LERONE BENNETT JR.

Lincoln is a religion in this country. He is a sacred icon. Millions of people make money selling Lincoln. He is an industry.

If Abraham Lincoln had had his way, there would be no Black people in America—None!

An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.

I refuse to play the game of American scholars who only see genocide when it occurs for Europeans. American slavery was just as much a genocide as ever occurred in Nazi Germany.

Historians are responsible not only for the words they write but for the words they don’t write.

Who freed the slaves? To the extent that they were ever u2018freed,' they were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was authored and pressured into existence not by Lincoln but by the great emancipators nobody knows, the abolitionists and congressional leaders who created the climate and generated the pressure that goaded, prodded, drove, forced Lincoln into glory by associating him with a policy that he adamantly opposed for at least fifty-four of his fifty-six years of his life.

Lincoln is theology, not historiology. He is a faith, he is a church, he is a religion, and he has his own priests and acolytes, most of whom have a vested interest in [him] and who are passionately opposed to anybody telling the truth about him.

Historians are responsible not only for the words they write but for the words they don’t write.

I refuse to play the game of American scholars who only see genocide when it occurs for Europeans. American slavery was just as much a genocide as ever occurred in Nazi Germany.

Lincoln is a religion in this country. He is a sacred icon. Millions of people make money selling Lincoln. He is an industry.

If Abraham Lincoln had had his way, there would be no Black people in America—None!

An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.

Who freed the slaves? To the extent that they were ever u2018freed,' they were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was authored and pressured into existence not by Lincoln but by the great emancipators nobody knows, the abolitionists and congressional leaders who created the climate and generated the pressure that goaded, prodded, drove, forced Lincoln into glory by associating him with a policy that he adamantly opposed for at least fifty-four of his fifty-six years of his life.

Lincoln is theology, not historiology. He is a faith, he is a church, he is a religion, and he has his own priests and acolytes, most of whom have a vested interest in [him] and who are passionately opposed to anybody telling the truth about him.