How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that,” President Abraham Lincoln wrote on August 20, 1862. “What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation as a “necessary war measure.” After winning the Civil War, racist Republicans (to distinguish from the less numerous antiracist Republicans) voted to establish the Freedmen’s Bureau, reconstruct the South, and extend civil rights and voting privileges to create a loyal Southern Republican base and secure Black people in the South far away from northern Whites, who “want nothing to do with the negroes,” as Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, one of the laws’ main sponsors, said. The “White man’s party,” as Trumbull identified the Republican Party, grew “tired” of alienating their racist constituents by militarily defending the Negro from the racist terrorists who knocked Republicans out of Southern power by 1877. Republicans left Southern Blacks behind, turning their backs on the “outrages” of Jim Crow for nearly a century. “Expediency on selfish grounds, and not right with reference to the claims of our common humanity, has controlled our action,” Garrison lamented in an address for the centennial of Independence Day, in 1876.