The cadence is not exactly King-like, but Barack Obama, on Dr. King's birthday, captures the essence of King in talking about the substance of hope in a speech that he gave in the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist Church: Martin Luther King's Church (both senior and junior). Ebenezer was Dr. King's church for most of his career as a Civil Rights leader.
In the end, Obama's speech is more Lincoln-esque than King-like in the theme that it tackles: Unity.
The biggest complaint against Barack Obama is not that he's inexperienced, per se, but that he's short on ideas. I'm not sure if the speech at Ebenezer changes that perception. What he does do for the very first time in the campaign is light a small fire under the core of the national African American electorate, perhaps save the remaining lions of the Civil Rights Movement.
Why such a small fire for people who want to trust and follow him? Why such a small fire for a people who want to be excited and ignited?
Some people would say that Obama has kept Black people at arms length. However, exhorting Black people to take responsibility for themselves, more of a Bill Cosby theme rather than a King one, gives Barack Obama a different dimension than other African American presidential candidates and leaders in the recent past. He tells Black people what they must do rather than what others must do for them.
It's why most African American Civil Rights leaders have been luke-warm to Obama's candidacy. He refuses to strike the same refrains that Civil Rights leaders have struck since King's death. King's "promissory note" and "insufficient funds" are the stuff that Barack avoids on the stump and in the pulpit at Ebenezer. Obama's "fierce urgency of now" is to join him and elect him because there will not be a him without a broader us.
At the very end of his Ebenezer Baptist Church sermon, Obama tells a story of a young white worker in his campaign, Ashley, which explains all you need to know about Barack Obama.
For most of Senator Obama's speech he has had the flights of oratory that hearkens the Kennedy (both JFK and RFK) rather than King, yet when he mentions Ashley, people seem a bit more skeptical about where Barack intends to take them next.
Would King have advanced a trope like Ashley into one of his speeches? Probably not. You could hear a pin drop in Ebenezer because Barack is leading them home to where he wants to go.
Ashley's story is about self-sacrifice. She has gotten Black people mobilized in South Carolina since the start of Obama's campaign. It's not just him, as Barack states, that people want to follow. It's the hope that an Ashley feels from his candidacy, which elevates her out of the degradation of poverty, eating mustard and relish sandwiches while her mother struggled with cancer when she was nine years old.
It's not exactly what Black people want to hear at the end of the speech where Barack has had them in the palm of his hands, but it is, I suspect, why so many white liberals embrace Barack's candidacy. He speaks to them. He certainly speaks to a number of Black folk, too. But has he convinced them yet. Has he convinced all of us.
In this house divided, only time will tell.
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