BLACK LIVES CERTAINLY MATTERED TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN

 

Monday, February 15, 2021, is President's Day.  From History.com is this explanation of how this third Monday of February became a federal holiday.  

Speaking of Abraham Lincoln,  have you heard about the San Francisco Unified School District voting to rename Abraham Lincoln High School because, “Lincoln, like the presidents before him and most after, did not show through policy or rhetoric that black lives ever mattered to them outside of human capital and as casualties of wealth building?”   Here is an article in Smithsonian Magazine that sets the record straight.   We only need to visit Gettysburg and to read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to realize that he believed that all men are created equal.  Here are some photos from our visit there back in 2001.  Lincoln's Gettysburg address follows.

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."