February 12 · This Day in America
In a one-room cabin on Sinking Spring Farm, on a Sunday in the Kentucky backcountry, a son is born to Thomas and Nancy Lincoln. There is nothing to mark the day. He has perhaps a year of formal schooling in his whole life, splits rails, reads by firelight whatever books he can borrow, and grows up tall and poor and self-taught on the frontier. From that floor he travels to the hardest seat in the Republic, holds the Union together through its bloodiest test, and writes sentences Americans still measure themselves against. A government of the people, by the people, for the people. The distance between that dirt floor and those words is the country's whole argument with itself — that here, the cabin is not the end of the story.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1909
Exactly a century after Lincoln's birth, and in the wake of a deadly race riot in his own Springfield, a call goes out for racial justice. Some sixty people answer it — among them W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell. The organization they form, the NAACP, becomes the longest-running engine of American civil rights. They chose Lincoln's birthday on purpose: the work was not finished.
Source: naacp.org
“government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 1863