You’re teacher was right about Kennedy. I’m not sure about Lincoln, but it probably is true since black Americans were prohibited from joining the militias (there was no standing US military until after WWII). The black Americans in Massachusetts petitioned the legislature of their state to let them join the militia in the late 1700s because they had all the other rights —voting, land owning, etc. But the legislature voted it down because they had to agree with the federal policy, now dominated by loud mouth southerners who never wanted to see a black man with a gun. The fact that there were whole regiments of black soldiers fighting in the Revolution in the North was too much to bear. Black Americans had or got their freedom from during the Revolution and then got pensions like white soldiers. That kind of gun-wielding benefit-receiving equality must have drove their Southern white minds mad.