[It is highly instructive that in his victory speech
Obama elected to narrate modern American history in
terms of the experiences of a Black woman suffering
discrimination on both the counts of being a woman and
a Black and flagging the milestones on the way to
Change, highlighting the need to go much further -
reminding the audience of the long way ahead and the
steepness of the climb.
He also pointedly drew attention to the oppressive
history of slavery.
The ringing signature tune was of course: Yes, We Can!
(Yes, We've Done! Yes, We're To Do So Much More!)]
http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/savoring-the-undertones-and-lingering-subtleties-of-obamas-victory-speech/
November 7, 2008, 4:55 pm
Savoring the Undertones and Lingering Subtleties of
Obama's Victory Speech
By Brent Staples
Like many great orations, Barack Obama's victory
speech on Tuesday night was deceptively simple. As
powerful as it was to hear, the hidden complexities
and import of the president-elect's words surface only
after we re-read the text and think back on the
moment.
A confirmed fan of Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Obama drew on
another flawless speech, the Gettysburg Address (pdf)
("a government of the people, by the people and for
the people has not perished from the earth"), while
also celebrating both the inherited majesty of the
Democratic process and his own achievement — the broad
coalition that elected him.
He echoed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ( "the arc of the
moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice'')
when he praised the electorate for rejecting the
rhetoric of fear and for " put[ting] their hands on
the arc of history and bend[ing] it once more toward
the hope of a better day.''
But this remarkable speaker had more on his mind than
classical citations. Woven through his address was
nothing less than an attempt to broaden the meaning of
America's founding documents - and its living
democracy - by expanding the list of the people who
come to mind when Americans think of "the Founders.''
This mission is evident in the opening stanza:
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that
America is a place where all things are possible, who
still wonders if the dream of our Founders is alive in
our time, who still questions the power of our
democracy, tonight is your answer.
By this he meant to include the many men and women —
Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner
Truth, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther
King — who have worked and sometimes died in the fight
to extend the full rights of citizenship to people
(African-American and female) who were initially
denied them. He implicitly credited these women's
rights and civil rights giants with working to create
a more perfect union.
In other words, he was including the white fathers —
but not only them.
The speech recognized Thomas Jefferson and the framers
of the Constitution. It leaned heavily on Lincoln, who
orchestrated a second founding by reuniting a sundered
nation through the Civil War and pointing the country
toward the abolition of slavery.
Still, Mr. Obama knows full well that neither
Jefferson nor Lincoln ever "dreamed" of an America in
which a person of African descent would ascend to the
highest office in the land.
Jefferson, like many of his most influential
contemporaries, hewed to the idea that black people
would be forever set apart from their fellow citizens.
Had it been in his power, black slaves would have been
trained, set free, and sent to live apart in Africa or
the West Indies.
Virginians took this notion seriously. Seven years
after Jefferson's death, for example, the state
legislature conducted a special census to determine if
free people of color would agree to leave the state
and be resettled in Africa. Among the Negroes who
declined to go were Jefferson's long-time slave and
lover Sally Hemings and Jefferson's two Negro sons,
Madison and Eston Hemings.
Paradoxically, Sally, Madison and Eston Hemings had
more white than black ancestry — and had actually been
counted as free white people in a previous census. But
like many people of color in that period, they found
that membership in the majority was tenuous and easily
revoked. Leaving Virginia for Ohio after their
mother's death, Madison and Eston found their rights
as citizens increasingly curtailed.
Lincoln, too, believed in colonization. Speaking to a
group of black dignitaries in 1862, he argued that
blacks and whites could never live together
harmoniously and said: "If this be admitted, it
affords a reason at least why we should be
separated.'' He argued for colonization in a
preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation,
which began circulating that same year. But the
passage was dropped from the final version after
Lincoln failed to find political support for it.
The proclamation was a tactical military document,
forged in heat of the Civil War, that was intended to
improve the Union's chance of winning. It ended
slavery in the states that were in rebellion, while
preserving it the border states that had sided with
the Union and other areas that were under Union
control. Even so, the final document (pdf) allowed
that emancipation was "an act of justice, warranted by
the Constitution.''
Slavery was abolished with the ratification of 13th
Amendment in 1865. But it took another 100 years — and
more work by a subsequent set of Founders — before
black Americans and women could fully claim the rights
articulated in the founding documents.
That claim had yet to be fully exercised in the summer
of 1963, when Dr. King delivered the "I Have a Dream
Speech" at the March On Washington.
As Dr. King said at the time:
When the architects of our republic wrote the
magnificent words of the Constitution and the
Declaration of Independence, they were signing a
promissory note to which every American was to fall
heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black
men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the
"unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit
of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has
defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her
citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring
this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro
people a bad check, a check which has come back marked
"insufficient funds."
Some listeners heard hints of grandiosity in Mr.
Obama's assertion that this election proved that "the
dream of our Founders is alive in our time.'' But he
was clearly referring to the founding ideals as they
were improved upon and transfused through subsequent
generations of founders who, like King, worked toward
the "more perfect union" that Lincoln himself had
talked about.
Mr. Obama's moment would not have been possible
without the interventions of those latter-day
founders.
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