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Barack Obama's speech regarding the nation's racial divide, made Tuesday morning from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, is already being referred to by several political commentators and witnesses as "historic" and a "gift given to the country."
Attempting to quell recent attacks about his link to his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who once said in a sermon that blacks should damn America for continuing to mistreat them, Obama addressed the issue directly while putting it in the broader context of race relations in America.
Obama began by outlining the contradiction "embedded" within the U.S. Constitution that embraced freedom, yet supported the institution of slavery. He went on to note his own multi-cultural background, and explained the history of social and political rhetoric often preached in the black church.
He called Wright's statements "divisive," but still embraced the man who brought him to Christianity, officiated at his wedding, baptized his two daughters and inspired the title of his book "The Audacity of Hope."
"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," Obama said. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
With a row of eight American flags positioned behind him near the building where the Declaration of Independence was adopted, Obama urged the nation to break "a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years.'"
"The anger is real," he said. "It is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."
Obama advisers said he wrote the deeply personal speech himself. They said it was delivered in Philadelphia because of the city's historical significance, not because it is the most populous black city in Pennsylvania, site of the next primary vote on April 22.
