Booknotes: Black Americans in Mourning

New Arrival:

• Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Leonne M. Hudson (SIU Press, 2024).

Of course, there were members of every race and ethnic group who disapproved of Abraham Lincoln as a person, politician, policy-maker, and war leader. Much more unifying in crossing party and racial lines was the collective nature of national grief that followed Lincoln's sudden passing from an assassin's bullet. The black population's responses to the president's sudden demise just as the Civil War was drawing to close are the focus of Leonne Hudson's Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. According to Hudson, "no group mourned Lincoln more deeply than people of color. African Americans did not speak with a monolithic voice on social or political issues, but even Lincoln’s Black contemporaries who may not have approved of him while he was alive mourned his death, understanding its implications for their future."

More from the description: "Beginning with the assassination itself and chronicling Lincoln’s three-week-long national funeral, historian Leonne M. Hudson captures the profound sadness of Black Americans as they mourned the crafter of the Emancipation Proclamation and the man they thought of as their earthly Moses, father, friend, and benefactor. Hudson continues the narrative by detailing the postwar efforts of African Americans to gain citizenship and voting rights" during the Johnson administration.

In the book, Hudson attempts to gather contemporary first-hand perspectives of individuals from every level of black society while also examining group-level activities. Thus, his study "includes the tributes of prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Elizabeth Keckley, who raised their voices to honor Lincoln, as well as formal expressions of grief by institutions and organizations such as the United States Colored Troops. In a triumph of research, Hudson also features the voices of lesser-known Black people who mourned Lincoln across the country, showing that the outpouring of individual and collective grief helped set the stage for his enduring glorification."