President Obama’s eulogy Friday for a murdered black pastor is set to be the most momentous speech of his presidency about America’s struggle with race relations.
He, Vice President Joe Biden, and First Lady Michelle Obama will travel to South Carolina to pay tribute to the Rev. Clementa Pinckney and eight other victims of last week’s mass murder at an historic black church in Charleston. The Senate is out, and the House has canceled votes so members can attend memorial services for the victims, who were shot during a Bible study.
The president came to know Pinckney, pastor of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and a state senator, when he was an early supporter of Obama’s 2008 White House campaign.
So the address is a personal tribute to a longtime supporter. But it is also inevitably a national address at a moment when a clear cut racial massacre has reopened public debate about the scars of slavery, the meaning of the Civil War, and the icons of the old South.
It’s no easy task, and White House press secretary Josh Earnest earlier in the week was careful to underscore the importance of the eulogy’s focus on honoring the lives of Pinckney and the other eight victims. But he did not rule out that Obama could “raise a variety of issues” that have been part of a “robust public debate” in the shooting’s aftermath.
The president, key lawmakers said, needs to tread carefully while also demonstrating bold, fearless leadership.
“I think it’s going to be a heavily personal invocation from deep within the president,” Rep. David Scott, D-Ga., a member of the Congressional Black Caucus known for his independent streak, told the Washington Examiner. “Great moments come and great men become great when they reach out and grab those moments, and I believe this will be a great moment for him and the whole nation.”
“It’s healing time. We need healing, and I’m sure the president will bring that,” Scott said.
“The president is a magnificent speaker — I don’t agree with him on a lot of things, but I recognize his eloquence,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., a close friend and ally of Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
They also predicted the speech should and would express the nation’s gratitude to the families of the victims and their stunning expressions of forgiveness to 21-year-old year shooter Dylann Roof, who documented his racist activities and hatred in an online manifesto and in photos of himself posing with the Confederate flag.
“He needs to compliment the families on their strength,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., a prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “I don’t know many people who would, in this short period of time even before a loved one is buried, forgive the person.”
“I want the president to really salute the families for just the courageous way they’ve come out and said ‘We forgive you,'” said Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif. “I don’t think anyone expected that, and there’s so much healing that occurred just by them having said that.”
Cole said the families of the victims of South Carolina have already set the stage for the president’s speech and the healing that has already begun.
“The community has rallied together and crossed racial lines,” he said. “It’s just such a wonderful example for the entire country and I expect the president to build on that.”
But just like the nation’s view on the solutions to a string of mass shootings and racial clashes, the lawmakers split on whether the president should use the speech to issue another call for gun control.
“Absolutely,” Becerra said, when asked whether the president should raise the issue of gun control during the eulogy. “Anything that makes the American people safer, less likely to face something as heinous as this in a place of worship.”
“Reasonable gun-safety measures are not only needed, but doable,” he continued. “When I hear him say we have work to do, that should include anything that makes us safer in a house of worship, on the playground or just in the streets.”
“The whole country needs to understand the impact the killing of those nine individuals have had on all of us,” Thompson said. “It’s a sign of a sickness that can only be healed when right thinking people do what’s in the collective interest of society.”
“If it’s a measure to address guns, you do it,” he said. “If it’s a measure to take those symbols of hatred and bigotry out of a place of prominence into a museum, you do it.”
When it comes to guns, Cole strongly disagreed.
“You’re not going to change opinions on gun control — not in the short term,” Cole said. “If I were president, I wouldn’t want to look like I was exploiting [a eulogy] for a short-term political point, and I don’t think he will. It’s not likely to work.”
“I’m not questioning anyone’s motives,” he said. “I understand that on both sides people feel very passionately about the issue. But I think [the president] needs to look past the immediate political point that you think it reinforces for you, and think how could I really reach people that disagree with me on this — in a way that’s really meaningful and could bring us together.”
Almost seven years after his election was hailed as the beginning of a post-racial America, Obama has jettisoned his usually careful, measured speech to express deep frustration over the string of shooting massacres during his presidency and the congressional impasse on gun-control measures.
In the wake of the slayings, Obama has admonished the country that it will take more than sympathy to put a stop to the recent spate of shootings like the one that occurred last week in Charleston.
“We as a country, at some point, will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence doesn’t happen in other advanced countries,” he said one day after the killings.
He has also used the tragedy to talk bluntly about race, surprising many by using the “N-word” to underscore his point in an interview with a Los Angeles-based podcaster released Monday.
The killings have prompted bipartisan calls across the country to drop Confederate emblems. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the state’s senior senator and GOP candidate for president, Lindsey Graham as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have called for the Confederate flag’s removal from the South Carolina State House.
The movement to remove the Confederate flag is particularly emotional for Rep. Scott, who worked with then-Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes and a group of black and white state legislators in 2001 to remove the Confederate battle flag from his state flag for good.
He credits Barnes and the white legislators who lost their seats in the state legislature, for sacrificing their political careers “just to do the right thing.”
“On the night they changed the flag back in 2001, there was a great celebration and white and black legislators were hugging each other and crying,” he said. “And those tears were not only because we were happy that we corrected that big mistake … but we knew that most of my white colleagues were not coming back because of the vote.”
But when it comes to the first black president trying to exhort the nation to make progress on racial issues, Becerra says he doesn’t know if there is anything the president or anyone else can say that is going to help race relations as much as the family of the victims’ expressions of forgiveness.
“I just think it was so powerful,” he said.
