NEW YORK TIMES: Barack Obama’s eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., was remarkable not only because the president sang the opening refrain of “Amazing Grace” on live television, and not only because of his eloquence in memorializing the pastor and eight other parishioners killed by a white gunman. It was also remarkable because the eulogy drew on all of Mr. Obama’s gifts of language and empathy and searching intellect — first glimpsed in “Dreams From My Father,” his deeply felt 1995 memoir about identity and family. And because it used those gifts to talk about the complexities of race and justice, situating them within an echoing continuum in time that reflected both Mr. Obama’s own long view of history, and the panoramic vision of America, shared by Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as a country in the process of perfecting itself…
For Mr. Obama, America is “a constant work in progress,” a nation founded upon the idea of new beginnings, and the enduring belief, as he once wrote in an essay about Lincoln, that “we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.” Like his two moving speeches in Selma, Ala., in 2007 and this year, Mr. Obama’s eulogy used the prism of history to amplify and crystallize the meaning of the occasion — a wide-angle lens that reminds us of the distance we’ve come from the days of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow, and the distance we have yet to travel in addressing enduring prejudice and inequities…
A draft of the Charleston eulogy was given to the president around 5 p.m. on June 25 and, according to Mr. Keenan, Mr. Obama spent some five hours revising it that evening, not merely jotting notes in the margins, but whipping out the yellow legal pads he likes to write on — only the second time he’s done so for a speech in the last two years. He would rewrite large swaths of the text… (more)
