Read on Twitter
We forget how backbreaking and soul-sucking sharecropping was for black people in the Jim Crow South. People talk about Payday Lending but Obama mentioning Lewis's family "Picking somebody else's Cotton" shows how brutal it was.
"We act as if it was inevitable." We benefit from the fact that we live in John Lewis's world but this wasn't guaranteed. These systems were set up to keep black people in chains for decades after Reconstruction.
This speech reminds me of how @sullivanamy's piece about Obama's Christianity is very different from White Americans' idea of Christianity but he also came to it as an adult, so he thinks about it differently. https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-last-100-days-theologian-in-chief-edition-181221719.html
Obama quoting II Corinthians 4:8-9 "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed."
LBJ's speech after Selma is one of my favorite speeches of all time and better than any speech JFK gave.
http://www.lbjlibrary.org/lyndon-baines-johnson/speeches-films/president-johnsons-special-message-to-the-congress-the-american-promise
http://www.lbjlibrary.org/lyndon-baines-johnson/speeches-films/president-johnsons-special-message-to-the-congress-the-american-promise
Is Obama saying the word "Redeeming" intentional and a callback to the KKK and and Segregationists calling the end of Reconstruction "Redemption" https://www.neh.gov/news/reconstruction-vs-redemption
Obama calling John Lewis a founder reminds me of @adamserwer's piece https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-john-lewis-founded-third-american-republic/614371/
I can personally attest to Lewis's decency. Capitol Hill is a place full of ego and pomp and pettiness. But anyone who ever spent any time on the Hill could tell you gentle and decent he was. He never mistook gentleness for weakness.
"George Wallace may be gone," Obama says but he calls out the use of tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.
The Scripture Obama references is Acts 18:10 "For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city."
When Lewis died, my mom said his seeing people in the streets gave him the peace to know he could leave it to the next generation. Obama said these people were his Children.
