Lincoln junkies, I found a great interview with Henry Louis Gates

[EFerrari]

Watch one of our very best minds and very best story tellers talking about a book he edited on Lincoln, race and slaver. Gates also wanders out into contemporary education, Obama, his own work in tracing ancestors. About 1 hr 15.

About the Program

Author discuses his two new books on race: a comprehesive perspective on Lincoln's attitudes on slavery and race relations; and a look at how 19 prominent Black Americans reclaimed their past, using DNA and archival records to research their ancestry.

About the Author

Henry Louis Gates is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Humanities and Humanities Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of "Colored People, " coeditor with Kwame Anthony Appiah of "Encarta Africana," and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He has received many honors, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal.

http://www.booktv.org/watch.aspx?ProgramId=HI-10221

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Dr. Gates was very entertaining

But I would say that my feelings of Lincoln has been, since I was an adult, was that he was a very complex character, and that included his thoughts on blacks and slavery. I did understand that Lincoln hated slavery from the time that his family failed in KY. I felt that Gates quoting Lincoln's famous quotes on race from the Charleston debate didn't take into account the location of the debate and why he said what he did. I would say that, though he believed in separation of the races, his thoughts towards blacks as individuals was more liberal than the public statement he made in Charleston. That he wanted to ship blacks to colonies is also a desire that was quite prevalent at the time from moderates who opposed slavery but who were uncomfortable with full equality. What made Lincoln great was that he was able to change his mind about such matters.

If one studies other people of the period, you find that Lincoln was, by no means, the most liberal in regards to race, but he was also not the most conservative. He was ahead of general public opinion just enough to lead them towards a grudging acceptance that blacks should be freed and be given the basic rights of all citizens. One note on the mixing of races--when Union soldiers went south and encountered slaves who were obviously of mixed race, or of masters living opening with their black concubines, they were horrified--not at the blacks, but at the whites who perpetrated what they felt were immoral acts. The impression I have gotten reading the diaries and letters from Union soldiers was that they didn't feel the whites had "polluted" their blood by this intermixing, but rather that the whites had exploited the blacks. But they also didn't want mixing of races in their own towns and villages--I got the impression that they feared the taint of immorality that they associated, rightly or wrongly, with blacks. Sadly, these "black laws" remained in effect in Illinois until well into the 20th century.