Obama Echoes King's Call For Unity at Atlanta Church

Source: Washington Post

ATLANTA, Jan. 20 -- Sen. Barack Obama took the pulpit of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s church here Sunday and drew a clear link between King's vision of an America free of segregation and racism and the central tenet of his own presidential campaign, a call for unity after years of partisan rancor and division.

"If Dr. King could love his jailer, if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds and erase the empathy deficit that exist in our hearts," Obama said.

The Illinois Democrat spoke to more than 2,000 people in the large, modern sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church, across the street from the original structure where King and his father preached. Obama invoked the slain civil rights leader in defending himself against the argument, put forward repeatedly in recent weeks by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and her supporters, that by itself the inspirational rhetoric of the sort that he offers, and that King provided years ago, is not enough to achieve change.

King's rhetoric was twinned with the recognition of the need for hard struggle, and so, Obama said, would be his own. "Dr. King understood that unity cannot be won on the cheap," he said.



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/20/AR2008012002635.html?hpid=topnews

What stunning nerve. But we must expect no less from Barack (Never say Hussein) Obama.