Some See Connecticut Reflected In Obama Speech | Local News

From the Hartford Courant

Some See Connecticut Reflected In Obama Speech

By RINKER BUCK, Courant Staff Writer

March 19, 2008

In his landmark speech on race Tuesday in Philadelphia, Sen. Barack Obama pointedly addressed America's long "racial stalemate" in terms that were bound to strike familiar chords throughout the country.

But Obama's heartfelt ode to a "more just, more equal, more free" America also was a stark and brutally familiar description of Connecticut, where geography and neighborhoods are often defined by race, where Hartford schools continue to be embroiled in the Sheff v. O'Neill lawsuit and where even major areas of government like the state police are grappling with racial strife.

Obama scheduled his remarks in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the Constitution, after news reports on the comments of his friend and former Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., on American racism continued to dog his campaign over the weekend.

In his speech, Obama condemned Wright's comments as "not only wrong but divisive," yet he did not just issue the politician's standard distancing from a supporter who has embarrassed him. He instead used his speech as a springboard for a remarkably candid and perhaps risky assessment of the continuing problem of race in American society, words that echoed the theme of challenging the status quo that has marked his campaign.

"Nutmeggers can really recognize what Obama was talking about in his speech," said John C. Brittain, one of the lawyers who filed Connecticut's Sheff v. O'Neill school desegregation lawsuit in 1989. "Because what he was saying is the story of their home, too."

Despite the Connecticut Supreme Court's 1996 finding that "extreme isolation" characterized the state's schools, the legislature, the governor and the parties to the lawsuit are still haggling over implementing the desegregation order more than 12 years later.

"There has been some limited progress as a result of Sheff v. O'Neill, where minority kids, say, have a chance to attend better suburban schools," Brittain said. "But 18 years after the case was filed we still face the essential issue that Hartford schools are completely black and the suburbs are white. That's exactly the kind of stalemate Obama was talking about in his speech."

Obama is significant, Brittain said, because instead of running on the race issue and appealing only to his own community, his campaign is about aspirations to go beyond past obstacles over race and offer genuine hope for change. "The profound mistake of Rev. Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society," Obama said in Philadelphia. "It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country ... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen — is that America can change."

In a far-ranging speech that attempted to link racial issues from America's constitutional era to the present, Obama also said the Constitution "was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery." He said anger over racial issues is justifiable within both the African American and white communities, concluding that the country is stuck in a "racial stalemate."

Obama also said the race issue is distracting the public from other problems facing America, and he excoriated an American "corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed."

"I've certainly never heard a politician use language this blunt," said Mark Silk, the director of Trinity College's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and author of "Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II."

Silk said most politicians are deliberately vague on the subject of race to avoid raising a difficult subject, a stricture that Obama abandoned in Tuesday's speech. Silk also said Obama might have been most frank in addressing the assumptions of black Americans, not whites.

"At the core of the Obama campaign is a riposte to the notion in the black community that American society is irredeemably racist," Silk said. "Going all the way back to Booker T. Washington, and his doctrine of self-reliance for blacks, there has been a deeply separatist strain in the thinking of the black community.

"Because racism was considered so ingrained in America, so the thinking went, blacks had to go it alone and be apart. But Obama's speech was a call to move away from this past. It was courageous."

New Englanders should find significance in what Obama said for another reason, Silk said. He pointed out that he spent 10 years in Atlanta in the 1980s before returning north, which gave him a fresh perspective on the Northeast.

"In Atlanta, race just seems to be center stage all the time, while in Connecticut, because of the way neighborhoods and schools are divided up, it becomes easy to ignore race issues," Silk said. "For a lot of white people who don't live down South, the presence of race in life and society is just not front-of-mind. But Obama has been forced to deal with this himself, and now he is forcing us to think about it, too."

Obama joined Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side 20 years ago, impressed by the congregation's dedication to economic revival and community service. The Rev. John Deckenback of Frederick, Md., a conference minister, or bishop, for the UCC denomination, said many of the themes in Obama's speech date from historic commitments of the church. This included the large role the church played in the 1840s in the case of the Amistad, the Spanish ship that carried slaves who rebelled and who eventually were freed after standing trial in New Haven and Hartford.

"You have to remember that in the UCC, the same denomination that Wright and Obama belong to, we are the religious descendants of the same people who raised money to return the Amistad captives back to Africa," Deckenback said. "UCC has in its DNA from its very beginnings being responsible critics of our society. That's rooted in the Amistad story, which holds a special place in UCC's teachings."

Deckenback said that after the New England — and largely Connecticut — founders of the Amistad Defense Committee finished paying for the return of the Amistad slaves to Africa, money left over was used to establish the American Missionary Association, which founded schools for freed blacks throughout the South, including Howard University in Washington and Fisk University in Nashville.

"These were New England Congregationalists who believed that education is the foundation of opportunity and that churches play a vital role in keeping communities together," Deckenback said.

"Obama partly built that speech on those beliefs and on church history."

Contact Rinker Buck at rbuck@courant.com.

Sandra Csizmar contributed research for this story.