Obama delivers eulogy for slain S.C. pastor
President invokes race, faith in eulogy for slain S.C. pastor
President praises the grace shown by victims’ families and calls for “more lasting change.”
CHARLESTON, S.C. — President Barack Obama challenged the nation Friday to face up to its legacy of racial discrimination, insisting that it would betray the memory of the victims of the black church massacre here to “allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence once again.”
In a funeral address in which he frequently slipped into the cadences of a pastor and even led the predominantly black audience in a rendition of “Amazing Grace,” Obama returned repeatedly to the themes of race and religion. He praised the grace shown by the victims’ families and hailed South Carolina’s quick action to seek to remove the Confederate battle flag from its Capitol grounds in response to the racially motivated killings, but said, “I don’t think God wants us to stop there.”
In his eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Obama said the shocking nature of the killing of nine worshipers, — including Pinckney — the pastor of Emanuel AME Church and a state senator — required that Americans not “settle for symbolic gestures” and follow up “with the hard work of more lasting change.”
“For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present,” he said. “Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.”
At times in his more than six years in office, Obama has seemed to struggle with the expectations that came with being the nation’s first black president, particularly in speaking about race. References to his faith have also been sparing, a consequence in part of the political challenge that his affiliation with a combative black pastor posed during his first presidential campaign.
He seemed unencum- bered Friday. A draft of his remarks prepared for the president’s review Thursday night was returned to aides the next morning with significant revisions and additions, made by Obama on a yellow legal pad to incorporate his own reflections.
He called for reforms to the criminal justice system and policing tactics as well as an examination of how bias “can infect us even when we don’t realize it.”
The grace shown by the families of the nine victims toward the suspect in the massacre, Dylann Roof, was an example for others to emulate, Obama said.
“None of us can or should expect a transformation in race relations overnight,” he said. “Every time something like this happens, somebody says, ‘We have to have a conversation about race.’ We talk a lot about race. There’s no shortcut. We don’t need more talk.”
Thousands lined the sweltering streets of historic downtown Charleston hoping to claim a seat for Obama’s eulogy during Pinckney’s funeral at the TD Arena, just blocks from the Emanuel Church.
The audience inside included Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and about 40 members of Congress, including House Speaker John Boehner, who for the first time joined Obama on Air Force One to travel here.
They joined in what was for much of the day a celebratory atmosphere, full of joyful hymns and solemn prayers for Pinckney that preceded Obama’s arrival.
To cries of “Amen,” the Rev. John Richard Bryant, the senior bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal church, said that many wondered why “they have not viewed more anger and bitterness and hatred as a result of the blow we’ve taken.”
“Our secret is in our Lord,” he said. “Someone,” he said, “should have told the young man: He wanted to start a race war. But he came to the wrong place.”
Obama likewise praised the community’s response.
“Oh, but God works in mysterious ways,” he said.
Obama praised Republican Gov. Nikki Haley for her leadership in calling for the permanent removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s state Capitol, a call quickly joined by a host of other prominent Republicans. That flag, Obama said, “has always represented more than just ancestral pride,” and to many was a reminder of systemic oppression. Its removal did not dishonor Confederate soldiers, he said, but “the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong.”
The emotion in the arena was palpable when Obama returned to his speech’s theme of grace by singing that familiar church hymn.
After singing, Obama listed the nine victims by name, followed by a pronouncement that each had “found that grace.”
“Through the example of their lives, they’ve now passed it on to us,” he said, then offered a brief prayer: “May we find ourselves worthy of that precious and extraordinary gift.”