In arguably the most important speech in his political career, Obama established an approach to publicly speaking about black history to white America that he would continue to use. Most important, he further honed his skills at code-switching.
“My fellow citizens: I stand here today,” Obama opened his historic inaugural address on January 20, 2009, “humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you’ve bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.” If my fellow citizens were removed from these opening lines, it would not be unreasonable to assume that Obama was addressing a predominantly black audience. After all, he routinely celebrated the far-reaching sacrifices made by previous generations of African Americans, especially the Moses generation. As was the case with “A More Perfect Union,” in his inaugural address, he was, of course, speaking to a predominantly white audience; therefore, in evoking our, us, and we he was referring to all Americans. “Our ancestors” and “our forebears” for Obama was a double entendre: catch-all terms for past generations of Americans and a patriotic reference to “our Founding Fathers.” In fact, he spoke of the proslavery “Founding Fathers” in a manner similar to how he previously and later hailed the Moses generation to black audiences. “Our Founding Fathers,” he pronounced, were “faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine.” Under such circumstances, he maintained, they persevered and created enduring ideals. “We are keepers of this legacy,” Obama announced. In charting the “work of remaking America,” he revisited the black past only in passing, mentioning those who “endured the lash of the whip” and “tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation.”52
Without delving into America’s troubled racial history, Obama assured Americans that one of the best ways for the nation to move forward was by returning to the values and “truth” of the past, “the quiet force of progress throughout history.” In doing so, he ignored the widespread oppression of African Americans. He concluded his inaugural address by citing the “timeless words” of George Washington. How did the first black president reconcile the fact that in 1799 America’s first president owned 123 slaves at Mount Vernon? His veneration of Washington was similar to his praise song to “the small band of patriots” in his annual remarks on the South Lawn in honor of the Fourth of July. If Obama had been speaking to one of his black audiences, he would have most likely quoted Martin Luther King Jr. or another icon from the civil rights era (maybe even Douglass’s famous 1852 speech).
At the beginning of his second term, Obama spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. He highlighted the interracial nature of the march and credited the marchers with profoundly altering American society—“Because they marched,” he repeated. He expressed that Americans owed a debt to these activists, an obligation similar to the one that he assigned to younger blacks toward the Moses generation. In identifying martyrs, he strategically eulogized black and white freedom fighters—Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and Martin Luther King Jr.—and, in a sense echoing white conservatives who have appropriated King’s “dream,” he de-raced King’s sentiments. “What King was describing has been the dream of every American,” he commented. And whenever he singled out African Americans, he added “all races” or the phrase “regardless of race.” He drew connections between 1963 and 2013, acknowledging that the 1960s belonged to a much more challenging era than the new millennium but that parallels did exist between the two. For Obama, the most important legacy of the March on Washington was unity, cross-racial coalitions and exhibiting “empathy and fellow feeling.” For him, “the lesson of our past” is that “when millions of Americans of every race” unite, monumental change can be brought about.53
A month prior to this monumental speech, however, Obama spoke out in a very personal and persuasive way about racial profiling and the criminalization of black men.
“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son,” Obama divulged in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room about one week after George Zimmerman was found not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter. “Another way of saying that is,” he added, “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” These phrases from Obama’s speech made headlines nationwide and marked a noticeable shift in Obama’s stance toward racial profiling. What most newshawks ignored was important. Obama historicized Martin’s murder: “I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.” He expanded on this unchanging and persistent history:
The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws … And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case … [B]lack folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.54
Several years later, Obama continued to speak out about the lingering impact of tragic aspects of black history. “We gather here today to commemorate a century and a half of freedom,” Obama introduced his fourteen minutes’ worth of remarks celebrating the 150th anniversary of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. To soften the blow and connect with his white listeners in the US Capitol, he added that this ceremony was “not simply for former slavers, but for all of us.”55 Casting Lincoln as a stalwart abolitionist and honorary black freedom fighter in the company of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr., Obama memorialized Americans—“black and white,” “men and women”—who helped bring down slavery.
Conceivably steering away from potential queries about reparations (a struggle that he shrugged off early during his first presidential campaign), Obama did not mention how cotton was “King”; in other words, the incalculable wealth that slave labor generated for the US government for more than two hundred years. He did, nevertheless, make it plain that the legacy of slavery endured even though the country had made great progress. “For another century, we saw segregation and Jim Crow make a mockery of these amendments,” he proclaimed as he did when speaking to the NAACP, “And we saw justice turn a blind eye to mobs with nooses slung over trees. We saw bullets and bombs terrorize generations.”56 Obama had referenced lynching in earlier orations, but this is perhaps the only time that he linked past maltreatment of African Americans with domestic terrorism. As to be expected, he chased up this indictment with an optimistic request that “our generation be willing to do what those who came before us have done” in standing up for others’ freedoms.
In evoking lynching in this manner, Obama had come a long way since October 2009 when he signed off on the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Act. The brutal, ritualistic, and premeditated murder of Byrd by three white men was by definition a lynching, a “lynching-by-dragging” as it has been dubbed. It was reminiscent of instances when white mobs—“the assemblage of two or more persons”—murdered black men during the “nadir” period. In his remarks at the reception commemorating the Act, Obama neglected to point out in his description of Byrd’s death how similar his murder was to the killings of black men that were commonplace a century earlier. As historian Philip Dray has reminded us: “Almost every black family has a story in its history of an ancestor who ‘come up missing’ … Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, fears of racial profiling and the police,