Abraham Lincoln attached his signature to a Proclamation calling for a “National Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer.”

On this day, Americans would be encouraged to take time from their daily pursuits and gather to pray for their country. Wrote the President:

“Let us then rest humbly in the hope. . . that the united cry of the nation will be heard on high and answered with blessings no less than the pardon of our national sins and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.”

The nation would eventually once again become the United States. But the path to reunion would be more difficult and filled with recriminations. Lincoln wanted the South restored. He never believed the confederate states had truly left the Union.

Our Unfinished Work

The charges of racism levied against the United States of America as a whole are very grave. We have experienced and chronicled countless tales of racially-charged police brutality, mass incarceration, and the tragic murder of young Blacks, particularly men.

Ethnic minorities endure continual unwarranted suspicion, false accusations, and unprovoked assaults. Slavery, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, purposeful disenfranchisement, lynching, and redlining have brought incalculable pain.