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