By the time Abraham Lincoln arrived in my home town of Alton, Illinois to wrap up the grueling 1858 Senate debates with Stephen Douglas his position on slavery had become clearer. Alton was a town in the middle of the north-south divide and the slavery debate. Elijah P. Lovejoy, the outspoken abolitionist newspaperman, had been murdered there in 1837 by a racist mob. Like much of Illinois the city harbored outspoken proponents on both sides of the growing conflict.
Fittingly, the last Lincoln-Douglas debate revealed Lincoln’s own middle position: slaves were indeed fully human and thereby had natural rights to so live; slaves were not, however, to be accorded civil rights that would permit them to live in equal citizenship with whites. Lincoln’s driving objective was to save the Union, nothing less and little more.
On this 200th anniversary of his Kentucky birth Lincoln is rightly memorialized across a still-frayed nation that he saved at great cost. His eloquence to this day is awe-inspiring. To stand in the Lincoln Memorial and read his words is to feel the power of his spirit. To walk in New Salem where he spent his early Illinois years is to understand the depth of his roots among common people and common places. Across the Prairie State this good day bells ring in joy and gratitude for his enduring presence and legacy.
The struggle for racial justice, of course, also endures. Lincoln’s middle position on slavery has not been resolved: African Americans have largely won civil rights after a century of struggle on the heels of the Civil War, but the natural rights Lincoln upheld remain elusive.
The institutional and systemic structures of race and racism in America predominate, keeping the African American community at bay and undercutting the aspirations of generations. The grim, contemporary markers of this social construct are everywhere. Poverty. The incarceration of Black men. Education. Job possibilities. Job losses. Rural and urban housing. Business. Civic society. Political life. Economic opportunity. Hard-won civil rights provide a more open pathway to a new future; endemic racial structures, attitudes, and actions block the journey at virtually every turn. The vacuous, emerging notion of a “post-racial” nation is but another roadblock, rooted in a muddled middle way that will not open the road ahead.
Race is at the heart of every issue facing this nation, and engagement in the enduring struggle for racial justice must be foundational to every aspect of civic and political engagement.
The 2050 transition of this nation into a minority-white population will not automatically mark the advent of a new age. The numerically shrinking dominant culture will not readily loosen its grip on political and economic power, and emerging alignments of a collective majority of color will not necessarily be grounded in or driven by a foundational racial analysis that opens the road with African Americans.
Race is the lasting American conundrum. To engage in the struggle for racial justice is the American mandate of human freedom, regardless of ones heritage.
February 12, 2009. A good 200th Lincoln birthday. The day to get off the middle path. And a good day to rededicate and engage fully in the enduring struggle for racial justice and the birthing of freedom.