Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? In his compelling new book, Lincoln and Race (Southern Illinois University Press), Washington College history professor Richard Striner weighs the evidence and concludes that, not only was Lincoln free of racial bias, but he also was a political genius willing to deceive his opponents about his racial attitudes in order to further the cause of human rights.

“With lawyerly precision, Richard Striner mines the speeches and writings of our 16th president to make a compelling case for a President Lincoln who, contrary to contemporary belief, had a long and abiding commitment, not just to the end of slavery, but also to equality before the law for all men, whatever the color of their skin,” writes Clay Risen of The New York Times.

The author of five previous books, two of them about Lincoln, Striner has been writing and thinking about the Civil War president since he was a graduate student in history at the University of Maryland in the late 1970s. He says that writing Lincoln and Race gave him a chance to explore in depth one of the themes of his first major work on Lincoln, Father Abraham (Oxford, 2006).

“Was Lincoln, emancipator and champion of liberty, actually a conflicted soul struggling to overcome his own racial prejudice? As I worked my way through the issue in Father Abraham, I thought it quite unlikely for a number of reasons, but most of all because, studying his statecraft and politics, it became clear to me that Lincoln was a moral Machiavellian, an idealist with street smarts,” Striner says.

“Lincoln chose to employ deception a number of times during his White House years, in ways that are easy to document. He had to craft a very careful strategy in order to prevent all sorts of worst-case contingencies, including a white supremacist backlash that would have set back the antislavery cause for God knows how many decades.”

Striner structured Lincoln and Race as a sort of detective yarn, a courtroom drama. He even invokes Dashiell Hammett’s classic

Washington College Historian Striner's new book, Lincoln and Race, explores Lincoln’s racial attitudes and political savvy

detective novel The Thin Man in his introduction. Assembling the evidence piece by piece, affording all sides of the debate a fair hearing, he has one end in mind: that “any satisfactory theory should make greater sense than the others.”

Striner became fascinated with Lincoln’s statecraft when he was in graduate school, “looking at the past in order to find my own bearings in terms of political philosophy, looking for inspiration. Lincoln struck me powerfully in many ways, not least because of the way he harmonized a great idealism with a very tough realism. Later, when I worked as a grassroots historic preservationist in Washington, I came to appreciate him even more because, trying to summon power to my cause, I realized I was trying at a very low level to do what he did so brilliantly on a grand scale.”

Striner’s habit of mining the past for inspiration has informed his numerous articles, including recent pieces about Lincoln for the popular New York Times “Disunion” series on the Civil War, and a cover story in The American Scholar in which he urges the administration to consider Lincoln’s strategy of printing greenbacks as a possible cure for contemporary economic woes. His 2011 book, Lincoln’s Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power, examines how Lincoln and five subsequent presidents pushed forward large-scale public projects and policies.

Striner is currently working on a book about Woodrow Wilson, who, “unlike Lincoln, was a terrible strategist,” he says. “Wilson was narcissistic and foolish in ways that make him Lincoln’s operational opposite. If democracy is going to work, it demands leadership, and if the world is going to be made better, it will be by people who know how to deliver real results and not just pose on a soapbox demonstrating how perfect they are in their attitudes. That’s nice, but it doesn’t free any slaves.”
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Alisha Knight

A new book by Alisha Knight, associate professor of English and American Studies at Washington College, offers the first full-length critical analysis of pioneering African American writer Pauline Hopkins. Just released by the University of Tennessee Press, Knight’s Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream: An African American Writer’s (Re)Visionary Gospel of Success will provide literary scholars and historians alike with insight into the life and writings of a woman who openly confronted discrimination at the turn of the century.

“Pauline Hopkins broke the mold of the domestic tradition of nineteenth-century women’s writing, choosing instead to use self-made African American men and women to critique the racism and sexism that prevailed in American society,” says Knight, a resident of Elkton.

A prolific writer, Hopkins published four novels, seven short stories, and numerous articles for the Colored American Magazine, where she also worked as an editor, in just the four-year period between 1900 and 1904. The Maine native lost her position at the magazine because of her habit of challenging authority figures with her then-revolutionary ideas about how literature should be used to advocate racial and gender equality in a Post-Civil War America. Her “Famous Men” and “Famous Women” series for the Colored American Magazine offered African American models of success, but her fiction often depicted African American heroes who either failed to achieve success at home because of societal barriers, or found success only after leaving the United States.

“I’ve always been interested in authors who have been underrepresented in the canon and in the classroom,” Knight explains, “and being able to study Pauline Hopkins at length has been fulfilling. I’m pleased that Hopkins has been gaining attention, and I hope my book helps make her work more accessible to students and everyday readers. Hopkins wanted her writing to reach a broad audience, and she worked hard to produce material that was both straightforward and intellectually engaging. I would like to think that my book does likewise.”

Dr. Knight is a summa cum laude graduate of Spelman College who went on to earn a master’s from Rutgers and both a master’s and doctorate from Drew University. In addition to teaching at Washington College, she directs the Black Studies Program, which encourages a greater understanding of black culture and a new appreciation for the impact people of African descent have made on world cultures and human history.

Among Dr. Knight’s published articles are “Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline E. Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the Colored American Magazine” (American Periodicals) and “One and One Make One: A Metacritical and Psychoanalytic Reading of Friendship in Toni Morrison’s Sula” (College Language Association Journal). Recipient of a prestigious Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation in 2007, she is currently working on a study of late 19th and early 20th century African American book publishing practices.
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