By Kathy Wray Coleman is a community activist, legal and political reporter, and a 22- year investigative journalist who trained for 17 years under five different editors at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio.
Tel: (216) 659-0473 and Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com
(www.clevelandurbannews.com) / (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com
Charleston, South Carolina (Cleveland Urban News.Com, Ohio's leader in Black digital news(www.clevelandurbannews.com)-President Barack Obama (pictured) delivered the eulogy on Friday afternoon for the home-going service of the Rev Clementa Picnkney and eight other Black parishioners gunned down earlier this month by suspected serial killer and White supremacist Dylann Storm Roof during a church revival at the prominent Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
The 21-year-old self-confessed killer said at the time of the unprecedented shooting that has taken the country literally by storm, that he was "there to kill Black people."
"Over the course of centuries, black churches served as hush harbors, where slaves could worship in safety, praise houses, where their free descendants could gather and shout," preached Obama to a “Hallelujah…”
Among other matters, the president also discussed Jim Crow Laws that were state and local laws relative to racial segregation that were enacted after the Reconstruction period in Southern United States that continued in force until 1965 in Southern U.S. states.
"The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, and the resistance to Civil Rights for all people was wrong,'" said Obama, who political experts say will go down in American history as one of the nation's great president.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president was there too, an indication, said sources, that she is more aggressively, or more cleverly, courting the Black vote this time around and after losing the Democratic nomination to Obama, a two-term president, in 2008. She did not speak on the platform though.
America' first Black president touched on a number of other hot-topic issues during his 30-minute eulogy, that critics say had political undertones, and he said that racism is alive and well in America, and that gun violence must cease.
“We have to have a conversation about race," said Obama, before adding that while gun safety measures will not prevent every tragedy, that to do nothing about the impact of gun violence on American society is irresponsible.
The Charleston killings ring true the fragile relationship between police nationwide and the Black community, and the tragedy comes as police murders of unarmed Blacks are getting heightening media attention, including the police shooting death of 12-year--old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio.
During an interview with comedian Marc Maron on Friday Obama said that the use or misuse of the n-word by those that are not African-American in particular, "is not the measure of whether racism still exists or not."
Obama launched into a solo at the end of his eulogy, leading funeral goers in the routine Black funeral song of "Amazing Grace."
The president then read aloud the names of each murder victim in addition to Rev Pinckney, namely Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson.
The killings have outraged Black leaders and Civil Rights advocates across the county.
The president of the NAACP expressed his outrage at the violence.
National NAACP Executive Director Cornell William Brooks
“There is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people engaged in the study of scripture,” said Cornell William Brooks, executive director of the national NAACP.
(www.clevelandurbannews.com) / (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com
