What’s in a Name?

This month, back in 1858, a forty-nine-year-old candidate for the U.S. Senate had to defend his position on racial justice, after a man approached him in a hotel lobby and asked, somewhat incredulously, “whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people.” That same day, on a public debate stage, the Republican nominee made his position clear: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” Many decades later, I was born in a city named after that politician, who would lose the Senate battle but go on to win the war.

Locals are proud of Lincoln, with its imposing statue of the Great Emancipator by Daniel Chester French watching over downtown. And even in this period of reckoning, one would be hard pressed to imagine petitions...