Lincoln coupled emancipation with proposals to colonize Black Americans abroad

Evidence

Black Americans denounced the meeting. Frederick Douglass, perhaps the greatest American this country has ever produced, called Lincoln’s colonization scheme “a safety valve…for white racism” and said that the meeting “expresses merely a desire to get rid of” Black Americans. That August meeting was the only time Lincoln took his colonization proposal directly to Black Americans. The next month, in September 1862, he issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that advocated colonization, and in his annual address to Congress in December, he called for a constitutional amendment to aid colonization, which became Lincoln’s last known public call to colonize Black Americans. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 134

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Whiteness-and-the-founders thread of 1619 chapters 1-3; and to the reader’s more general study of how origin stories get simplified in national myth.