FEBRUARY 12, 1809 & 1909: LINCOLN'S BIRTHDAY
Note: This is a reprint of an essay I wrote on February 12 a year ago.
Caution: This essay contains descriptions of racial violence, as does much of American history.
Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky on February 12, 1809. In the century after his 1865 assassination, every school child could recite his birth date, and that of George Washington on February 22. Passage of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act in 1967 created Presidents Day on the third Monday in February, but its lack of an apostrophe before or after the plural s caused confusion. Which president/s? Whose birthday/s? Attention shifted to our Founding Father. Alexandria, Virginia, where he was born in 1732, hosts a parade and nearby Mount Vernon serves cake.
Lincoln’s February birth date was one reason Black history is celebrated this month. The Great Emancipator was revered by African Americans. Republican politicians appealed to Black citizens to support “the party of Lincoln.” Where they could safely vote, the majority did, until the New Deal. On its centennial, on February 12, 1909, there were nationwide commemorations. One of them was a gathering in New York City, the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Lincoln’s vision of a post-Civil War America was undercut by deeply rooted racism and the intransigence of Southern white elites. Those attitudes undermined constitutional amendments, civil rights laws and enforcement by federal troops. Instead, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws and widespread racial violence upheld the white privilege of even the poorest whites.
Racism was not regional. The Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, related to public transportation, institutionalized racial segregation and sanctioned the concept of “separate but equal.” Holding that the Fourteenth Amendment “could not have been intended to . . . enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or the commingling of the two races,” the 8-1 majority gave constitutional cover to American apartheid. Only Justice John Marshall Harlan, “The Great Dissenter,” whose family had been enslavers in Kentucky, objected: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”
Because it had been illegal to educate enslaved workers, at the end of the Civil War the vast majority were illiterate. Many would never escape a cycle of sharecropping and subsistence living enforced by random terrorism. Racial stereotypes depicted Black men as shiftless wastrels or sexual predators; Black women were mammies or whores.
By the era of Plessy, Black leaders split over how to survive and thrive. Booker T. Washington, the “Wizard of Tuskegee,” proposed training workers for the jobs they could get, as farmers, carpenters, cooks, housekeepers, nurses or teachers. “We shall not agitate for political or social equality,” he declared in 1895.
Whites saw Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” as admirable and acceptable. High achieving African Americans saw it as accommodating and submissive. These reformers would resist racism more aggressively. Their self-appointed spokesperson was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the first Black scholar to earn a PhD. His 1895 Harvard dissertation was about the slave trade.
The two sides fought first over whether the curriculum in segregated high schools should be vocational or academic. Du Bois’s adherents, many of them college graduates, whom he called the “talented tenth [percent],” wanted schools to offer Latin, literature, history, languages, math and science. Washington pushed back, using his political influence with those white leaders who appointed school boards and controlled patronage jobs.
In 1905, Du Bois, then a professor at Atlanta University (later Morehouse), and William Monroe Trotter, publisher of the Boston Guardian, convened a meeting of Black leaders who opposed accommodation. Twenty-nine men from fourteen states met on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The Niagara Movement issued a Declaration of Principles. “We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty.”
Reminiscent of debates within the abolitionist movement, DuBois and Trotter disagreed over including women. Du Bois prevailed, women joined, and Trotter left. Washington’s opposition made fundraising a challenge. The group floundered.
Then, in 1908, a deadly race tore through Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln had established his law practice, started a family, run for Congress and was buried. The immediate cause of the August 14 uprising was the arrest of George Richardson, charged with raping a white woman. He shared a cell with Joe James, accused of murdering a white man. A mob surrounded the county jail, demanding a hanging. Setting off a false fire alarm, the sheriff distracted the vigilantes. In the chaos, he moved the prisoners to Peoria.
His accomplice was Harry Loper, who owned a restaurant and one of the few cars in town. When the throng discovered the ruse, they burned Loper’s restaurant. Shouting “curse the day Lincoln freed the N----rs,” the swarm tried to burn the president’s former home. The riot resulted in the lynching of two innocent Black men, at least eight other deaths, seventy injuries, the destruction of fifty Black-owned homes and thirty-five businesses, three of them owned by white sympathizers, including a Jewish pawn shop, and the displacement of hundreds of Black families, who were refused asylum in nearby towns.
Ordered not to shoot into the mob, 3700 state militia were outnumbered and overwhelmed. An estimated 5000 white men and women participated in two days of violence: 200 were arrested and 149 were indicted for murder, attempted murder, assault, arson, burglary, malicious mischief or rioting. Mob leader Kate Howard, a brothel owner, known as “Springfield’s Joan of Arc,” took arsenic when she was arrested. Other rioters boastfully confessed their actions but only one man was tried. Abraham Raymer, a twenty-year-old Russian Jewish vegetable peddler, denied stabbing and lynching eighty-year-old William Donnegan, a prosperous Black cobbler. Raymer was acquitted because of a coerced confession.
The deeper cause of the violence was an incendiary intersection of racial hatred, xenophobia, economic insecurity and political corruption, fueled by alcohol. Springfield was a railroad and mining hub recovering from the economic Panic of 1907 and one of only two “wet towns” in the county. It had 200 saloons; the six serving Black patrons were destroyed. Its five percent Black population was being replaced by Eastern European immigrants. To lower wages and prevent unionizing, employers pitted them against each other.
No matter how poor, “native” whites and new immigrants felt superior to African Americans and resented their hard-earned advances. Springfield was not alone. In 1908 there were eighty-six non-judicial lynchings of African Americans in the United States. After the riot, 10,000 tourists flocked to town, purchasing postcards of the destruction.
Eventually, the cases of the two men originally arrested were heard. Richardson, the accused rapist, who had witnesses to his alibi, was released only after his accuser recanted. There was no restitution. He remained in Springfield, working as a janitor. His obituary did not mention the riot. Joe James, age seventeen, accused of premeditated murder, was convicted, despite contradictory evidence. Too young for the death penalty in Illinois, he was nonetheless hanged. It took eleven minutes for him to die.
On February 12, 1909, Springfield celebrated the centenary of Lincoln’s birth with a pricey, whites-only, black-tie dinner. On the same day, a mixed raced group of progressives in New York City issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice, in reaction to the riot in Lincoln’s hometown. Among the sixty organizers of what became the NAACP were muckrakers, suffragists, labor organizers, social workers, scholars, philanthropists, reformers, Jews and Gentiles. Mary White Ovington, born three days after Lincoln’s assassination, and Oswald Garrison Villard were descendants of white abolitionists.
Among the seven Black founders was attorney Archibald Grimke, the nephew of famed abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke. The sisters had left their enormously wealthy, South Carolina plantation family in the 1830s, to become outspoken critics of slavery. They did not know until after Emancipation that their older brother Henry, a notoriously cruel enslaver, had fathered three sons with his Black concubine, Nancy Weston. On his death bed, Henry willed her and their children to his oldest legitimate son, who treated them harshly. After the war, their aunts found them, funded their educations, but did not comfortably embrace the young men.
There is not an accurate count of white female NAACP founders, but three “great race women” participated. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell and Mary Burnett Talbert. Wells was an anti-lynching crusader. In 1892, she published Southern Horrors, documenting that lynchings were prompted by economic envy disguised as trumped-up charges of sexual assault.
Terrell was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896. “Lifting As We Climb,” the NACW sought to end lynching, discrimination, disenfranchisement and convict leasing. Both Wells and Terrell integrated the 1913 march for a woman suffrage amendment.
Like Terrell, Talbert was an Oberlin graduate. As principal of Little Rock’s Union high school, she was the highest ranked woman in Arkansas. After marrying, she moved to Buffalo and helped launch the Niagara Movement. As NAACP’s vice president, she directed its Anti-Lynching Campaign in the 1920s.
Wells, Terrell & Talbert
The NAACP aspired to secure the rights promised by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments: equal protection of the law and voting rights. Initially directed by a white board, it established offices in New York City. After every violent death, it hung a black banner, “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.” Du Bois was the only African American among its original staff, as director of publications and research. He edited The Crisis, “a record of the darker races,” from 1910-1934. It covered writers and artists, included children’s pages, and featured photographs of Black celebrities. It also published statistics about lynchings.
The NAACP grew through local branches, even in states where membership was illegal. It lobbied Congress for anti-lynching legislation and established the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1935. Led by Charles Houston, dean of Howard University Law School, and his protégé Thurgood Marshall, LDF would challenge the doctrine of separate but equal and eventually overturn Plessy.
In 1920, James Weldon Johnson became the NAACP’s executive director. A writer and poet, he was the first Black professor hired by NYU in 1917. Today Johnson is also remembered for writing the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice,” known as the Black national anthem. His brother, composer John Rosamond Johnson, wrote the music.
Lift every voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place For which our fathers died.
We have come, over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
'Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet, stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.
PHOTO CREDITS:
Springfield riot ruins: www.naacp.org/springfield-branch; Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954), Mary Burnett Talbert (1866-1923): public domain;lynching banner: www.naacp.org/history
SOURCES:
Uniform Monday Holiday Act, https://uslaw.link/citation/us-law/public/90/363
Roberta Senechal de la Roche, In Lincoln’s Shadow: The 1908 Race Riot in Springfield, Illinois (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), https://www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/163us537
Derrick P. Alridge, “Atlanta Compromise Speech,” https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archeology/atlanta-compromise-speech/
“Niagara Movement,” https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/niagara-movement
https://trotter.umich.edu/article/toimeline-willism-monroe-trotters-life
https://www.britannica.com/biography/mary-white-ovington
Kerri K. Greenidge, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright, 2022).
Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (Amistad, 2008).
Alison M. Parker, Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
Lillian S. Williams, “Talbert, Mary Morris Burnett,” in Black Women in America, vol 2., Darlene Clark Hine et al, eds., (1993).