Obama’s Eulogy, Which Found Its Place in History By Michiko Kakutani July 3, 2015
Barack Obama’s eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., was remarkable not only because the president sang the opening refrain of “Amazing Grace” on live television, and not only because of his eloquence in memorializing the pastor and eight other parishioners killed by a white gunman. It was also remarkable because the eulogy drew on all of Mr. Obama’s gifts of language and empathy and searching intellect — first glimpsed in “Dreams From My Father,” his deeply felt 1995 memoir about identity and family. And because it used those gifts to talk about the complexities of race and justice, situating them within an echoing continuum in time that reflected both Mr. Obama’s own long view of history, and the panoramic vision of America, shared by Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as a country in the process of perfecting itself.
Mr. Obama’s view of the nation’s history as a more than two-century journey to make the promises of the Declaration of Independence (“that all men are created equal”) real for everyone, his former chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, suggested in an email, is “both an American and a religious sentiment” — predicated upon the belief that individual sinners and a country scarred by the original sin of slavery can overcome the past through “persistent, courageous, sometimes frustrating efforts.”
For Mr. Obama, America is “a constant work in progress,” a nation founded upon the idea of new beginnings, and the enduring belief, as he once wrote in an essay about Lincoln, that “we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.” Like his two moving speeches in Selma, Ala., in 2007 and this year, Mr. Obama’s eulogy used the prism of history to amplify and crystallize the meaning of the occasion — a wide-angle lens that reminds us of the distance we’ve come from the days of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow, and the distance we have yet to travel in addressing enduring prejudice and inequities.
These are themes that have animated Mr. Obama’s writings and oratory for years, going back to his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynoteaddress and 2008 “A More Perfect Union” speech, to his 2013 speech commemorating the 1963 March on Washington. History, he believes, is an odyssey, a crossing, a relay in which one generation’s achievements serve as the paving stones for the next generation’s journey.
In his eulogy on June 26, Mr. Obama recounted the history of Charleston’s “Mother Emanuel” — how “a church built by blacks seeking liberty” was “burned to the ground because its founders sought to end slavery” and how it rose again, “a phoenix from these ashes,” to become a sacred place where Dr. King would preach from its pulpit. He spoke of how history “must be a manual” to avoid “repeating the mistakes of the past” while building “a roadway toward a better world.” This looking back at what has been overcome and looking forward toward a better tomorrow is a bedrock tradition in the black church — which, having borne witness to so much suffering, looks to the promised land ahead. And it is a fundamental theme in the sermons of Dr. King, who talked in his great “Dream” speech of hewing “out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” of transforming “the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” Mr. Obama, like Dr. King, is fond of quoting the words of the 19th-century minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
In grappling with the wounds of the Civil War, Lincoln similarly looked to the broad vistas of history and the lessons of Scripture — both for solace and as a way of framing and universalizing his own arguments. In theGettysburg Address, he effectively redefined the founders’ vision of America and how we read the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and in his Second Inaugural Address, he recognized the sin of slavery and the terrible scourge of war that was part of its price, and at the same time, sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” to find a way forward “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural was on the mind of Mr. Obama’s chief speechwriter, Cody Keenan, when he was preparing a first draft of the Charleston eulogy. He spoke with the president on June 22 about the speech and hoped to emulate Lincoln’s tone of reconciliation and healing. Like many classical eulogies, the narrative begins by memorializing the dead, then addresses the tasks remaining for the living: exhorting the congregation and the nation, as Lincoln put it, to “finish the work we are in.”
A draft of the Charleston eulogy was given to the president around 5 p.m. on June 25 and, according to Mr. Keenan, Mr. Obama spent some five hours revising it that evening, not merely jotting notes in the margins, but whipping out the yellow legal pads he likes to write on — only the second time he’s done so for a speech in the last two years. He would rewrite large swaths of the text.
Mr. Obama expanded on a short riff in the draft about the idea of grace, and made it the central theme of the eulogy: the grace family members of the shooting victims embodied in the forgiveness they expressed toward the killer; the grace the city of Charleston and the state of South Carolina manifested in coming together in the wake of the massacre; the grace God bestowed in transforming a tragedy into an occasion for renewal, sorrow into hope.
As he’s done in his most powerful earlier work, Mr. Obama drew upon his own knowledge of Scripture and literature and history — much the way Lincoln and Dr. King did in their writings — to create a musical narrative that uses biblical and historical allusions to widen the dimensions of his storytelling, while moving between the vernacular and the metaphorical, between particular issues (inequities in the criminal justice system, the need for gun control, the hurt and hate represented by the Confederate battle flag) and larger moral and spiritual imperatives.
He also inserted lines from his favorite hymn, “Amazing Grace,” as a refrain, and, on the way to Charleston aboard Marine One, he told his advisers that he might sing some of those lines “if it feels right.” It did feel right. Mr. Obama, now in the final quarter of his presidency, has grown increasingly assertive and outspoken about issues close to his heart: In a recent podcast interview with the comedian Marc Maron, he spoke of how experience and the “fearlessness” that comes from having survived being in “the barrel tumbling down Niagara Falls” have brought a sense of liberation. At the same time, the eulogy he delivered that Friday afternoon in Charleston turned out to be the capstone to a dizzying and momentous week in which Southern politicians began calling for a renunciation of the Confederate battle flag, while the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act and found that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.
It was a week in which a lot of Americans felt they were actually watching the arc of history bend in front of their eyes, and it was a eulogy that both spoke to the moment and connected that moment to the past and the future of what Mr. Obama calls the great “American experiment.”