The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Let me tell you what good crazy can do. The other day in New York, a man on the platform of the subway had a good crazy. He looked down between the tracks and saw a brother, prostrate, doomed by an oncoming train. And he jumped down in the middle of the tracks. And I asked a friend of mine, I said, Go out there and measure how deep it is. The deepest measurement they've given me is twenty-six inches. Ain't no way in the world for one man to get on top of the other in twenty-six inches, and the train go over, and the only thing it touched, left a little grease on his cap ...

  That same God is here today. Something crazy may happen in this country. Oh Lord!

  Through most of Lowery's five-minute speech, Obama had a faraway look, but as Lowery started waving his hands, as his homily went into overdrive, as it got funnier, as it became clearer that the really "good crazy" notion behind it all was the possible election of a black man to the Presidency, Obama started laughing and clapping like everyone else. As Lowery stalked away, with the laughter and applause still booming, Obama's face split into an enormous grin. The stage was not merely set; it was as if Lowery had set it ablaze. "Barack told me I stole the show," Lowery said later, "but, I swear, I didn't mean to."

  Long before the speech that brought Obama to national attention--the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in August, 2004, when he was still a state senator--Obama had been speaking to audiences all over Illinois, telling his own story: his family background, his growth as an organizer and as a student, his gratitude to earlier generations, his evolution as a public servant. He learned to make it an emblematic story: my story is your story, an American story. Obama was not suggesting that he was unique; there are many millions of Americans with complex backgrounds and identities, criss-crossing races, nationalities, origins. But Obama proposed to be the first President who represented the variousness of American life.

  Obama could change styles without relinquishing his genuineness. He subtly shifted accent and cadences depending on the audience: a more straight-up delivery for a luncheon of businesspeople in the Loop; a folksier approach at a downstate V.F.W.; echoes of the pastors of the black church when he was in one. Obama is multilingual, a shape-shifter. This is not a cynical gift, nor is it racist to take note of it. The greatest of all American speakers, Martin Luther King, Jr., did the same, shifting from one cadence and set of metaphors and frame of reference when speaking in Ebenezer Baptist to quite another as he spoke to a national, multiracial audience on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. There was, for King and for other preachers, a time to quote Tillich and a time to quote the blues, a time to invoke Keats and Carlyle, a time to speak of the Prophets. Obama was nowhere near this level of rhetorical magic and fluidity, but, as a politician, he had real gifts. Like the child of immigrants who can speak one language at home, another at school, and another with his friends--and still be himself--Obama crafted his speech to fit the moment. It was a skill that had taken years to develop.

  Obama's speech in Selma had the structure of a Sunday sermon. It began with an expression of gratitude to the elders in the room: Lowery, Vivian, Lewis, and the spirit of Dr. King. Then came the ritual acknowledgment of his own "presumptuousness" in running for President after spending such a short time in Washington. Then, by way of invoking the endorsement of an unimpeachable authority, Obama mentioned a preacher known to all in Brown Chapel--the Reverend Otis Moss, Jr., of Cleveland, an important figure in the black church, a trustee of Morehouse College, a former co-pastor, with Martin Luther King, Sr., at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta--who, he said, had sent him a letter saying, "If there's some folks out there who are questioning whether or not you should run, just tell them to look at the story of Joshua, because you're part of the Joshua generation." In other words, Obama was ascending the pulpit with a message blessed by a spiritual father of the civil-rights movement. And there was another link: Moss's son, Otis Moss III, would soon replace Obama's own pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, at Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago.

  From the early black church through the civil-rights movement, preachers used the trope of Moses and Joshua as a parable of struggle and liberation, making the explicit comparison between the Jewish slaves in Pharaoh's Egypt and the black American slaves on Southern plantations. In Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston wrote of a fictional Moses who was a figure of both authority and confrontation before the forbidding pharaoh. When Hurston's Moses wins the liberty of the Israelites, he prefigures another Mosaic figure, Martin Luther King, Jr., and a cry goes up, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last!" God's promise to the "children of Israel" was, in the terms of preachers like King, like the promise of equality inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. King asserted his role as the Moses-like standard-bearer for the millions of black men and women "who dreamed that someday they might be able to cross the Red Sea of injustice and find their way to the promised land of integration and freedom." And, as everyone in Brown Chapel knew, King, like Moses, had failed to complete his mission. Indeed, King had had a premonition of his own martyrdom:

  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.

  Forty years later, forty years of wandering in the desert after the murder of King, Obama paid tribute to the other "Moses" figures in the room--not only the famous ones but also the foot soldiers and the dead. And to universalize his message, to bring it beyond race, beyond Selma, he emphasized that those Moses figures had battled against "Pharaoh" "not just on behalf of African-Americans but on behalf of all of America." Echoing Lincoln at Gettysburg, Obama said that these were people who not only endured taunts and humiliation but "in some cases gave the full measure of their devotion."

  Obama had grown up with a secular mother and grandparents, but, since his twenties, he had spent countless hours in black churches, first as an organizer, then as a parishioner, and, like the first preachers of the early black church--underground churches hidden from Southern slave masters--he adapted the emblematic Biblical story of bondage and emancipation to describe a circumstance that was, at once, personal ("my story"), tribal, national, and universal. He began by relating that Biblical story to the struggle of the elders of civil rights:

  They took them across the sea that folks thought could not be parted. They wandered through a desert but always knowing that God was with them and that, if they maintained that trust in God, that they would be all right. And it's because they marched that the next generation hasn't been bloodied so much....

  Then Obama brought himself into the narrative of civil rights and, as he explained the particularity of his background, insisted on his place in the story:

  My very existence might not have been possible had it not been for some of the folks here today ... You see, my grandfather was a cook to the British in Kenya. Grew up in a small village and all his life, that's all he was--a cook and a house-boy. And that's what they called him, even when he was sixty years old. They called him a house-boy. They wouldn't call him by his last name. Call him by his first name. Sound familiar?

  Obama was making the claim that his grandfather's experience in Africa was not so different from the experience of so many grandparents of the people in the chapel. Racism is racism, suffering is suffering, and they were all provided the same moral and historical moment of possibility:

  Something happened back here in Selma, Alabama. Something happened in Birmingham that sent out what Bobby Kennedy called, "ripples of hope all around the world." Something happened when a bunch of women decided we're going to walk instead of ride the bus after a long day of doing somebody else's laundry, looking after somebody else's children. When men who had Ph.D.s were working as Pullman porters decided that's enough and we're going to stand up, despite the risks, for our dig
nity.

  In Obama's telling, the American moment of uprising and empowerment should be understood as a universal one:

  [It] sent a shout across oceans so that my grandfather began to imagine something different for his son. And his son, who grew up herding goats in a small village in Africa, could suddenly set his sights a little higher and suddenly believe that maybe a black man in this world had a chance.

  What happened in Selma, Alabama, and Birmingham also stirred the conscience of the nation. It worried folks in the White House who said, "You know, we're battling Communism. How are we going to win the hearts and minds all across the world if right here in our own country, John, we're not observing the ideals that are set forth in our Constitution. We might be accused of being hypocrites." So the Kennedys decided we're going to do an airlift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so that they can learn what a wonderful country America is.

  This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. And he met this woman whose great-great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a different idea, there's some good craziness going on, because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that in the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. But something's stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama, Jr., was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama.

  I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because y'all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants.

  Never mind that Obama was born four years before Bloody Sunday. Obama did not stop at his romantic (and partly romanticized) assertion of heroic continuity. He moved on to the new generation's responsibilities, criticized it for its disappointing fecklessness. In its self-regard, its obsession with money, the new generation was not fulfilling its obligations to the tradition of struggle and humanity itself. In Selma, this seemed a message confined to African-Americans; in the days and months that followed, it widened to include people of all races and creeds.

  "I worry sometimes that the Joshua generation in its success forgets where it came from," Obama said in Selma. "It thinks it doesn't have to make as many sacrifices. Thinks that the very height of ambition is to make as much money as you can, to drive the biggest car and have the biggest house and wear a Rolex watch and get your own private jet, get some of that Oprah money." Not that he was against capitalism--"There's nothing wrong with making money"--but focusing on the accumulation of wealth alone led to a "certain poverty of ambition."

  Voting for a candidate, even an African-American candidate, was insufficient; it was just another step in a battle against the poverty and inequality that still existed:

  Blacks are less likely in their schools to have adequate funding. We have less-qualified teachers in those schools. We have fewer textbooks in those schools. We got in some schools rats outnumbering computers. That's called the achievement gap. You've got a health care gap and you've got an achievement gap. You've got Katrina still undone.

  Even before he announced his candidacy, Obama was selective in talking about race. As the only African-American in the Senate, it would have been natural for him to be the most constant voice on "black issues": structural inequality, affirmative action, poverty, drug laws. But he was determined to be an individual with a black identity but a politician with a broad outlook and purpose. After Hurricane Katrina, an event that reawakened many Americans to the persistent problems of race, Jesse Jackson, Sr., expressed his fury about the treatment of poor blacks in New Orleans, saying that the devastation resembled "the hull of a slaveship." Obama approached the problem with less racially charged language. But now, in Selma, his language was one of cool outrage. It was the language of King in his later years, in the years of the Poor People's Campaign. Obama insisted that the legacy of injustice had continued long past the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  But Obama did not stop at protest. In a sentence that echoed the most famous moment in Kennedy's inaugural address, he wondered if the Joshua generation had lost some of the "discipline and fortitude" instilled in the marchers of a half-century ago as they tried to "win over the conscience of the nation." The new generation's responsibility was both at the kitchen table and in the larger social arena; there was a pressing need to "turn off the television set when the child comes home from school and make sure they sit down and do their homework," to instill the sense that educational achievement is not "something white."

  Obama was saying things that a thousand black preachers had said before him, but as a Presidential candidate he was talking not just to the audience in the room but to the cameras, to the rest of the country:

  I also know that, if cousin Pookie would vote, get off the couch and register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics. That's what the Moses generation teaches us. Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes. Go do some politics. Change this country! That's what we need. We have too many children in poverty in this country and everybody should be ashamed, but don't tell me it doesn't have a little to do with the fact that we got too many daddies not acting like daddies. Don't think that fatherhood ends at conception. I know something about that because my father wasn't around when I was young and I struggled....

  If you want to change the world, the change has to happen with you first.... Joshua said, "You know, I'm scared. I'm not sure that I am up to the challenge." The Lord said to him, "Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon, I have given you. Be strong and have courage, for I am with you wherever you go." Be strong and have courage. It's a prayer for a journey. A prayer that kept a woman in her seat when the bus driver told her to get up, a prayer that led nine children through the doors of the Little Rock school, a prayer that carried our brothers and sisters over a bridge right here in Selma, Alabama. Be strong and have courage....

  That bridge outside was crossed by blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, teenagers and children, the beloved community of God's children. They wanted to take those steps together, but it was left to the Joshuas to finish the journey Moses had begun, and today we're called to be the Joshuas of our time, to be the generation that finds our way across this river.

  It was a fascinating rhetorical performance. At his announcement speech in Springfield, Obama had recounted his past and then tied it to a larger, common purpose, using the phrase "Let's be the generation ...": "Let's be the generation that ends poverty in America," "Let's be the generation that finally, after all these years, tackles our health-care crisis." The metaphor that day was Lincoln--the man of scant experience and potential greatness facing a nation on the brink. Obama's address in Springfield was to everyone, not African-Americans in particular. In Selma, he addressed African-Americans, especially, directly, praising elders and both mobilizing and placing demands on the younger generation, the Joshua generation. His rhetoric created a parallel between the particularities of a candidate's life and a political struggle; put forth the self-appointment of a young man to continue and develop a national movement; and delivered it all in the rhetoric of the traditional black church--the first liberated space among the slaves and still the essential black institution. In Selma, Obama evoked not Lincoln but King; he adopted the gestures, rhythms, and symbols of the prophetic voice for the purposes of electoral politics.

  There was no question that he won the approval of his elders. "He was baring his soul and I liked what I saw," the Reverend Lowery said. "People were talking that nonsense about was he black enough, but, to me, it's always a question of how you see the movement, where you see yourself in the movement. And he came through."

  "Barack was putting matters into the context of church history, whic
h is so important to black Americans," the Reverend C. T. Vivian said. "To black people, Barack was right on base. Martin Luther King was our prophet--in Biblical terms, the prophet of our age. The politician of our age, who comes along to follow that prophet, is Barack Obama. Martin laid the moral and spiritual base for the political reality to follow. And this is a transformative time in our history. It is no ordinary time."

  In the months that followed, there was much talk about Obama's early distance from the centers of African-American life, the fact that he grew up in a white family, with the black father almost entirely absent. "Oh, please," Reverend Vivian said. "Any time you decide to be black in America, it will give you all the pain you need."

  Ever since the assassination of King, in April, 1968, and of Robert Kennedy, two months later, the liberal constituencies of America had been waiting for a savior figure. Barack Obama proposed himself. In the eyes of his supporters, he was a promise in a bleak landscape; he possessed an inspirational intelligence and an evident competence when the country had despaired of a reckless and aggressively incurious President; he possessed a worldliness at a time when Americans could sense so many rejecting, even hating, them; he was an embodiment of multi-ethnic inclusion when the country was becoming no longer white in its majority. This was the promise of his campaign, its reality or vain romance, depending on your view.

  Obama also proposed a scenario for improbable victory. He had taken an antiwar position on Iraq before the invasion--not an act of overwhelming courage for a state senator from Hyde Park, perhaps, but hardly risk-free, and enough to distinguish him from his Democratic opponents. It would attract younger voters and the liberal wing of the Party. And it was just possible that race--especially as he projected it--would help him far more than it would hurt him.

  * * *

  The final event of the day in Selma was the ritual crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. On the far end of the bridge there was a billboard thanking visitors for supporting local Civil War tourist spots; it featured a huge portrait of General Forrest. "To visit Selma today is to remember that America still hasn't lived up to its promises," C. T. Vivian said. "But black folks know that, step by step, we are winning. The forces of evil are being defeated."