Jamil Zainaldin is the president of the Georgia Humanities Council and the governor’s liaison to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Tomorrow, the Humanities Council is hosting a Lincoln bicentennial town hall on race at the Carter Center titled “Unfinished Work: Race, Civility and Equality of Opportunity.”

1) How would you describe the role of the Georgia Humanities Council?

The Georgia Humanities Council is a nonprofit organization that serves the state of Georgia with programs and grants in the humanities. We are affiliated with the National Endowment for the Humanities. The humanities include history, literature, ethics, philosophy, languages and the history of art and music. Our goal is to connect scholars with the public, and especially with school teachers.

2) What do you see as the purpose of celebrating Lincoln today, 200 years after his birth?

To remind us that a Civil War was fought over some fundamental national questions and the outcome of that war is still being worked out. The North won on the battlefield, but to the extent that the war was about the emancipation of slaves, it was at best a partial victory.

The war did not end bigotry. The work in the 21st century, to borrow a word that Lincoln used in his second inaugural, remains very much “unfinished.”

3) What personal aspects of Lincoln do you feel resonate most today?

Certainly his intellectual abilities are striking. His low-ego profile that allowed him to avoid being side-tracked by the tensions and disagreements which are part of politics, that’s key. And he was resilient, even bull-doggish about what he believed.

To me, the resonance is Shakespearian tragedy: that this man of innate goodness and kindness was fated to lead a war that took 600,000 lives, and I think he felt every single loss.

4) Is there still a sectional divide as to how Lincoln is remembered?

For sure, there are some people who are still fighting the Civil War, and Lincoln is the bad guy. Some of that is inevitable but I don’t want to overstate it either. These celebrations that give us the opportunity to reflect on the past and what we’ve learned in the meantime, what progress has or hasn’t been made, are so important to bringing many differing voices together with a hope for new understandings. The governor of Georgia did appoint a state liaison to the Bicentennial Commission and the Council has been quite active.

5) What part does anti-Lincoln scholarship, such as the work of Thomas DiLorenzo, play in the national conversation?

He’s peripheral and certainly no fan of Lincoln. He’s an academic economist whose published works depict Lincoln as a power-grabbing, big-government, anti-civil liberties president who wasted the lives of 600,000 Americans. It all could have been avoided, he argues.

He brushes past the problem of slavery, by the way. I see him less as a Lincoln scholar than an editorialist, and one with a national following, I gather. I think it says something about politics in America today and maybe he needs to be involved in the conversation.

6) What do you see as the most productive way to introduce younger schoolchildren to the figure of Lincoln?

There are people who do a good job of portraying Lincoln. Some work beautifully with children. Lincoln loved children, he loved animals and he was a kind-hearted man who also believed in “right” and “wrong.” It is the essential character of Lincoln that is what we need to look at. Children have better eyes and ears for that than most adults.

7) Do you think it’s beneficial for present-day politicians — such as President Obama — to look to Lincoln as an example and attempt to emulate him?

Lincoln was able to stay the course, because he had a rock-solid belief in what he was doing. He was also very, very good with words. He wrote to newspaper editors all the time explaining why he was doing this or doing that. He was wonderfully articulate and that helped him to nudge public opinion his way. I am sure those are some of the things that our current president thinks about too. There are lessons in Lincoln.

8) What do you see as the most pervasive public misconceptions about Lincoln?

My son came home from school one day and told me that he learned that Lincoln owned slaves. My! What worries me most of all is that most people have no conception of Lincoln. He’s that man in that funny stove-pipe hat. He’s that marble giant sitting inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

9) How does the way we remember Lincoln today compare to how we remember the founders or similar political figures?

We tend to put Washington, Lincoln and F.D.R. on the same plane. They each had a hand in the salvation of the Union as we know it. To me, race is the touchstone for studying Lincoln. Many see him today simply as a racist. They see founders like Jefferson in the same light.

But the fact remains that Lincoln very clearly grasped that the Constitution’s support of slavery was the great unresolved contradiction the founders left us with. His answer to that contradiction gives him a founder status of his own: founder of the modern state, the man who squared the Declaration with the Constitution.

10) Will we still be celebrating Lincoln’s birth in 50 years? In 100?

Let’s predict that there will be a revival in historical studies. (I’m an optimist.) Let’s also predict that Americans finally and truly will engage the problem of race in our society — the deepest and most enduring problem in America.

And then that log cabin in Kentucky where he was born will become one of the places where our long journey to freedom began. And he will be celebrated in 500 years too, by somebody somewhere.

— Interview by Editorials Editor Asher Smith