Obama--Farewell to Dred Scott

He got sworn in. He jumped the gun on the oath. The Chief Justice bobbled the lines of the oath right back at him. He grinned. They somehow finished it, and Obama was the 44th President (and the 43rd man to serve—Cleveland served two terms four years apart; he counts twice.)
The world has indeed turned upside down. We live in a nation where no less an authority than the US Supreme Court has ruled that Barack Obama (“no black man”) has any rights that a white man is obligated to respect. (Dred Scott case, 1857, Roger B Taney, chief justice—who, four years later swore Abraham Lincoln into office.) Nor could Obama, under that ruling, become a citizen of the United States.
The man who wrote that all men have a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” sent a note back to a brilliant black mathematician that his calculation was fine but his skin was simply the wrong color to be taken seriously in any field of human endeavor.
Then there was Lincoln who, six weeks before Lee surrendered, called the Hampton Roads conference where he made a final offer to the slave holders of the South. If they would lay down their arms, he would make certain that their senators were restored to the Senate in time to vote down the 13th Amendment. That would certainly have made Michelle Obama’s life different.
Lincoln is also said to have written to Frederick Douglas to the effect that even if he, Lincoln, considered blacks to be his equal, the American people would not hear of it. Before the war if any black wanted to live in Michigan he or she had to post bond for his good behavior. Several other northern states as well.
(Douglas may have felt slightly vindicated when he became the first black American to receive a vote for the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention of 1888. But probably not too much.)
The modern Ku Klux Klan came into being in 1915. Life in fact and theory didn’t get better. Sammy Davis Jr. in his autobiography, “Yes I Can” talks about life in a segregated army during World War II. A tall white Texan kept mocking and tormenting him. Sammy finally got mad (he had been raised in show business and didn’t really understand the rules of subservience) and lit into the man.
Davis punched him out so badly he couldn’t get back up. But he looked up at Davis and muttered what was the theme of American relations for three-and-a-half centuries: “But you’re still a nigger.”
Too bad Jefferson, Taney, Lincoln, Dred Scott, Sammy Davis Jr., and that G.I. couldn’t have been in Washington today.
Obama made a good speech. I listened afterward as the news commentators tried to decide who he was most like. I heard “Kennedy”, “Roosevelt”, “Reagan”, and a couple of others mentioned. That didn’t quite ring right to me. Then it hit me. His speech really cannot be linked to any other American or period in American history. It was pure Churchill.
I have listened and read most of the speeches Winston Churchill made during the period immediately before the war and during the war. These were the speeches President Kennedy referred to when he made Churchill the second man in history to ever have been granted honorary American citizenship.
“He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” In his own way, Obama attempted to do the same today. It was a battle speech. It was both a promise to us and our friends and an implicit threat to our enemies.
It was an unequivocal admission that we have major problems. It was a harsh reminder that no one man or institution got us into these problems. It was, Obama said, time to stop acting childishly and pull ourselves up short and change course. That’s more Churchillian than American.
No more eloquent statement could have been made—that the day of American economic and military hegemony has certainly changed if not ended. He’s going to have to keep repeating that. Almost no living American has known anything else but the unquestioned power of the American Imperium.
For good or for ill, President Obama leads us into a new and very different era.
It’s also a new racial era. Don’t you wonder what Jefferson and Lincoln might have thought?