Episode 242: Was Abraham Lincoln a Racist?

In a eulogy to Abraham Lincoln delivered on June 1, 1865, Frederick Douglass posed the question “what was Lincoln to the colored people or they to him?” His answer was that Lincoln was “emphatically the black man’s President, the first to show any respect for the rights of a black man, or to acknowledge that he had any rights the white man ought to respect.” With me to discuss his new book The Black Man’s President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality is Michael Burlingame. The Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield, Burlingame is perhaps the foremost living authority on the sixteenth president.