Was Abraham Lincoln against segregation?
Lincoln’s “support for segregation” is not exactly what some try to make it out to be. To begin with — Lincoln certainly did NOT think of blacks as ‘less than human’ (more on that below), and it is an absurd distortion of the Emancipation Proclamation to say that it “didn’t free any slaves” or that Lincoln didn’t really care about their being freed. He has left a LONG trail of evidence (writings, speeches and ACTIONS) to the contrary. _________________ Now it is true that Lincoln for most of his political career (though NOT at the end) was a proponent of a particular type of separation — one that involved emancipation and colonization of the slave population, but more as a solution to a difficult problem, to rid the nation of the evil of SLAVERY as well as to give former slaves a chance for a BETTER life. It is misleading to simply call this “segregation” without explanation of his purposes or attitude, or without paying any attention to the context in which he lived and acted. First
