More important (and like Washington before him), Obama—who deliberately and logically avoided discussing issues of race and the unfavorable status of black America as much as possible during his campaigning and presidency—had to speak simultaneously to black and white America (to say nothing of other groups) about sensitive past and present racial matters. In perhaps the most consequential speech of his political career, “A More Perfect Union” (2008), Obama masterfully appeased large segments of both black and white listeners. In a sense, this speech foreshadowed Obama’s future stratagem for coming to grips with issues of race and dreadful episodes in black history to white listeners.
Still, in numerous speeches that he delivered to predominantly black audiences, such as the NAACP, African American congregations, students at historically black colleges and universities, and impromptu meetings with African Americans, Obama spoke “familiarly Black” and more frankly revisited the black past and its lingering influence on African Americans’ contemporary status. In speaking “familiarly Black,” as Washington did when kicking it with black farmers, Obama also echoed the “pick yourself up by your own bootstraps” ethos and respectability politics of Washington and his contemporaries.
When deciphering Obama’s rendering of African American history, as is the case with Washington and other crossover black leaders, one thing is crystal clear: it is essential to recognize to whom he was speaking and the specific circumstances and context.
REMIXING BLACK HISTORY: HISTORICAL DEBTS, MEMORIES, AND REVIVALISM
While running for the US Senate in Illinois, Obama delivered a memorable keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston in which he endorsed the then US senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry, in his quest to become the next commander-in-chief of the United States. While serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 until 2004, Obama delivered numerous speeches, yet with this well-rehearsed seventeen-minute talk he captured notable attention, truly captivating and electrifying his audience. It marked a turning point in his political career. Three years later, on February 10, 2007, he officially announced his candidacy for President of the United States. From this point on, he further honed his prowess as an orator by delivering thousands of different speeches.
In terms of substance, subject matter, and rhetorical style, Obama adjusted and modified his speeches based upon the racial and generational makeup of his targeted audiences. Certain features stand out when reading, listening to, or watching talks that he gave to predominantly white and black audiences and multiracial crowds. Obama offered these distinct audiences discrete and in some cases mismatched and conflicting depictions and interpretations of African American history.
In his 2004 DNC keynote address, for instance, he famously declared: “There’s not a black America and white America …” He also intimated to his largely white audience that he was the epitome of the ever so elusive “American Dream” and owed a debt to his nation. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all those who came before me, and that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”26 Compare this to other speeches that Obama bequeathed unto his African American audiences and one immediately notices a different modus operandi. “And for most of this country’s past, we in the African American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity,” Obama preached to the congregation—his “brothers and sisters” as he affectionately called his eager spectators—at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, ten months before he was elected President of the United States.27 Similarly, in many heart-to-hearts with overlapping generations of African Americans, Obama emphasized that his success was due to the sacrifices of famous and uncelebrated black civil rights activists, that he indeed stood on the “shoulders of giants.”
Of the many speeches that Obama delivered to predominantly black audiences, his first keynote address at a “Bloody Sunday” commemoration on March 4, 2007, at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, was one of his most history-centric. It was in this sermonlike address that Obama established his often-cited discussion of the Moses and Joshua generations. The fact that Obama transmitted such an account in a black church is not surprising. He knew the importance of the black church, “our beating heart,” as a conduit of black liberation theology and a vital movement center. His former mentor, pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, taught him this. In late June 2015 while reflecting upon the murder of Reverend Clementa Pinckney of Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama gave prominence to the black church. “The church is and always has been at the center of African-American life—a place to call our own in a too often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships.” All too often, however, black churches were terrorized as well. For him, the “Charleston Church Massacre” on June 17, 2015, “was an act that drew upon a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress.”28
Obama launched into his “Bloody Sunday” address by praising Congressman John Lewis, C. T. Vivian, and other members of the civil rights, or Moses, generation who paved the way for him. “It is because they marched that I stand before you today,” Obama reiterated. After validating his Afro-diasporic blackness by drawing stark parallels between the British colonial system that oppressed his Kenyan grandfather and Jim Crow segregation in the United States (“Sound familiar?”), Obama underscored that the Joshua generation—those who came of age after the “classic” phase of the civil rights movement—owed a “debt,” conceivably unrepayable, to their selfless predecessors.
Obama evoked a knowledge of the black past as a prerequisite for the Joshua generation’s responsibility to “fulfill that legacy.” He pronounced:
I think that we’re always going to be looking back, but there are at least a few suggestions that I would have in terms of how we might fulfill that enormous legacy. The first is to recognize our history. John Lewis talked about why we’re here today. But I worry sometimes—we’ve got black history month, we come down and march every year, once a year. We occasionally celebrate the events of the civil rights movement, we celebrate Dr. King’s birthday, but it strikes me that understanding our history and knowing what it means, is an everyday activity.29
He then enumerated the lingering problems facing the collective black community, from educational inequities to poverty to low-quality health conditions. Central to Obama’s homily was his belief that the Moses generation set unattainable standards for everything from social and political activism to perceptions of “sacrifice,” “dignity,” “hard work and discipline,” and morality. In doing so, upon more than a few occasions, he chastised young black people, mainly members of the millennial hip-hop generation. “I can’t say for certain that we have instilled that same sense of moral clarity and purpose in this generation,” Obama lamented as he joined forces with the Moses generation and beseeched the Joshua generation to become politically active and to “do for ourselves.”
There are discernable patterns and themes concerning the meaning, utility, and application of black history from Obama’s 2007 “Bloody Sunday” oration that would continue to surface in his future talks to black listeners. When sounding off to his “brothers and sisters,” Obama positioned civil rights activists (the Moses generation) as being the progenitors and standard bearers of the long black freedom struggle, he situated himself within the history of black leadership, he drew connections between the past and the present, he commented on habitual obstacles that African Americans overcame, and he argued that the contemporary black community owed a debt to the past. Still, Obama often sidestepped indicting white America for its mistreatment of African Americans before black audiences.
A few exceptions stand out. On May 5, 2007, and June 5, 2007, Obama spoke to black mayors in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and black ministers in Hampton, Virginia, respectively. In both of these speeches, Obama denounced white America’s mistreatment of black people. Reflecting upon the beating of Rodney