Hillary Clinton offended Barack Obama and a great many others when she recalled President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. She said:
I would point to the fact that that Dr King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the President before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became a real in people’s lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it, and actually got it accomplished." (This is the full quote from The Horse’s Mouth blog in Talking Points Memo.)
Obama said:
Senator Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark, about King and Lyndon Johnson.
I wonder what he thinks of yesterday’s New York Times article which says pretty much the same thing:
In the early 1960s, opinion polls found that a majority of Americans saw civil rights as the dominant issue facing the country. And President Lyndon B Johnson, in one of several memorable 1965 speeches on race, said, speaking before a joint session of Congress after the “Bloody Sunday” voting-rights march from Selma, Ala.: “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
Yet it was President Johnson, too, who foresaw the end of what Glenda Gilmore, a Yale historian and author of “Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950,” described last week as a 20-year “national conversation on race” in the 1950s and 1960s. After signing the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, the president is said to have observed that he had just handed over the South to the Republicans for at least a generation. The Republicans seized the opportunity to peel off Democratic states.
Johnson was right about the South. He might not have been the greatest president: he did incalculable damage with the war on Vietnam, but he did dream of a Great Society and signed the civil rights legislation at considerable expense to his own party. Anyone who says acknowledging his role belittles King or offends blacks may be politically correct but is ignoring history.
King mentioned once in Obama’s speech on race
Obama did not speak about Johnson and there was only one reference to Martin Luther King when he spoke about race in Philadelphia on March 18. He said nothing about the civil rights movement though he mentioned how people of that generation grew up amid segregation. He mentioned King only when he said he had "the great honour of speaking on Dr King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta".
Obama, I guess, has the temperament of a personal blogger who is most comfortable talking about himself.
But he was so eloquent. I was moved when I read the complete speech in the New York Times and saw the YouTube video again after reading Frank Rich’s column on The Republican Resurrection. Rich and almost every other commentator has praised the speech to the skies, but no report, no comment, can compare with the experience of reading and watching Obama’s speech personally. I especially loved this quote:
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
Truer words were never spoken.
Obama’s defence of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is moving too.
The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
And how wonderful is his description of his church:
Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And then he quotes Faulkner:
As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”
And then he returns to his theme:
The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.
He shows empathy for both black and white — it’s remarkable, his feel for the people.
Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
The speech has been described as courageous, bold, powerful, one of the finest in living memory.
As a Hillary supporter — and an Obama admirer — all I can say is, it was Obama at his finest, using his greatest gift with bravura.
Why is it that two such smart, intelligent people who obviously care for others can’t find common ground and come together as running mates?
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