Feb 12

My admiration for Abraham Lincoln is well known.  I make no secret of it.  Today is his birthday, 1809.  (For class today, I will wear one of my Lincoln tie and a pair of my Lincoln socks.  Students won't see my Lincoln tee shirt or briefs.  I don't have a Lincoln beard!)  It, individually, used to be celebrated.  To substitute it, and Washington's Feb 22 birthday, with a generic "Presidents Day" is, to me, ridiculous.  Millard Fillmore......who?  Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan?

I won't give one of my lectures on Lincoln, but will forward what W.E.B. DuBois, one of the founders of the NAACP, wrote about him in 1922.  Of all the lessons we can learn about and from Lincoln, I think this is one of the greatest.

“Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the greatest figure of the nineteenth century. Certainly of the five masters,--Napoleon, Bismarck, Victoria, Browning and Lincoln, Lincoln is to me the most human and lovable. And I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed. The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.”

Happy Lincoln's Birthday!