Until the election of Barack Obama, it could be said that no president was more important to African Americans than Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln, of course, led the nation through the American Civil War and made the historic decision to free the slaves in the rebellious southern states with the Emancipation Proclamation.

So it seems somehow right that as the nation celebrates Black History Month this year it also is celebrating what would have been President Lincoln’s 200th birthday.

Born in the backwoods of Kentucky on February 12, 1809, Lincoln was a man of humble background and limited schooling who rose to greatness by taking on big issues and surrounding himself with smart, powerful advisers.

Lincoln’s willingness to assemble a so-called “team of rivals” to serve in his policy-making cabinet is one reason President Obama calls him the past president he most admires.

An even more important reason, Obama has said, was the way Lincoln worked to keep the nation whole and to bring people together.

“In the face of impossile odds, people who love their country can change it,” Obama said when he announced he was running for president. “That’s what Abraham Lincoln understood. He had his doubts. He had his defeats. He had his setbacks. But through his will and his words, he moved a nation and helped free a people.”

“Honest Abe” Lincoln was a far more complicated man than many history books suggest.

Born in a state where owning slaves was legal, he freed American slaves as president. But not all slaves.

The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves in Southern states that had seceded from the Union. It did not apply to southern “border states” like Kentucky that remained loyal to the Union, but still allowed slavery.

Coming in the middle of the Civil War in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation had a political purpose as well as a moral one: It aimed to weaken the states that were fighting to break away.

Even if Lincoln was reluctant to free slaves in border states, no one can dispute that the Emancipation Proclamation pushed the nation forward on the road toward equality for people of all races.

The Proclamation made it possible for the U.S. Congress to later pass the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning slavery altogether in 1865.

It made possible the 14th and 15th Amendments, which gave all African Americans the rights of citizenship and African American men the right to vote (no women could vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920).

Nearly 100 years later, it made it possible for President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, which banned all discrimination based on race or color and prohibited discrimination in the buying or renting of homes.

Forty years after that, it made it possible for an African American to become president of the United States.