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It was not the war, or the economy, or George Bush that got Barack Obama elected. It was the power of the written and the spoken word. I have no proof of this other than the look on the faces and the tears in the eyes of those who came out on election night to hear him.
“The road ahead will be long,” he said to his supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park, dignitaries and common citizens alike. “Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there … I promise you, we as a people will get there.”
If those splendid lines sound familiar, it’s because they were written to evoke the last speech ever delivered by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. before his assassination:
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land! And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
In this speech, delivered in Memphis in 1968, King equates the plight of black Americans with that of the Israelites under the heel of the Pharaoh. That analogy has been a commonplace in the African-American homiletic and musical traditions, but what stands out is King’s self-identification with Moses as leader of his people out of slavery. According to the biblical account, Moses, because of his failings, was not permitted by God to enter the Promised Land but was permitted to see it. So, King imagines with prophetic clairvoyance, he may not be there to see the day of salvation.
When many African-Americans heard Obama utter the phrase “we as a people will get there,” they understood he was talking directly to them. But, as my colleague Keith Woods explained so eloquently to me, Obama used the occasion to expand the definition of “we,” for no longer is “we” a race. “We” is now a nation. America. Perhaps the world. And as our new leader, Obama places himself, without irony or self-deprecation, in a genealogical and oratorical line that extends from Lincoln to King to himself.
This is very tricky business. Obama’s opponents tried unsuccessfully to turn his virtues into vices, deriding his oratory as uppity rhetoric and his sense of legacy as messianic hubris. Anytime a politician invokes a classic line from a historical figure, he or she runs the risk of hearing from the public: “Mr. Obama, we knew Dr. King, and you, sir, are no Martin Luther King.” Nor is he yet an Abraham Lincoln or a Nelson Mandela.
Hanging in my office is an Associated Press photo dated April 27, 1994. It shows an aerial view of long serpentine lines of black voters waiting to cast their first ballots in the post-apartheid South Africa. It is an inspirational image, the double helix of a new democracy, showing the passion and patience of a people who have found their collective voice in the form of a free election.
I visited South Africa just two months after those events, and it felt like being a citizen of Philadelphia in 1776, a new nation, to quote Lincoln, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Another famous image from those elections was that of two young men carrying an ancient woman by the arms so that she could vote for the first time.
In his election night remarks, Obama described a similar moment:
This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight’s about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.
What follows is a brief history lesson in which we see the momentous changes of the last century through the life experience of this one person. So perhaps it can be said that the 2008 presidential election was about lines that created lines, that is, lines of great political oratory that inspired voters to stand on lines for hours to vote.
November 19 happens to be the anniversary for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which I memorized when I was 9 years old and delivered, word for word, to my fourth grade class. In re-reading it now, it is obvious how often President Lincoln, speaking in 1863 while the Civil War still raged, uses the first person plural: our, we, us. Thirteen times in just three paragraphs. He was talking, of course, to his countrymen of the North, who had won a great defining victory at Gettysburg at the cost of 7,000 lives, many of them buried in mass graves. But there were Southern corpses buried in those mass graves, too, and the power of those carefully scripted words, not scribbled on an envelope as legend holds, persuades the reader that Lincoln’s “we” was as broad and inclusive as Obama’s.
Gene Patterson, editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution during the Civil Rights era, describes the history of race in America as a set of political upheavals provoked by the establishment of slavery in our founding documents. It took the Civil War to remove that stain from the American soul. But it took another century and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s to tear down the American system of apartheid, those legal barriers to racial equality. What would have to come next, Patterson still argues, is a “revolution of the heart.” It’s easy to wonder whether the seeds of such a revolution were made manifest in hearts of millions Tuesday as they walked into the voting booth.
