For more than 200 years, our little green country town of Philadelphia has been the setting of some of history’s most powerful political oratory. Stirring speeches have been delivered here by some of the greatest thinkers of their respective generations - John Adams, Abe Lincoln, JFK, Nelson Mandela – it’s a list too long to recite.
By noon this past Tuesday, we had another jersey to hang in the rafters.
Barack Obama’s discourse on race, redemption, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, delivered to an invitation-only crowd at the National Constitution Center, was one of the most awe-inspiring political speeches I’ve ever heard. If you somehow missed it, I urge you to watch the speech online, and read the transcript. It’s definitely worth the time.
Dogged in recent days by sharp criticism of Wright, his mentor, father figure and pastor of 20 years, Obama was pretty much forced into making a public statement denouncing some of Wright’s more incendiary statements. The same snippets of a couple of Wright’s fiery sermons played over and over, and endless hand-wringing by conservative commentators and bloggers made it necessary, despite Obama’s previous condemnations, to address the issue fully and head on – which is exactly what he did.
Never mind that right-wing evangelicals and conservative pulpit-pounders have said far worse, and been openly embraced by Republicans for it, since time in memoriam. Never mind about Billy Graham’s anti-Semitic rants, or Rod Parsley’s call for the extermination of all Muslims, or Jerry Falwell’s claim that 9/11 was the fault of gays and feminists, or John Hagee’s declaration that Hurricane Katrina was punishment from God. Never mind about Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, or Ted Haggard. For a solid week, we were told in no uncertain terms that Rev. Jeremiah Wright is the sworn enemy of everything American and Christian, and that even sitting in the pews listening to him is an automatic disqualifier for public office.
And make no mistake: Obama’s speech on Tuesday will not silence the voices of those determined to see him fail. No speech - no matter how eloquent, sincere or thoughtful – will be enough to quell the fear mongering and racially tinged animosity of the Pat Buchanans and Rush Limbaughs of the world. No mere repudiation of a few words, culled from thousands of otherwise uplifting sermons, will satiate the bloodlust created over the past few days. For them, Black people, led by their Black preachers, are to be viewed with suspicion, scorn and derision, in varying doses.
They will scream until they’re blue in the face that Obama didn’t wholly reject Wright as a pastor, teacher and human being, as though even that would have satisfied them. They will tear their garments and wail piteously on cable news shows about the “hate” being preached in Black churches – churches in which they wouldn’t have set foot anyway. They will studiously pore over the sermons of Black ministers, searching for even the slightest criticism of the government or white folks in general, and then howl in pain with each You Tube “revelation”.
They will question the validity of Black anger. They will completely ignore the part of Obama’s speech where he said: “For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.”
They are destined to find themselves on the wrong side of history, along with their brethren who branded Mandela a terrorist; and their fathers, who huffily declared Muhammad Ali a traitor and Martin Luther King, Jr. nothing more than a communist.
I don’t care if you’re a Hillary Clinton supporter, or a John McCain supporter, or even a Ron Paul supporter, if there are any left. If you didn’t see Obama’s speech Tuesday morning as one of the brightest moments in political discourse of our generation, then you are a shortsighted, narrow-minded fool. If you can’t see past Rev. Wright’s inflammatory comments to the larger truth of Obama’s words, then you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
Whether he wins the Democratic nomination or not, the nation saw something of Barack Obama Tuesday. They saw the measure of the man - his principles, his history, his worldview – and learned how a Black man came to be standing at a podium in the Cradle of Liberty, poised and ready to take on what may be the greatest challenge of any Black man in our time.
Let the fools find themselves on the wrong side of history. The rest of us who saw the speech for what it was must seize this moment and use it to its full advantage. It’s time to change, America.
