One more thought that came from watching Obama at the Lincoln Memorial concert yesterday: A year ago, I was at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to see Obama speak. He was about to take the pulpit at Martin Luther King Jr’s old church, on the day before King’s birthday, and the whole experience seemed just a little too much for him. I watched Obama while the church’s senior pastor Raphael Warnock delivered an introductory sermon. He kept his head down, his shoulders slumped.
It was just before the South Carolina primary, so he had won Iowa and then lost New Hampshire. But Obama didn’t appear tired or discouraged so much as weighed by the responsibility he was being presented with in that church. Warnock led off his sermon with these words: “I want to talk about unfinished business.” He reminded the congregation that they were there not just to celebrate King’s birthday but to observe that year the 40th anniversary of his death. “Things tend to happen in 40-year cycles in the Bible,” Warnock explained. “It’s time to claim the promise.”
By the time he was done, Warnock had placed Obama as the successor to King, Joshua to his Moses. It seemed not quite preposturous but definitely a heavy burden to place on the slight shoulders of the young man from Illinois. Hanging over the pastor’s remarks as well was the unspoken reminder of how King had died. There was a visceral fear for Obama’s safety in the air, and the last verse of “We Shall Overcome” was sung with defiant verve: “We are not afraid…today.”
And yet today the expectation that Obama is the new King seems commonplace. The popular verse on t-shirts all over the city is: “Rosa sat so Martin could walk so Barack could run so our children can fly.” It was certainly the implicit–and at times explicit–theme of yesterday’s concert. Now, however, Obama doesn’t seem bowed by the weight of expectations. Maybe that’s what winning the presidency does for you. Maybe it’s because his volunteer-driven revolution has convinced people the job is their’s to do as well as his. Whatever the reason, it was striking to see how much things have changed from one freezing cold January day to another.