The Rhetorical One-Two Punch

Emanuel AME Church

For those who like political oratory, and I do, the last week of June was a good week.

Two speeches addressed the murder of nine members of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston (often called “Mother Emanuel”). Both speeches, infused with Christian teaching, asked the audience to take action. Both speeches combined heartfelt performance and well-crafted message. 

The orators represented disparate positions on the political spectrum. Paul Thurmond is a Republican state senator, and, notably, the son of Strom Thurmond, arguably the South’s most famous segregationist politician. Barack Obama is the 44^th President of the United States, a Democrat, and the only child of a white American woman from Wichita, Kansas and a black man of the Luo tribe from Kenya.

Taken together these two speeches represent a kind of one-two punch against the continued display of the Confederate flag.

Before I go any further, I recommend the reader listen to the two speeches if he or she has not already done so. It is quite literally witnessing history. Imagine, if you will, that we had a YouTube of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Here are the links.

Paul Thurmond's S.C. Senate Speech (7:33 minutes) 

Barack Obama's Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney (37:46 minutes)

With any speech, context, audience, and occasion is important.

As reported and pretty much beyond doubt, 21-year old Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel AME Church on the evening of June 17^th, joined a weekly prayer session, and an hour later pulled out a handgun and shot ten churchgoers, nine of whom died. The victims were shot multiple times at close range. Roof’s weapon was a 0.45-caliber automatic, a powerful handgun. The scene, I must assume, was horrific.

The Symbol of Our Discontent

The next day Roof was apprehended by police. While it appears Roof carried out the murders alone, online photos and a personal website connect him with the white supremacist movement. Pure and simple, this was a hate crime.

Among the white supremacist symbols Roof selected for his web persona was the Confederate battle flag, more commonly known as the Confederate flag.

On June 23^rd, six days after the shooting at Mother Emanuel, Paul Thurmond took the floor of the South Carolina Senate. He didn’t mention his father during his speech. (Everyone listening knew who his father was). As a U.S. Senator, Strom Thurmond famously once spoke continuously for 24 hours, 15 minutes to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (nevertheless, it passed). Now his son, speaking on a different senate floor nearly 60 years later, conveyed a quite different message. He spoke for about six minutes.

Paul Thurmond on South Carolina Senate Floor

Thurmond began by describing his personal friendship with and admiration for the deceased Clementa Pinckney, the senior pastor of Emanuel AME and also a state senator. He spoke of a moving vigil he had attended for Pinckney and the other slain church members. If I am any judge of what happens in a man’s heart, in the days following the Mother Emanuel murders Paul Thurmond had experienced an epiphany, which had then compelled him to address his fellow senators. 

Seemingly a man who takes his faith seriously, perhaps also adroitly reading his audience, Thurmond introduced his message by recounting the New Testament's “Parable of the Sower” (Mark 4). I suspect you are familiar with it. A farmer sows his seed, and while some seed is devoured by birds, some scorched by the sun, some choked by weeds, the seed that falls on good soil produces a crop many times what was originally sown.

Thurmond hoped that the Mother Emanuel tragedy had created a rich soil within the hearts of his fellow Senators and thus an opportunity to effect change in his state.

“I think the time is right and the ground is fertile for us to make progress as a state and to come together and remove the Confederate battle flag from prominent statue outside the Statehouse and put it in the museum. It is time to acknowledge our past, atone for our sins and work towards a better future. That future must be built on symbols of peace, love, and unity. That future cannot be built on symbols of war, hate, and divisiveness.”

He continued, attacking one of the enduring myths of the South, and a source of its persistent resistance to retiring this particular symbol of slavery,

“…for the life of me, I will never understand how anyone could fight a civil war based, in part, on the desire to continue the practice of slavery…These practices were inhumane and were wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Whether Paul Thurmond’s speech directly influenced President Obama’s two days later I don’t know, but it sounds like the two men were fishing in the same waters. 

President Obama delivered a eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, Emanuel AME’s senior pastor and a colleague of Paul Thurmond’s in the South Carolina Senate. He spoke for 35 minutes to 5,400 mostly African American mourners at TD Arena, a few blocks from Mother Emanuel. He was the final speaker for a funeral service that had begun four hours earlier.

The murders at Mother Emanuel AME demanded a response from the President. The mourners in TD Arena surely expected an address that would honor all the victims, not just Reverend Pinckney, and somehow give meaning to the whole awful event. In this, the President did not disappoint.

The President’s eulogy began, like any, praising the qualities and accomplishments of the deceased. But as he recounted Reverend Pinckney’s life, he artfully interwove the role of the black church in the black community, and how among black churches Mother Emanuel AME held a place of honor, both for its illustrious history—it was started by free blacks and slaves in 1816—and its prominence in the civil rights movement.

“A sacred place, this church…for every American who cares about the steady expansion of human rights and human dignity in this country; a foundation stone for liberty and justice for all.”

Against this backdrop the President then brought in Dylann Roof (unnamed, just called “the killer”), and asserted that this young man understood his act as belonging to a long tradition of white supremacist attacks on black churches. Attacks intended to cowl and control—in today’s language, acts of terror.

Dylann Roof's Online Persona

Then, in one exhilarating moment, he introduced the central theme of his sermon.

“Oh, but God works in mysterious ways. God has different ideas. He (Dylann Roof) didn't know he was being used by God. Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group…”

All that week the President had been thinking about this concept of God’s grace. He had seen grace in action when the families of the murdered expressed words of forgiveness at Dylann Roof’s arraignment. And while he didn’t explicitly say it, he probably believed he had witnessed the power of grace again when the son of Strom Thurmond spoke on the floor of the South Carolina Senate two days earlier.

President Obama had almost certainly given careful thought to communicating his message beyond the confines of the TD Arena. A hard reality, of which the President was well aware, is that many white Americans in the “red” states of the South are deaf to his words. Yet, knowing the religiosity of this region, and the solemnity of this particular occasion, he could reasonably expect some fraction of this normally unreachable audience to tune in to this address. Christian “grace” is something they would often have heard from their own pulpit. In this sense grace became the rhetorical weapon to pierce this audience’s ideological armor.

The President described grace as neither earned, nor merited, but “rather grace is the free and benevolent favor of God.” The President believed that as a consequence of the Mother Emanuel tragedy, God had given us the gift of grace; and with this gift, new insight into the African American experience. First and foremost, here, was the African-American experience of the Confederate flag.

"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…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…By taking down that flag, we express God's grace."

Other areas of social blindness followed--criminal justice, guns, jobs, voting rights, poverty, schools—but always the President returned to the idea of God’s grace, which, once accepted, allows us to see anew and comprehend the complexity of truth. He acknowledged that there will never be unanimity on the crafting of policy—“this is a big, raucous place, America is” (channeling Master Yoda for a moment). He urged us not to “avoid the uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society” or “to slip into a comfortable silence again.”

Finally, quoting the writer Marilynne Robinson, a personal friend, he exhorted us to find "that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things"; equating this reservoir of goodness with the gift of grace, and arguing with it “anything is possible."

President Obama Singing "Amazing Grace"

In a second moment of rhetorical magic, the President repeated the line “amazing grace," as if publicly ruminating in wonderment the power of the thing, and then, after a long pause, began to sing the famous hymn of the same name.

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
   That sav'd a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
   Was blind, but now I see.

Concluding, the President exhorted us not to squander this gift of grace, a special gift passed from the fallen to us, the living.

It is a moment of considerable power. I have found the speech grows with re-listening.

The hymn “Amazing Grace” is itself full of symbolism apropos to this moment. John Newton, its author, was a former Atlantic trade slaver who became a noted abolitionist, publishing a popular pamphlet on slavery considered instrumental in the English outlawing slavery in 1807.

Today, July 10, 2015, almost at the same time as I post this commentary, South Carolina formally removed the Confederate flag from the its grounds. It still flies in other places in the South. You can see it on the  upper left-hand corner of the Mississippi state flag.