TGR: Obama Wins Democratic Nomination for U.S. President
(BALTIMORE – August 28, 2008) – If timing is everything, then tonight is set to be the pinnacle of a most momentous point in American history … and in Barack Obama's rise to leadership.
Three years ago this time, for one, Hurricane Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast with an unprecedented storm causing cataclysmic results on an otherwise unprotected piece of American soil. Louisiana, in particular, was devastated. What was worse, however, was the American government’s response. While dogs were shipped away on coach buses, the people – many of whom were poor and black – were left hanging. Helicopters flew by taking pictures as people flooded the Super Dome hungry, traumatized, and depressed.
Also, forty-five 45 years ago to the day, a young and gifted orator and Civil Rights leader named Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would combine all of his formalized training at Atlanta’s world-renown Morehouse College and Crozier Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania and combine it into a whirlwind of a speech that still send shivers up the spines of human beings today. The astute student of Ghandi’s methods of non-violent protest would implore upon the nation some of the most memorable words this world has ever heard:
“I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are
presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification,
will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and
black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys
and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.”
Given the challenges people of African descent have faced and endured in what has been a most unkind territory since the prisoners of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade first stepped onto the shores of North America, given the racial violence and dehumanization that has permeated every aspect of African American life in every era since then, given the efforts and failures of everyone from David Walker to Harriet Tubman to Frederick Douglass to Nat Turner to Madame C.J.Walker to Marcus Mosiah Garvey – tonight is one for the record books.
Coming on the heals of an historic first last night, Obama’s official nomination as the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, tonight the gentleman from Illinois will unleash his vision for change before an audience at INVESCO Field at Mile High. His speech tonight will follow three days of incredible oratories by people like his wife - Michelle, Sen. Edward Kennedy, Sen. Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton, and his running mate, Delaware Senator Joe Biden.
Walking into the history books tonight, the former community activist/lawyer-who-turned-down-the-big-bucks will present his plan for America. No doubt, he will tell us all why he is better qualified than John McCain to guide our ship after some 8 years of a failed Bush administration, the same one that left the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast hanging. Surely, he will enunciate why leaving Iraq “responsibly” as soon as possible makes a helluva lot more sense than staying there, and why refocusing our military on targets in Afghanistan makes even more sense.
Tonight is a night of all nights for Barack Obama, the nation, and the world. And I pray Godspeed to him and his as his persona crystallizes a long overdue moment in this nation’s history that many of us thought would never come in our lifetime: When a black man would become President of the United States of America.
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