The speech

The Speech

I got into a dust-up with an Episcopalian minister at an Easter lunch over at the Myer’s house. She was still leaking steam from her morning sermon about how Jesus’ resurrection should be the paradigm for fixing up America. I brought the conversation around to Barack Obama and she said she admired him as a faith-based candidate but felt he was flawed by his unwillingness to demolish that Chicago pastor. To paraphrase her, “They’ll tear him up in the White House,” she said…… “he can’t fire people, do what’s necessary..." I asked her if she had read the speech on race he gave in Philadelphia last week and she said she hadn’t, and then she added, ominously…..(again, a paraphrase)…. “have you noticed that many of the people surrounding him are atheists?”

Whizz! Bang!

The devil made him do it.

The devil made him speak out with elegance and honesty on the subject of race in response to his own minister’s screed.

What Obama did in that single speech was organize the truth about race in our country, pretty much all of the truth…. It wasn’t an expose’, not a log got turned over….the surprises weren’t surprises at all…he just said things that we all know and never say outside of our private world. He said his white grandmother loved him and was a bigot and that he knows guys who are really pissed off that they have to bus their kids 11 miles when there is a kindergarten next door. He said the back wounds of slavery still sting and that they’re not going to be healed in a single election round.

He said all that standing there in front of a small live audience, his tone was measured, his language free of the usual stump stuff. There was a particularly stunning moment when talking about racial chaos he said, “Not this time……”

He said that there is some bad stuff underneath our racial civility….he said he wanted to find justice and healing in the middle of angry history. He didn’t use Dr. King’s poetry, or his rhythmic phrasing…..he spoke quietly with a kind of intellectual candor that I haven’t heard since I listened to Jim Farmer talk in 5th Grade public schoolroom in New Orleans twenty years ago.

I have never been so touched as I was by Obama’s speech and yes, I was there in August of 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial.

That reminds me; I grew up in central Illinois, not far from Salem. My father was a Lincoln scholar…and I know he would be fascinated by the obvious parallels of this young man and our 16th President; a lawyer who worked the streets, an Illinois state senator, a member of congress, a man who can’t write a bad sentence, and most of all, a guy who showed up and ran for president when the country was in deep deep trouble.

olval

Gentle Men

Well, to bring things up to date, I’ve become an impassioned Barack Obama supporter and was devastated Tuesday, March 4 when Ms. Clinton won both Ohio and Texas. As and old (77) civil rights guy, I allowed myself to think about the incredible fact that less than fifty years ago….virtually NO black people voted in the American south. And here we are, in 2008, with a viable black candidate for president. I remembered that CORE’s first big voter registration drive was led by Jim McKeon in South Carolina in 1960. I remember…I remember a lot of things….but the truth is that most people take the franchised “African-American” community as a given…as if it has always been there.

I like Barack Obama…..I find him a strong and gracious leader, a gentle man, not unlike my best friend Jim Farmer who was the actual founder of the non violent civil rights movement in Chicago in 1942. Jim, like Obama, had both a moving and common touch….and could, with a few words….reach across old divides with a call for self-respect and yes….love of one another. I was moved by the number of white votes for Obama in South Carolina….a state where it was worth your life to try to register black voters all those years ago.

There came a time when Jim Farmer was attacked and pilloried just as Senator Obama was beaten up on the weekend before the Texas and Ohio primaries. One story links the two men in my mind in a remarkable way. In 1968 Jim ran for Congress in the Bed-Stuy
District of Brooklyn, NY. He didn’t have much of a chance because he didn’t have the Democratic line on the ballot…..he appeared only on the Liberal line….way down on the lower left hand corner of the ballot. About a week before the election, a friend of mine….a distinguished writer, pulled me aside in a Harlem restaurant and told me he had what he called “a terrific piece of dirt” on Jim’s opponent. The writer told me a harrowing story about a close relative of the opponent which, if revealed, might well have killed the opponent’s chances in the election.

I took the story to Jim and asked him if we could use it. Jim looked at me as if I was crazy…… “No! No! A thousand times No!,” he said, “I’ve been preaching brotherhood all my life…I’ll be damned if I’m going to get down in that sewer.”

We lost.