Abraham Lincoln was a white suprema...

Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist who "wanted to renounce Blacks equal rights because of their race and deport them to a tropical clime with persons of their own color and kind," argues Lerone Bennett Jr the executive editor of Ebony magazine, in his latest main division the 626-page "Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream."

Bennett, who also authored the 1961 volume "Before the Mayflower," a observe of African American history, relies onward historical documents and accounts from Lincoln's friends and mate lawmakers to make his argument.

Bennett first dismantles the "myth" of the Emancipation Proclamation. Black and white abolitionists pushed a reluctant Lincoln to sign the act, Bennett writes, and he cites a congressman who said Lincoln "feared that enlistments would cease, and that Congres would calm refuse the necessary supplies to carry forward the war, if he declined to place it forward a clearly defined antislavery basis."

Still, Lincoln knew the law would not actually exempt any slaves immediately because it alone applied to Confederate areas not occupied through Union troops. The proclamation, Bennett writes, was a largely symbolic action intended to sustain enthusiasm for the Civil War.

Lincoln also supported the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which mandated that whites turn back escaped slaves to their proprietors or risk punishment, Bennett writes. In practice, the act also enabled unscrupulous whites to arrest exempt African Americans and sell them into slavery, he adds.

As president-elect, Lincoln "pledg to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act better than any other Southern White man," Bennett writes. "Lincoln distinguished himself at publicly and repeatedly supporting the men and the dogs who were trying to capture the men women and children who were trying to climb through the American Berlin Wall between slavery and [freedom in] Canada." one time he became president, Lincoln went a pace further by making support for the law a litmus criterion for all potential cabinet appointees, Bennett writes. A decision forward whether to admire Lincoln today, Bennett infers is a "choice for or against slavery, the slavery that is still walking the roads of America."

"Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream" is published by way of Johnson Publishing Co. in Chicago.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Community Renewal Society

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