Part 1 Race and the American Presidency: From Abraham to Joseph | New York Carib News – NYCaribNews

Joseph Biden has been elected the 46th President of the United States. It has been traditional for presidential succession to proceed peacefully for hundreds of years except the 45th to the 46th President.

Historians have judged American presidents and unquestionably Donald Trump will be judged as one of the worst in American history.

There is some consensus on who are the great American presidents. George Washington is often mentioned not only because he won the Independence War but for the fact that he stepped down after serving two terms and returned as a private citizen to his home in Mount Vernon. Invariably, Abraham Lincoln is mentioned as he assumed the presidency at the height of the Civil War. In that same vein, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his herculean effort to bring back the economy from the devastation of the economic depression. Lyndon Johnson also was at the helm when Civil Rights legislation and the Great Society Programs were passed even though Johnson was less than truthful in his pursuit of the Viet Nam War.

CNN has been running a new documentary on Lincoln and it deviates from the romantic notion of Lincoln and emancipation. Lincoln like most white Americans of his generation wrestled continuously on the question of slavery.

Lincoln was bothered by the cruelty of slavery. Nonetheless, in his early career as a public figure never was an abolitionist. In his epic debates for the Senate race in Illinois, what became known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas accused Lincoln of being in favor of emancipation and giving black folks the same rights as white Americans.

Douglas being engaged in race-baiting was not entirely honest. Lincoln was not in favor of expanding slavery into the new territories or the new frontiers that had emerged as a critical question dealing with political hegemony. From the inception of the country, the southern states were able to exercise more power over the Legislative and Executive Branch than those concentrating in northern states. If slavery was allowed to expand to the new western territories, that would mean the extension of the political power of those advocating the perpetration of slavery.Such further shifting of free labor would also inhibit the advance of industrial capital.

Douglas won the Senate race but with the formation of the Republican Party, Lincoln became the Partys standard-bearer in the presidential election of 1860. On ascending to the presidency, the Confederate or slave-owning states immediately seceded from the Union. Abraham Lincoln insisted on his messaging that he was fighting the Civil War not to free the slaves but to preserve the Union.

As the war progressed, Lincoln and his Generals were very much aware that the backbone of the Confederate states was the slave economy and if Africans voted with their feet, it would weaken the capacity of the Confederate states to effectively wage the war. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect on January 1, 1863, that would free all slaves in states which were in a state of rebellion against the Union.

President Lincoln even after the Emancipation Proclamation could not envision the free black population living as free men and women with the same rights as white Americans. He floated the possibility of free blacks leaving America en masse and establishing residence somewhere in Central America. The black abolitionist, Frederick Douglas, in meetings with Lincoln made it abundantly clear that black folks were not going anywhere.

By his second term, Lincoln recognized the folly of any mass migration. Black folks had contributed to the wealth creation of America and were entitled to the spoils, at least their share of the spoils.

The Radical Reconstructionists were adamant about reparations and explored the possibility of the free black population being given 40 acres and a mule.

After Lincolns assassination and the Democrat Andrew Johnson succeeded, Andrew Johnson was vehemently opposed to the U.S. Government giving black people any reparations for their labor and insisted that poor whites were not getting a similar rescue package.

The Confederacy refused to accept their defeat on the battlefield. Immediately after the Civil War, the secessionist states introduced the Black Codes which were an attempt to keep black people in a state of subservience. The Black Codes introduced harsh penalties for black workers who abandoned working on plantations. The criminal justice system was used to exploit black labor and black people were sentenced for frivolous crimes and sent to prison to work as gang laborers in surrounding farms.

The Federal government abandoned its protection of the freed African-Americans. The violence of the Klu Klux Klan was used to prevent black people from exercising the right to vote. In 1877 with the Tilden-Hayes presidential compromise, Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the Southern States for electoral college votes to become President of the United States.

With the Federal troops withdrawal, the white terrorists were given free reign to subjugate black folks. The Jim Crow Era had been ushered in. The Supreme Court traditionally refused to recognize the humanity of black citizens. In the case of Dred Scott, in 1857 the Supreme Court ruled that blacks were protected by the United States constitution and even if they migrated to free states they were still defined as slaves. The Supreme Court in 1896 would declare separate but equal was not a violation of the constitution. The Union was intact but black folks had been forced into a new form of bondage.

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Part 1 Race and the American Presidency: From Abraham to Joseph | New York Carib News - NYCaribNews