★| 8 |★
The last week of June 2015 had been the greatest week of Obama’s presidency, and one of the greatest weeks any president had ever had.1 The Supreme Court had delivered surprising victories for the president by upholding Obamacare’s nationwide insurance subsidies on Thursday, and legalizing same-sex marriage across America the next day. Although it wasn’t as loudly touted, the nation’s highest court on Thursday also upheld a central legal argument put forth by the Obama administration: that claims of racial discrimination in housing shouldn’t be limited by questions of intent but should be determined by discriminatory effect. Obama had begun the week with a big victory on his Pacific Rim trade deal by receiving a green light from the Senate to negotiate trade with eleven countries.
And then on Friday afternoon, Barack Obama delivered the eulogy for fallen South Carolina state senator and Emanuel AME pastor Reverend Clementa Pinckney—arguably the most crucial speech of his presidency. The nation had been shocked by Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine souls at prayer at Emanuel. The president stepped into the pulpit to celebrate a martyr for black freedom, which has always meant, but never more clearly than now, the freedom of the nation to be its best.
Obama knew the minister, but not well, a fact that had moral utility: Pinckney was a proxy for all those who had lost their lives in the recent siege of racial terror that was sweeping the nation. Roof claimed in his sick manifesto that black people were taking over, a delusion easily rebutted on the same Internet that fed the gunman’s twisted logic. No single person better embodied black progress, and therefore scared white terrorists more, than Barack Obama. Could it be that unarmed blacks who were dying across the nation were urban proxies for the black presidency and the change it had brought? Those who can’t aim a gun at Obama take whatever black lives they can. Roof is not, therefore, a lone wolf. A better way of saying this is that calling him a lone wolf hardly denies the hatred of the philosophical pack from which he separated; the evil he reflects is deeply entrenched in our culture. The banner he killed under did not go away when the Confederate flag—which should have come down long ago—was removed.2
When Obama stood in the pulpit as president, he bore a guilt for which he was in no way individually responsible; it was instead a symbolic guilt as the shining emblem of black mobility that the killer found so offensive. It is a guilt that very few human beings can ever fully know or understand: Martin Luther King Jr. was wracked with guilt for being the centerpiece of a freedom movement that so many others participated in and died for. It was not simply a matter of knowing that many others deserved credit. It was understanding that his actions provoked, deliberately at times, the established order to deadly response: fire hoses washing away black bodies, police dogs tearing into black flesh, billy clubs lowered on black heads, bullets unloaded in black backs. Of course King was not responsible for a single death as leader of the movement; that responsibility lay in the belly of white terror that he agitated, and which spit up those black bodies in retching compensation for the pressure they put on the anatomy of white privilege. But King still felt guilt despite knowing that what he did was necessary if black people were to be free in a racist society that would deny their freedom as long as they were afraid to demand it or die for it. For King it wasn’t merely a matter of racial guilt, either, but a theological one as well. Every Christian minister is a stand-in for God, who, as Christ, grappled with death and bore the weight of sin, of human guilt, on his shoulders. The act of preaching is the ritual reenactment of that sacrifice, and of symbolically taking on guilt. Obama bore both theological and political guilt that day when he climbed the pulpit as our nation’s First Preacher.
Obama’s body, again, was at a crossroads. He had often spoken of the benefits of his biracial biography; it was needed now more than ever, for the black and white elements that went into his making were at loggerheads, incessantly. Had his presidency put an end to racism or reignited its burning terror? Roof, of course, gave his answer, mad, literally, that black folk seem always to talk of race while whites hardly speak of it at all. Of course black folk spoke of the pain in their gut, the burr under their saddle, the weight around their neck, the invisible cloud that poured rain on their slow and forever-delayed parade to parity. Even whites who are not racists wonder the same thing: Why are blacks obsessed with race; why can’t they stop navel-gazing when the world lies before them for the taking; instead of moaning the blues, why can’t they make an honest go of it like whites had to?
Obama had tapped some of this sentiment in his speeches, especially his famed race address in Philadelphia. But now was not the time to lay into blacks, but to back them; an unforeseen opening had arrived when Governor Haley and Senator Graham of South Carolina both said that the Confederate flag should no longer wave its despotic message over their State House grounds. Like Obama, Haley and Graham bore a kind of symbolic guilt, too, for having vigorously defended a symbol of hate that masqueraded instead as a sign of southern heritage. Haley and Graham thus expiated their guilt, and the guilt of their fellow South Carolinians, by vigorously embracing an interpretation of the flag they would have disputed the day before Roof’s racist rampage.
If ever there was doubt that Obama is the celebrated compromise between black assertion and white resistance, moments like this confirmed his value on either side of the divide, which, inevitably, left both sides hungry for more. He could never be white enough, given his brown skin; and his blackness had always to be contained, circumspect, signified, radiated, implicit—always threatening to flare at the wrong moment. Calling a white cop stupid. Saying a black boy in Florida killed by a rogue neighborhood watchman could have been his son. Obama had always to field demands from some blacks to be blacker, and the wish of many whites to whitewash the story of American race and politics. He was shadowed between the ideals and the realities of race and identity in America. But he had made it a productive tension, one that put him in office and thus increased the pressure on him to reconcile the two—a challenge he had often shirked, one from which he begged relief, one he sometimes denied being aware of. Obama had often had to be both Christ and Peter: the evidence of the resurrection of racial progress to come, and the denial of the suffering blackness through which it might emerge.
If Haley and Graham had to confess their guilt about the flag, Obama had fences to mend, too, for having dispensed to black people too much tough love and not enough tender loving care. It was important for the nation to see him loving black people without hesitation or apology. There is political import to such displays, for they highlight elements of black culture that are usually ignored until crisis comes. Just as Obama took pains to insist that most Americans are decent people, it is equally true that most black folk are loving and forgiving people. It may be true that those qualities—like survivors forgiving a white racist his evil deed even before their loved ones found their final resting place—shine brightest in catastrophe. But they beam, too, in everyday acts of valor, particularly in what blacks refuse to do: hate all police because of instances of egregious brutality, or make violent attempts to undo a criminal justice system that unfairly punishes black people. It is a wonder that black goodness, and sanity, survive the hidden injuries of race: the daily denials of opportunities; the withholding of resources, goods, and services; and the relentless assaults, both subtle and vocal, on the humanity of black folk. Obama knew better and should have said so more often, more publicly, more loudly. Now was his chance to broadcast to the world the beauty of black humanity.
When Obama stepped into the pulpit, he was greeted with organ chords and drumrolls, and a sea of royal purple behind him as the majesty of the AME bishopric engulfed him. The Baptist and Methodist churches, with their loose organizational structures and their less formal educational standards, had historically been more open to black slaves and their style of worship.3 When they left to form their own colored congregations, black folk sought to expand their biblical literacy and to deepen their mastery of rhetoric. Among those on the stage behind Obama was Vashti McKenzie, the first female bishop of the AME Church and one of the most gifted preachers in the nation. In the vast congregation of six thousand stretched out before him at the College of Charleston were Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, past masters of black sacred speech. Obama was surrounded by black rhetorical genius and the greatness of black music, and had every reason to tap both veins in his performance.
“Giving all praise and honor to God,” Obama began. Right off the bat he was signaling that he would not operate, at least not exclusively, as a politician, or even as president, but as preacher, with the phrase that accompanies many testimonies, speeches, and sermons in black churches—with a slight emendation: “Giving all praise and honor to God, who is the head of my life.”4 Obama need not go that far, to claim God as the head of his life, since that dependent clause might signal for some a personal claim that would make him vulnerable to rebuff—“Really? God is the head of your life as you conduct war and send drones?”—or unkind parody. The phrase as it stood drew applause and verbal affirmation from the audience.
“The Bible,” Obama said next, leaving no doubt as to his rhetorical anchor, following the Spirit with the Word of God, “calls us to hope. To persevere, and have faith in things not seen.” He didn’t have to mention that it was the same kind of hope he often spoke of, an audacious hope, a hope for which he named his second book as a way to capture his political vision. Obama read his scripture, as preachers are wont to do, except, unlike most of them, he didn’t tell us the source of his words, which in this case are from the eleventh chapter of the New Testament Book of Hebrews, a book that famously details the substance of faith and hope. We sensed there was something monumental about to happen, since only the epic can match the tragedy of what had occurred; it was being presaged in his announcing “scripture,” but not a particular scripture. The universal was hovering low, about to claim the eulogy as a conduit for the sort of truth that no one scripture can contain, but which reflects the whole of the book itself—the very idea of God’s word.
“We are here today to remember a man of God who lived by faith. A man who believed in things not seen. A man who believed there were better days ahead, off in the distance. A man of service who persevered, knowing full well he would not receive all those things he was promised, because he believed his efforts would deliver a better life for those who followed.”
After acknowledging Pinckney’s widow and daughters (how personal and painful that must have been, as Obama—in the presence of his own beautiful wife, Michelle, with their two precious daughters, Sasha and Malia, back home in Washington—saw before him the reflection of his own family and possible fate), Obama foreshadowed his theme of grace: “The first thing I noticed was his graciousness, his smile, his reassuring baritone, his deceptive sense of humor—all qualities that helped him wear so effortlessly a heavy burden of expectation.” Could not these words be spoken of the eulogist himself? His voice may have been an octave higher, his skin less chocolate, but they shared the same smile and humor. Black men so bright and accomplished so rarely offer love and recognition to one another in public, except, perhaps, on a hardwood court or at a music or movie awards show, and it is a shame that it is too often in death that compliments are bestowed.
Obama saluted Pinckney’s preacherly pedigree, telling us that he came from a long line of ministers who “spread God’s word, a family of protesters who sowed change to expand voting rights and desegregate the South. Clem heard their instruction, and he did not forsake their teaching.” Obama tied together Pinckney’s political and religious vocations, calling him an “anointed” man. Obama, of course, had grown to appreciate great preaching under the tutelage of Jeremiah Wright; this was an ode, indirectly, likely unintentionally, but no less effectively, to the spiritual side of Wright, the man who shaped Obama’s religious identity, a fact that gained little notice in their bitter contretemps. Obama spoke of Pinckney’s political work in representing “a sprawling swath of the Lowcountry, a place that has long been one of the most neglected in America. A place still wracked by poverty and inadequate schools; a place where children can still go hungry and the sick can go without treatment. A place that needed somebody like Clem.”
What he didn’t say, perhaps felt no need to say in light of the massacre, is that the problems of blacks in South Carolina run far deeper than bad schools, hunger, poverty, and poor health care. Black folks had waged perennial war against white supremacy from the day they set foot on South Carolina soil.5 Blacks had been rebelling against, and running away from, the brutal oppression of slavery and its punishing subtropical clime at least since September 9, 1739, the day of the infamous Stono Rebellion near Charleston, where forty-four black people, and twenty-one whites, were killed. It was the largest slave rebellion in the history of the British mainland colonies, though of course there were larger insurrections in the Caribbean and South America. The blacks in South Carolina were trying to get to Florida, which was then under Spanish rule; the British controlled Carolina. The king of Spain had issued an edict announcing that any slave who made it across St. Mary’s River in Florida would be free. Black folk made every effort on land and sea to get to St. Mary’s and secure their freedom. Those who made it created the first free black town in North America, Fort Mose, in Florida.
It should be remembered that 48 percent of all of the black people who entered the colonies, and the United States after 1776, until 1808, when the slave trade was outlawed, came to America through Charleston. It was so identifiably black that even the white people called it “Negro Country.”6 There is little wonder that Charleston is such a contested site for racist diehards and is ground zero in the history of tortured race relations in America. This history cannot be ignored in grappling with the Confederate flag and its relationship to the animus that flashed in deadly manner at Emanuel. Antiblack racism flows like a vicious current under the floorboards of American history; but under the floorboards of South Carolina, it rushes like a flood. Black people fought back in South Carolina; they risked their lives, and took the lives of their oppressors, to be free, and that terror—festering for nearly three hundred years—is just one of the motivations for the virulent racism that flowed through Dylann Roof into the lives of Charleston and indeed the nation.
The theme of grace played on Obama’s lips, especially as he contrasted grace to fallen humanity; the killer, Obama declared, was blind to grace in all the ways it shone during and after his fatal act.
Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group—the light of love that shone as they opened the church doors and invited a stranger to join in their prayer circle. The alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court—in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness. He couldn’t imagine that.
The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston, under the good and wise leadership of Mayor Riley[,] . . . how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond—not merely with revulsion at his evil act, but with big-hearted generosity and, more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life.
Obama explicitly embraced his theme as he acknowledged that for the “whole week, I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace.” Obama spoke of the grace of the families left behind by the massacre, and said that grace was a topic Pinckney had often preached about. Obama recited lines from one of his favorite hymns: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind but now I see.” Obama brilliantly played on the blindness that plagues the American soul—blindness to the pain unfurled in waving the Confederate flag; blindness to how the harm of the past, in slavery and Jim Crow, caught up to the present in mass incarceration, tension and mistrust between cops and blacks, and the attack on voting rights—and how, with incredible grace, with God’s grace, black folk overcame.
Like any good preacher, Obama had a working theological definition of grace as he encouraged the congregation to forge ahead and find the meaning of God’s grace in their hearts and in neighborhoods across the land:
According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace. As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and short-sightedness and fear of each other—but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace. But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.
It’s a dangerous prospect for a professional politician to wade into theological complexities and to offer his view of faith, but Obama garnered confidence in the preaching moment. He shows, too, the political utility of grace. There is a subtle rebuke to political self-portraits of romantic, rugged individualism that refashioned a do-it-yourself pragmatism into a mythology of the self-made man. We are all indebted, the president reminds us, to a grace we didn’t earn—and of course the nation has also benefited from so much black labor and black grace that it didn’t earn. Obama had earlier, in the 2012 campaign, during a stump speech in Virginia, got in trouble with conservatives when he claimed that “if you’ve got a business”—in the line that got yanked out of context and repeated—“you didn’t build that.” But the broader context and true meaning were deliberately missed:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me—because they want to give something back . . . [I]f you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own . . . I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen . . .
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together . . . We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people.7
In the context of the funeral, the reminder of grace had a political and racial resonance that was hard to miss.
If Obama had been, before, hesitant to embrace his blackness, and to call it by its name, allow it to name him, and to use it as a lens on America, the hesitation melted this day. In a remarkable passage Obama argues that America has been blind to how the past colors our present racial moment and therefore blind to how we have missed out on God’s grace:
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. Perhaps it causes us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate. Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal justice system and leads us to make sure that that system is not infected with bias; that we embrace changes in how we train and equip our police so that the bonds of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve make us all safer and more secure. Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it, so that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs, but we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal. So that we search our hearts when we consider laws to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote. By recognizing our common humanity[,] by treating every child as important, regardless of the color of their skin or the station into which they were born, and to do what’s necessary to make opportunity real for every American—by doing that, we express God’s grace.
By insisting that Americans not harm black people by doing these unjust things to them, and telling us that the will to name, and undo, harm is an expression of God’s grace, Obama goes far beyond political arguments about resources and links the doing of justice to the moral order of the universe. If in the past Obama lagged far behind in insisting on the dignity of black identity—in acknowledging his own blackness and how it might have anything to do with how he thought or behaved as president—in his eulogy Obama leaped cosmic dimensions to compassionately embrace a broader, bigger, blacker notion of blackness than ever before. He was not merely preaching to the world, to the nation, to the congregation, or to the choir. He was also preaching to himself. As the Negro spiritual says, “Not my brother, nor my sister, but it’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.”
Obama had, before his endorsement of blackness, also punctured the self-image of the southern white who claimed that heritage, not hate, marched beneath the Confederate flag. Obama insisted that the flag represented a legacy of white supremacy that harmed black citizens,8 and that the grace that we claimed in the religious world must extend to politics as well:
For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in too many of our citizens. It’s true, a flag did not cause these murders. But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge—including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of praise—as we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now.
Removing the flag from this state’s capitol would not be an act of political correctness; it would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought—the cause of slavery—was wrong. The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong. It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history; a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds. It would be an expression of the amazing changes that have transformed this state and this country for the better, because of the work of so many people of goodwill, people of all races striving to form a more perfect union. By taking down that flag, we express God’s grace.
Of course, Obama didn’t have the exegetical or expository room to tackle another prominent symbol that has also shielded a multitude of sins: the cross. In the same way that the Confederate flag has flown above bigotry, the cross has been raised, too, against black people in the name of white terror, and against women, and gay and lesbian folk, and against transgender people, too, in the name of sexual and moral purity. God’s grace was manifest, too, in the mingling of two victories on the same day: the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, and the Confederate flag receiving its most potent symbolic lowering in Obama’s speech. In the black religious setting where he metaphorically folded the Confederate flag, Obama let stand a contradiction he might have reasonably assailed on another occasion: how the black church often undercut its own glorious reach, its own universal sweep, by emulating the bigotry it despised, bigotry that had unjustly curtailed black life. Many black believers had recoiled when Obama came out in support of same-sex marriage, using scripture and tradition to hammer gays and lesbians the same way white bigots had used the Bible to strike against black humanity and civil rights. Many black believers even chafed at the suggestion of a parallel between race and sex, but of course, race hate and homophobia flow from the same river of repulsion. In truth, there were many confederacies of bigotry operating that day, not just the Confederacy; many flags were flying for blindness; many banners were hung and waved for disbelief in our essential togetherness and unity. Either all black lives mattered or none mattered at all.
Obama underscored the literally unbelievable humanity of black people who could, without the killer ever asking, forgive the man who murdered their kin in cold blood. Theirs was no offer of “cheap grace,” as the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer phrased it, “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance.” Bonhoeffer counseled instead the embrace of costly grace, in which “the gospel . . . must be sought again and again.”9 The forgiveness of the folk in Charleston was more than a singular moral act; it was, too, a gesture of theological preemption and political strategy—a refusal to define their lives by hate and a refusal to offer the killer the pleasure of the race war he desperately hoped to provoke. Obama wasn’t simply an observer of the black theology at work in forgiveness; he was a participant as well when he argued that Roof didn’t know that God was using him. That doesn’t mean that God intended for Roof to do wrong; it means that God uses even Roof’s bad actions for good purposes, purposes that were lost to Roof behind his veil of evil. Black believers never tire of quoting the scripture in Genesis 50:20 about the good outcome of Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, only to become minister of agriculture to save them and a nation from famine: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” The death of nine valiant souls brought down a symbol of hate that has menaced millions of blacks for decades—and may open the way to a more vigorous challenge to the white supremacy for which that flag stands. If black Christians didn’t believe this, they would lose their minds and their faith in the God who guided them to triumph over suffering.
Perhaps it was spontaneous reflection on the grace of God, and the grace of black folk to bring the Word to life in their willingness to forgive—and the grace of black worship, with its mighty songs and its eloquent words—that caused a hush in the president, a silence, a pause, twice, as he repeated near the end of his eulogy the words “Amazing grace.” “If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.” And then several seconds of silence. “Amazing grace,” the president said, and then again, shortly afterward, “Amazing grace.” That was followed by a longer silence, thirteen seconds of it—the silence necessary for speech to sink in, for speech to rise in the first place, for speech to make meaning and make an impact, for words to reach their biggest targets, the hearts and minds and souls of those listening. Obama played the pauses as brilliantly as he had commanded the speech; his rhetoric had soared to heights, and now it sank to silence, but a pregnant, creative silence, a cessation of talking that focused the energy of the moment on what was not being said, on what was being thought silently in the minds of those listening, and, finally, what was being felt by those who savored the ecstasies of Obama’s eulogy.
There was much to contemplate in the silence. How Obama had broken free of constraints and given voice to a blackness that now percolated through his rhetoric. How the president had become a preacher leading the nation to spiritual healing. How the words of a black man were being heard around the world because a white man had desperately wished to unleash tides of hate that would forever mute the black voice. How a black presidency had looked as if it were on its last legs when suddenly, fresh momentum turned the president from lame duck to rising phoenix. How all the promise of hope and change that his presidency had pointed to, but continually frustrated, now seemed possible again because he gained the courage to be at his blackest when he was at his best. How he was fully and proudly African American.
At that moment, in those pauses, speech seemed hardly enough. Isn’t that why we have always relied on our greatest artists to search our truths and sing our lives in their words? Why we have embraced words that are sung so that we might draw nearer to a vision or feeling or wish or hope that could never be captured in prose? The rhythm of our creation is mirrored in the rhythms of the songs we create to praise our inspirations and, for many of us, the God who made us with nobody else in mind. Obama paused to drink in all of this; he paused the first time for focus, the second time for courage. He knew that as powerful and as eloquent as his words had been—preachers, even temporary ones, know when they strike rhetorical fire—a more lasting impression could be made if he gave of himself even more. If he slipped out from beneath his security blanket and wrapped his vulnerability around the church—and as president, he leads a congregation that spans the nation—then his parishioners, his constituents, his countrymen and women, might be reminded of the need to risk their identities, comforts, securities, and pride, and go out on a limb for somebody too.
One could glimpse his struggle to find the right key in those pauses, as he glanced down, seeming to ask himself if he dared follow where the Spirit led him.10 He repeated the phrase “Amazing grace” twice, between pauses, to remind himself that it was God’s grace that would help him enchant the nation. And then, without warning, without a musical safety net, on the high wire of live television, before an audience of millions around the world, he stepped out on the faith he had encouraged others to follow. The president crooned a post-linguistic celebration of the truths he had evoked in such a masterly way. He memorably condensed into song what he had said over the last forty minutes. Singing, after all, is never just about singing; it is also about melodies breaking forth on one’s lips which rise from one’s heart and soul. Singing in church ratifies with the gut what the head has decided is true.
A singing preacher is a reminder that the message of God is both said and sung. A singing president is even more profound: a man becoming spiritually transparent for the world to see and hear; a figure going where no executive order can rescue notes ill flung, where no pen can veto the legislation of verbal dissent. When Obama, after electrifying, productive silence, launched into the first words of “Amazing Grace,” the bishops and ministers behind him leaped to their feet. He turned his head, slightly, to acknowledge their approval as they chimed in to help him finish the verse.
Obama stayed mostly on tune, though he fell flat, a flatness that was both the object and vehicle of the blues that black folk embraced.11 As Obama finished the verse, he spoke again, for speaking after singing—especially if that singing already followed speech—has to be engaging, and the president didn’t disappoint. He called out the names of those who died with Pinckney that fateful night. Obama ushered his song into speech, his words now humming with the slight tune and gentle vibrato of black sacred rhetoric—rhetoric that could at any moment erupt into music within the spoken words, an art that in the black church is called the chanted sermon, or, more colloquially, “the whoop.”12 As he called each name, the president reminded us that they all “found that grace,” dramatizing how much more amazing grace was for having been found in the midst of terror and grief and heartbreak and death.
Obama ended his eulogy and reveled in the warm elation of the bishops, and in that moment, and in all that had preceded it for the last forty minutes, the promise of his black presidency beamed as brightly as it ever had.