Obama Calls for Unity
The New York Times | March 15, 2008
By Jeff Zeleny
Senator Barack Obama repudiated the "incendiary" remarks of his former minister today, imploring Americans to set aside racial divisions and heed the words that Robert F. Kennedy delivered not far from here the night the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
"At that moment of anguish, he said we've got a choice in taking the rage and bitterness and disappointment and letting it fester and dividing us further, so that we no longer see each other as Americans, but we see each other as separate and apart and at odds with each other," Mr. Obama said. "Or we can take a different path."
...As the crowd of 3,000 people listened intently, Mr. Obama continued.
"Although I knew him - and know him - as somebody in my church who talked to me about Jesus and family and friendships, but clearly if all I knew was those statements I saw on television, I'd be shocked," he said. "And it reminds me that we've got a tragic history when it comes to race in this country. We've got a lot of pent up anger and bitterness and misunderstanding."
Then, Mr. Obama reprised a few lines from his speech to the 2004 Democratic convention, saying "there's no black America, white America, or Asian America or Latino America. There's the United States of America."
The crowd rose to its feet in applause.
"I will not allow us to lose this moment where we can not forget about our past and not ignore the very real forces of racial inequality and gender inequality and the other things that divide us," he said. "When people say things like what my former pastor said, you have to speak our forcefully against them, but what you have to also do is to remember what Bobby Kennedy said that it is within our power to join together to truly make a United States of America."
