Bloody Sunday, Part Two

If this was a competition, Barack Obama won in the Bloody Sunday Showdown in Selma, Alabama, today. No question.

Hillary Clinton gave a speech at the First Baptist Church. Barack Obama Jr. gave a politically-tinged sermon at the Brown A.M.E. Church, which was headquarters for the March 7, 1965, march for voting rights that ended in the beating and battering and tear gassing of the participants. He paid homage to the “Moses generation,” some of whom were in the congregation: the men and women who did so much to lead Blacks out of bondage but never quite made it to the Promised Land.

"We are in the presence today of a lot of Moseses. They are giants whose shoulders we stand on. They are people who battled on not just the behalf of African Americans, but on behalf of all Americans for America's soul....Like Moses, they challenged Pharoah, powers who said that some are on top and others are at the bottom and that's the way it's always going to be."

His is the “Joshua generation,” he said, tasked with the obligation to continue the journey and to move in directions the Moses generation could not even have imagined. "It's because they marched that the next generation hasn't been bloodied so much" and has excelled in many fields, including politics.

Not so subtlely silencing his critics about his racial identity, he recounted the life story of his Black grandfather, still called a "houseboy" when he was in his 60s in colonial Kenya and required to carry a passbook to get from one place in White-controlled Kenya to another part. But he dreamed and passed on his hope to his son, Barack Obama (Sr.), who benefitted from a US program to bring Africans to the US for education and to repair the American image abroad as a result of the well-publicized injustices and brutalities of the civil rights era. The possibilities for the Obamas changed "because some folks were willing to march across a bridge."

"So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama. I'm here because somebody marched for our freedom."

His message, beyond connecting his family’s racial odyssey and his own to the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was not that different from Clinton’s. They both said that the march must continue.

“We have to finish the march,” Hillary said. “That is the call to our generation, to our young people.”

"There are still some battles that need to be fought, some rivers that need to be crossed," Barack said.

And referring to God's message to Joshua, Barack admonished his listeners to “Be strong and have courage.” Blacks seem to be warming to that message.