As they recounted in their autobiographies, this unique skill was something that they developed in their early years.
When interfacing with predominantly white audiences in the spoken and written word, Washington presented himself as a humble, nonthreatening, and compliant mouthpiece for black America. He personified the quintessential “safe Negro” leader. In Up From Slavery, he rewrote black history by labeling slavery a school for those in bondage, he claimed that the Ku Klux Klan no longer existed in 1901, he pandered to wealthy white philanthropists, he extolled the progress of US race relations since Reconstruction, and he publicized his own Horatio Alger tale as living evidence that all blacks descended from slaves could go on to accomplish great things.
In the multilayered, five-minute speech that he delivered on September 18, 1895, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington offered temporary solutions to the so-called “Negro Problem” that did not disrupt the white South’s racial hierarchy. He meekly instructed blacks to remain in the South, to accept their positions as agricultural laborers, to obey the South’s convoluted system of racial etiquette in the public sphere, to clinch onto vocational and industrial education, and to place notions of political and social equality on the back burner. Washington reassured southern whites that they would be “surrounded by the most patient, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world had seen” and accepted segregation, famously declaring: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet, one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”24
Be that as it may, when holding court with students in the Tuskegee Chapel during his routine “Sunday Evening Talks” or sermonizing to black Southerners during his whistle-stop speeches or educational tours from 1908 until 1912 that historian David M. Jackson meticulously sifted through, Washington propagated fundamental tenets of black nationalism—self-help, self-determination, economic independence, and perseverance. Like all influential black leaders of his times, he also believed in racial uplift and the politics of respectability.
The founder of Tuskegee Institute was bilingual, a master code-switcher who was well-versed in hamming it up with whites who believed in black inferiority; connecting with politicians (from congressmen to US presidents); keeping it real with poor black southerners; debating with his adversaries; and captivating his supporters abroad.
Linguists H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman are spot on in arguing that Obama’s “ability to style-shift is one of his most compelling and remarkable linguistic abilities.” They note that he knew when to speak ‘‘familiarly Black.’’25 To be sure, in order to become the bona fide “first black president,” Obama was compelled to study, get a grip on, and eventually master the art of consolidating and style-shifting, while communicating with black and white Americans. A mature chameleon, he calibrated his language and swag daily.
More important (and like Washington before him), Obama—who deliberately and logically avoided discussing issues of race and the unfavorable status of black America as much as possible during his campaigning and presidency—had to speak simultaneously to black and white America (to say nothing of other groups) about sensitive past and present racial matters. In perhaps the most consequential speech of his political career, “A More Perfect Union” (2008), Obama masterfully appeased large segments of both black and white listeners. In a sense, this speech foreshadowed Obama’s future stratagem for coming to grips with issues of race and dreadful episodes in black history to white listeners.
Still, in numerous speeches that he delivered to predominantly black audiences, such as the NAACP, African American congregations, students at historically black colleges and universities, and impromptu meetings with African Americans, Obama spoke “familiarly Black” and more frankly revisited the black past and its lingering influence on African Americans’ contemporary status. In speaking “familiarly Black,” as Washington did when kicking it with black farmers, Obama also echoed the “pick yourself up by your own bootstraps” ethos and respectability politics of Washington and his contemporaries.
When deciphering Obama’s rendering of African American history, as is the case with Washington and other crossover black leaders, one thing is crystal clear: it is essential to recognize to whom he was speaking and the specific circumstances and context.
REMIXING BLACK HISTORY: HISTORICAL DEBTS, MEMORIES, AND REVIVALISM
While running for the US Senate in Illinois, Obama delivered a memorable keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston in which he endorsed the then US senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry, in his quest to become the next commander-in-chief of the United States. While serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 until 2004, Obama delivered numerous speeches, yet with this well-rehearsed seventeen-minute talk he captured notable attention, truly captivating and electrifying his audience. It marked a turning point in his political career. Three years later, on February 10, 2007, he officially announced his candidacy for President of the United States. From this point on, he further honed his prowess as an orator by delivering thousands of different speeches.
In terms of substance, subject matter, and rhetorical style, Obama adjusted and modified his speeches based upon the racial and generational makeup of his targeted audiences. Certain features stand out when reading, listening to, or watching talks that he gave to predominantly white and black audiences and multiracial crowds. Obama offered these distinct audiences discrete and in some cases mismatched and conflicting depictions and interpretations of African American history.
In his 2004 DNC keynote address, for instance, he famously declared: “There’s not a black America and white America …” He also intimated to his largely white audience that he was the epitome of the ever so elusive “American Dream” and owed a debt to his nation. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all those who came before me, and that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”26 Compare this to other speeches that Obama bequeathed unto his African American audiences and one immediately notices a different modus operandi. “And for most of this country’s past, we in the African American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity,” Obama preached to the congregation—his “brothers and sisters” as he affectionately called his eager spectators—at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, ten months before he was elected President of the United States.27 Similarly, in many heart-to-hearts with overlapping generations of African Americans, Obama emphasized that his success was due to the sacrifices of famous and uncelebrated black civil rights activists, that he indeed stood on the “shoulders of giants.”
Of the many speeches that Obama delivered to predominantly black audiences, his first keynote address at a “Bloody Sunday” commemoration on March 4, 2007, at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, was one of his most history-centric. It was in this sermonlike address that Obama established his often-cited discussion of the Moses and Joshua generations. The fact that Obama transmitted such an account in a black church is not surprising. He knew the importance of the black church, “our beating heart,” as a conduit of black liberation theology and a vital movement center. His former mentor, pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, taught him this. In late June 2015 while reflecting upon the murder of Reverend Clementa Pinckney of Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama gave prominence to the black church. “The church is and always has been at the center of African-American life—a place to call our own in a too often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships.” All too often, however, black churches were terrorized as well. For him, the “Charleston Church Massacre” on June 17, 2015, “was an act that drew upon a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress.”28
Obama launched into his “Bloody Sunday” address by praising Congressman John Lewis, C. T. Vivian, and other
