forward to the future.”
In 2013, during his thirty-three-minute commencement address at Morehouse College, he reflected on the history of this venerable university and celebrated King, who enrolled in Morehouse at age fifteen, and longtime Morehouse president Benjamin Mays. He called upon the graduates to embody the reformist and sacrificial leadership spirit that Mays encouraged and embodied.
“So the history we share should give you hope,” Obama declared after describing the oppressive times that Mays, “black men of the ‘40s and ‘50s,” and the Moses generation overcame. Juxtaposing them with those who came of age during the era of Jim Crow segregation, Obama told the Morehouse class of 2013 that they were “uniquely poised for success unlike any generation of African Americans that came before it.” He brought to the fore that their collective experience of struggle “pales in comparison” to what previous generations coped with and insisted that they could draw great inspiration from their ancestors. Morehouse men, he declared, should, like Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth,” be committed to serving as role models and servants of the black masses. He challenged them to use Mays as a guiding light. “Live up to President’s Mays’s challenge … I promise you, what was needed in Dr. Mays’s time, that spirit of excellence, and hard work, and dedication, and no excuses is needed now more than ever.”35
Whom Obama praised to his black listeners often depended upon his particular audience. For instance, when speaking to members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in 2009, Obama conjured up a relatively overlooked black politician, George Henry White, a Republican congressman from North Carolina from 1897 until 1901 and the last black congressman until 1928. Obama used White’s prophecy—an optimistic prognosis that in the future other black congressmen would “rise up”—as a source of faith and inspiration for the CBC. He concluded by rallying members of the CBC to consider White’s and others’ struggles. “Remember what it was like for George Henry White in the early days of the twentieth century, as he was bidding farewell to the House of Representatives, the last African American to serve there for a quarter century.” White and other early black politicians, Obama pleaded, did so much “to make it possible for us to be here tonight, to make it possible for you to be here tonight, to make it possible for me to be here tonight.”36
“A LONG LINE OF STRONG BLACK WOMEN”
Like other black male spokespersons, leaders, and politicians, Obama tended to prioritize the legacies of black male heroes and icons. Beyond nominal remarks about Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm, Diane Nash, and “women of soul” Patti LaBelle and Aretha Franklin; his 2012 National African American History Month proclamation, a tribute to black women as “champions of social and political change”; his honoring of two black women historians with the National Medal of the Arts and Humanities Awards (Darlene Clark Hine and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham); or his Senate floor speeches commemorating the deaths of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, he rarely celebrated black women’s contributions to the black freedom struggle or black women’s history. Black women were not, however, totally absent from his historical revivalism.
On April 20, 2010, Obama offered remarks at the funeral of Dr. Dorothy Height, chronicling why she deserves “a place in our history books.” He praised Height for her work in the National Council of Negro Women and beyond—for fighting for “the cause” without needing “fanfare.” In his commencement address at Hampton University, Obama used Height’s life and work as a source of inspiration. As he said when referring to John Lewis and others, he imparted that she is “one of the giants upon whose shoulders I stand.” He shared with Hampton graduates Height’s struggle to get a college degree in hopes of motivating them to be tenacious:
But I want you to think about Ms. Dorothy Height, a black woman, in 1929, refusing to be denied her dream of a college education … Refusing to let any barriers of injustice or ignorance or inequality or unfairness stand in her way. That refusal to accept a lesser fate; that insistence on a better life, that, ultimately, is the secret not only of African American survival and success, it has been the secret of America’s survival and success.37
Height was not the only black female civil rights heroine who Obama honored. On February 27, 2013, Rosa Parks became the first black woman to have a life-size statue erected in the Capitol. In National Statuary Hall, Obama delivered the dedication. “Rosa Parks tells us there’s always something we can do.” He continued, her “singular act of disobedience launched a movement.” With these words Obama contributed to the archaic top-down notion of the civil rights movement. Yet, like her leading biographer Jeanne Theoharis, he acknowledged that before and after refusing to give up her seat on the bus, Parks was and continued to be an activist.
One of Obama’s speeches stands out for its treatment of black women: his 2015 oration at the CBC’s 45th Annual Phoenix Awards Dinner. On this occasion, he zeroed in on black women, past and present, because he, speaking for the black male collective, wanted them “to know how much we appreciate them, how much we admire them, how much we love them.” Echoing scores of black women historians from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Obama pointed out that black women were at the forefront of the civil rights movement, “a part of every great movement in American history even if they weren’t always given a voice.” He stressed that black women were working “behind the scenes … making things happen everyday.” We are all, he pressed home, “beneficiaries of a long line of strong black women.”38 Obama, whose biological mother is white, closed ranks with black motherhood.
In addition to heaping praise upon black women, Obama was also critical of his male predecessors who at the March on Washington nearly five decades earlier snubbed black women, only allowing Daisy Bates the “honor” of introducing male speakers. “The men gave women just 142 words,” Obama continued:
America’s most important march against segregation had its own version of separation. Black women were central in the fight for women’s rights, from suffrage to the feminist movement and yet despite their leadership, too often they were also marginalized. But they didn’t give up. They were too fierce for that. Black women have always understood the words of Pauli Murray—that “Hope is a song in a weary throat.”39
In the remainder of his speech, Obama linked the past marginalization of black women to their present status by stressing the necessity of continuing to fight for the “full opportunity and equality” for black women and girls. He identified the pressing challenges facing black women (namely unemployment, health disparities, unequal pay, stereotypes, incarceration, violence, and sexual abuse), yet celebrated black women’s accomplishments in business, education, and motherhood.
He wrapped up his speech in a familiar tone, giving thanks to those nameless black women who “risked everything” not only for their survival but also for the welfare of future generations: “Their names never made the history books. All those women who cleaned somebody else’s house, or looked after somebody else’s children, did somebody else’s laundry, and then got home and did it again, and then went to church and cooked—and then they were marching.”40
“THANK YOU TO THE NAACP”
One of Obama’s primary black audiences was the NAACP. On July 16, 2009, Obama spoke at the organization’s centennial in New York City. This thirty-seven-minute speech was clearly crafted for a majority black audience, albeit middle class. There were certainly hip-hop generationers in the audience—it should not be overlooked that the then organization’s president and chief executive officer, Benjamin Todd Jealous (b. 1973), is a hip-hop generationer who took office in 2008.
Immediately, Obama referenced the “journey” that African Americans had made since that time “when Jim Crow was a way of life; when lynchings were all too common, and when race riots were shaking cities across a segregated land.” Unlike in “A More Perfect Union,” in which he credits all Americans for
