John Wilkes Booth Quotes
Lincoln’s talking nigger citizenship!
John Wilkes Booth, 1838-1865, Actor and assassin, Comment to a friend after hearing Abraham Lincoln’s Speech, 1865
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
After attending a Lincoln speech, Booth said to Lewis Powell, one of his band of conspirators, “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”
The first sentence is inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC. The last two sentences are rarely quoted.
This quotation is very interesting historically. Despite the fact that Washington DC was a thoroughly racially segregated city, and the Southern racists controlled much of Congress, Blacks as well as whites were welcome in the Congressional galleries, and they attended many debates. Slavery and equality were not just debated in the 1850s but the issue was in constant friction from the earliest Congress.
When the slaves were emancipated, they were free but they were no yet citizens with civil and political rights either. They had no land or other property and racial discrimination in the ex-slave states was vicious and rampant.
The Mystery was for many years the only Black Newspaper in America.
Freedom Rides were interracial groups of Civil Rights advocates who boarded public interstate busses in Washington and rode South through some of the most segregated communities in the country. As the bus stopped at the segregated rest stops, the Black Freedom Riders would use the “white” waiting rooms, toilets, and other facilities which was against the local custom and law. Racist segregationists often brutalized and assaulted the Freedom riders whose leaders demanded Federal Protection. The Attorney General and others were trying to get the local politicians and law enforcement officials to protect the Freedom Riders, but often these were the worst of the racist segregationists. Kennedy thought if he could have a “cooling off period” for a few days, he could persuade the locals to protect the Freedom Riders from the mobs with the threat of sending Federal Marshalls or troops for the protection. So he asked Farmer and other Freedom Ride organizers to stop the Freedom Rides for a few days. This was Farmer’s famous response. The Freedom Rides continued and forced the Federal Government to respond on a timetable they did not prefer.
Note that he referred to the “martyred President” as if Lincoln had recently been assassinated. It was actually 33 years after, and many of his audience had lived through what for most was their greatest national trauma. Springfield was the hometown of Lincoln and many in the audience had served under Lincoln in the Union Army. At that time, a statement like this praising Blacks was hated in the South, and unusual even in the North. However, politically the Solid South then always voted for the Democrats, so he and his party would never win any Southern States anyway, but the KKK was active in Illinois and many other Northern States. Adjacent Indiana was the headquarters of the KKK. There was much racism in the North so this speech was quite courageous. Republican Presidents Hayes, McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt made significant inroads in the racial problem and brought Blacks into Federal jobs. The progress, however, was totally undone by Woodrow Wilson who fired most Blacks who had gotten Federal jobs. Wilson needed the Southern legislators which was a major component of his party. He also came from New Jersey which had a strong KKK element who pressured him. Jim Crowe, the KKK and racism increased and the Republican Presidents thereafter did little for Civil rights. The great progress was made by Democratic Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Truman, and Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party replaced the Republicans as the Civil Rights party, and the Southern Democratic politicians switched to the Republican Party ending its traditional leadership in race relations
John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. A member of the prominent 19th-century Booth theatrical family from Maryland, he was a noted actor who was also a Confederate sympathizer; denouncing President Lincoln, he lamented the recent abolition of slavery in the United States.
