But I want you to think about Ms. Dorothy Height, a black woman, in 1929, refusing to be denied her dream of a college education … Refusing to let any barriers of injustice or ignorance or inequality or unfairness stand in her way. That refusal to accept a lesser fate; that insistence on a better life, that, ultimately, is the secret not only of African American survival and success, it has been the secret of America’s survival and success.37
Height was not the only black female civil rights heroine who Obama honored. On February 27, 2013, Rosa Parks became the first black woman to have a life-size statue erected in the Capitol. In National Statuary Hall, Obama delivered the dedication. “Rosa Parks tells us there’s always something we can do.” He continued, her “singular act of disobedience launched a movement.” With these words Obama contributed to the archaic top-down notion of the civil rights movement. Yet, like her leading biographer Jeanne Theoharis, he acknowledged that before and after refusing to give up her seat on the bus, Parks was and continued to be an activist.
One of Obama’s speeches stands out for its treatment of black women: his 2015 oration at the CBC’s 45th Annual Phoenix Awards Dinner. On this occasion, he zeroed in on black women, past and present, because he, speaking for the black male collective, wanted them “to know how much we appreciate them, how much we admire them, how much we love them.” Echoing scores of black women historians from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Obama pointed out that black women were at the forefront of the civil rights movement, “a part of every great movement in American history even if they weren’t always given a voice.” He stressed that black women were working “behind the scenes … making things happen everyday.” We are all, he pressed home, “beneficiaries of a long line of strong black women.”38 Obama, whose biological mother is white, closed ranks with black motherhood.
In addition to heaping praise upon black women, Obama was also critical of his male predecessors who at the March on Washington nearly five decades earlier snubbed black women, only allowing Daisy Bates the “honor” of introducing male speakers. “The men gave women just 142 words,” Obama continued:
America’s most important march against segregation had its own version of separation. Black women were central in the fight for women’s rights, from suffrage to the feminist movement and yet despite their leadership, too often they were also marginalized. But they didn’t give up. They were too fierce for that. Black women have always understood the words of Pauli Murray—that “Hope is a song in a weary throat.”39
In the remainder of his speech, Obama linked the past marginalization of black women to their present status by stressing the necessity of continuing to fight for the “full opportunity and equality” for black women and girls. He identified the pressing challenges facing black women (namely unemployment, health disparities, unequal pay, stereotypes, incarceration, violence, and sexual abuse), yet celebrated black women’s accomplishments in business, education, and motherhood.
He wrapped up his speech in a familiar tone, giving thanks to those nameless black women who “risked everything” not only for their survival but also for the welfare of future generations: “Their names never made the history books. All those women who cleaned somebody else’s house, or looked after somebody else’s children, did somebody else’s laundry, and then got home and did it again, and then went to church and cooked—and then they were marching.”40
“THANK YOU TO THE NAACP”
One of Obama’s primary black audiences was the NAACP. On July 16, 2009, Obama spoke at the organization’s centennial in New York City. This thirty-seven-minute speech was clearly crafted for a majority black audience, albeit middle class. There were certainly hip-hop generationers in the audience—it should not be overlooked that the then organization’s president and chief executive officer, Benjamin Todd Jealous (b. 1973), is a hip-hop generationer who took office in 2008.
Immediately, Obama referenced the “journey” that African Americans had made since that time “when Jim Crow was a way of life; when lynchings were all too common, and when race riots were shaking cities across a segregated land.” Unlike in “A More Perfect Union,” in which he credits all Americans for challenging the past racial status quo, in this speech he specifically credited black leaders and civil rights activists like W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, the Little Rock Nine, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, “all the civil rights giants,” and even Emmett Till’s uncle, Mose Wright, for making history and paving the way for his presidency. He also affirmed personal links between himself and black America’s past.
Obama unpacked how historical discrimination impacts the present by highlighting the major historically rooted problems that disproportionally affect black America and offered rudimentary remedies. Invoking the long tradition of black self-help and seemingly sampling from Malcolm X, Obama posited that African Americans have internalized oppression. “We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes—because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way that we have internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves.” He also pointed to himself as being a role model for the hip-hop generation. He declared that “our kids” need to
set their sights higher. They might think they’ve got a pretty good jump shot or a pretty good flow, but our kids can’t all aspire to be the next LeBron or Lil Wayne. I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice. I want them aspiring to be President of the United States.41
Sampling from James Weldon Johnson’s classic poem/song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (later known as the Black National Anthem), Obama rounded off his speech by invoking a connectedness to the black past as well as to enduring spirits of survival and perseverance that characterize the African American experience. Sharing his family’s experience at the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, he avowed:
There, reflecting on the dungeon beneath the castle church, I was reminded of all the pain and all the hardships, all the injustices and all the indignities on the voyage from slavery to freedom … I was reminded that no matter how bitter the rod or how stony the road, we have persevered. We have not faltered, nor have we grown weary … One hundred years from now, on the 200th anniversary of the NAACP, let it be said that this generation did its part; that we too ran the race; that full of the faith that our dark past has taught us, full of the hope that the present has brought us, we faced, in our own lives and all across this nation, the rising sun of a new day begun.42
In July 2015, Obama delivered one of his most fervent speeches to a large energized NAACP audience at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, a critical appraisal of the US criminal justice system, “one aspect of American life that remains particularly skewed by race and by wealth.” This assessment of this flawed institution was more critical than the one he delivered eight months earlier at the Rutgers University Center for Law and Justice. Celebrating its 106th anniversary, Obama praised the NAACP for battling against lynching, segregation, and disenfranchisement and repeated one of his catchphrases—“I would not be here, and so many would not be here, without the NAACP.” He observed that young blacks’ life chances were threatened by a biased criminal justice system that had historically oppressed black America. “Part of this is a legacy of hundreds of years of slavery and segregation, and structural inequities that compounded over generations,” Obama pronounced. “There’s a long history of inequity in the criminal justice system in America.”43
What’s more, he suggested that this was a conspiracy of some sort: “It did not happen by accident.” This declaration