoln in 1852 that showed his white superiority. In the speech, Lincoln admitted that he felt African American people and white people should be separated. He believed that African people should be returned to Africa, not because of slavery, but because white people were too superior to live with inferior black people (Lockett, …show more content…
According to Bennett’s article, Lincoln, a White Supremacist (1968), Lincoln did not have any intention of freeing the slaves; in fact, Lincoln did not even free those enslaved where he held power at all. When Lincoln issued The Emancipation Proclamation, the South had already succeeded from the Union, meaning Lincoln had no power over what the South did or did not do. This is proven by author J.G. Randall, in The Great Emancipator (1957), stating that Lincoln did not even try to free the slaves himself, but Congress were the ones who issued the Emancipation Proclamation. According to the article, Lincoln only signed the document with intentions of winning the Civil War (Randall, 1957). In Abraham Lincoln and Colonization: An Episode That Ends in Tragedy at L 'Ile a Vache, Haiti, 1863-1864 (1991), Lockett wrote that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had strictly a military clause, not humanitarian. While Lockett, Bennett, and Randall all agree that Congress issued the Emancipation Proclamation and forced Lincoln to sign it, Barry Schwartz, sociologist, author of The Limits of Gratitude (2009), quoted social-activist and African-American, Vincent Harding, in There is a River The Slack Struggle for Freedom in America (1981) with his opinion that Lincoln did not free the slaves, nor did Congress, but the slaves freed themselves. According to Harding, the Emancipation