He
left Clementa Pinckney’s funeral as a black man who happened to be president.
By Donald Kaul
If Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech is the 20th
century equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s magnificent Second Inaugural — and I
think it is — then what President Barack Obama gave us in Charleston, South
Carolina is our century’s Gettysburg Address.
He gave a marvelous eulogy that was powerful and eloquent. He
was moving without resorting to sentimentality.
Obama embraced the life of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, slain in his historically black
church by a white racist only days before. Rather than merely eulogizing the
man, Obama traced the black experience in America, all through its history of
slavery, war, segregation, discrimination, mass imprisonment, and murder.
And despite the bleakness of that history, Obama found
redemption in Pinckney’s life. He talked about the reverend’s gift of grace,
and how grace has buoyed African Americans through their darkest times and
armed them with a kind of invulnerability.
The message was all the more effective because Obama delivered
it in the cadences of the black church. As he wrapped it up, he broke into the
hymn “Amazing Grace” and invited the audience to join in.
He went into that funeral at the College of Charleston as a
president who happened to be black. He left it as a black man who happened
to be president.
I don’t know how much good it will do. Maybe some. It looks like
the Confederate battle flag will be taken down from its perch at the South
Carolina State House and other public buildings across the South. In terms of
symbolism, that’s no small thing.
“Removing the flag from this state’s Capitol would not be an act
of political correctness,” Obama said. “It would not be an insult to the valor
of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause
for which they fought — the cause of slavery — was wrong. The imposition of Jim
Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people, was
wrong.”
When have you heard an American president cut through the
mythology with which the South has wrapped the Civil War — the “War Between the
States,” they call it, or even the “War of Northern Aggression” — with so
simple and direct a statement? The cause for which they fought was wrong.
Period. End of argument.
The greatness of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address wasn’t universally accepted when it
was delivered. Lincoln’s partisan enemies said it was inappropriate to the
occasion, and some of them even attacked it as “silly.”
I don’t watch Fox News (doctor’s orders). But I imagine its crew
of political harpies and trolls gave the Charleston eulogy a similar welcome.
I feel sorry for them. I forgive them. I’m in that kind of mood.
I’m as close to a state of grace as you can get without actually believing in
God.
But I believe in something: a power that’s larger than oneself
that arises from masses of people struggling for justice and listening to — as Lincoln said in
his first inaugural address — “the better angels of their nature.”
Some people will call Obama’s speech political. Of course it was. He is, after
all, the president of the United States. Every word out of his mouth is
political in some way or another.
How, he asked, can we permit so many of our children to live in
poverty, and for tens of thousands of our young people to be caught up in our
criminal justice system? How can we make it harder for some of our fellow
citizens to vote?
He indicted our relative indifference to the carnage of gun
violence that takes 30 lives every day in our nation.
“Every time something like this happens, somebody says we have
to have a conversation about race,” Obama said. “We don’t need more talk.”
It’s time to do something.
OtherWords
columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org.
