On Friday, South Carolina Senator and Rev. Clementa Pinckney was memorialized in a packed auditorium at the College Of Charleston. As his wife and two young daughters sat and suffered what must be the worst moment of their short lives, President Obama delivered Pinckney’s eulogy with fervor and deliberation. It was the blackest thing I’ve experienced in some time, and I had grits for lunch.
“Clem was often asked why he chose to be a pastor and a public servant, but the person who asked probably didn’t know the history of the AME church,” said Obama. “As our brothers and sisters in the AME church know, we don’t make those distinctions.” Later, he added, about the church’s activist history: “To put our faith in action is about more than individual salvation, it’s about collective salvation.”
In his speech remembering Pinckney, the POTUS called out racism, slavery and the history of the black church as a target of homegrown terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
“The church is and always has been the center of African American life,” he said. “Over the course of centuries, churches have served as hush houses, where slaves could worship in safety, praise houses where their descendants could say ‘hallelujah,’ rest stops for the weary along the underground railroad, bunkers for the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement.” He called the church “our beating heart.”
He added that Mother Emanuel was “built by blacks,” and then burned to the ground when their leaders sought to end slavery—but still the church “rose from the ashes like a phoenix.”
Obama kept going. He talked about racial bias and hiring discrimination, how employers will call back “Johnny but not Jamal” for a job interview. He championed the removal of the Confederate flag but cautioned Americans not to be satisfied.
“For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in too many of our citizens,” he said. “It’s true, a flag did not cause these murders but we must acknowledge that it’s always represented more than ancestral pride.
“For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now,” he said. “Removing the flag from this state’s capital, it would not be an insult to Confederate soldiers… it would just be an acknowledgement that the cause of slavery was wrong, the imposition of Jim Crow, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong. It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds. By taking down that flag, we express God’s grace but I don’t think God wants us to stop there.”
And here’s where the organist got fired up, and gave Obama some background, if you will, as the POTUS implored America to express God’s grace by fighting for equality without hiding from the fact that certain inequalities might not affect each one of us personally. He called for gun safety laws and asked that we not go back to business as usual—it would be disrespectful to “everything Reverend Pinckney believed in.”
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