AFTERWARD

If Dr. King had lived, what might he say about what he sees today? This is but a small piece of what I think he might have thought about a few personal and social issues, offered in the same spirit that he penned his letter to the American church as the Apostle Paul. The occasion for the interview is a celebration of Dr. King's 80th birthday, which, of course, had he lived, would be nowhere near a national holiday.

QUESTION: Dr. King, how does it feel to turn 80 years old? It's such a milestone.

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING: I must confess to you that I never thought I'd make it to this age. During the most intense moments of our struggle, there was a great deal of hatred and danger directed at us. I personally faced constant death threats. Many of our greatest leaders and most stalwart activists were brutally murdered. Medgar Evers was shot down like an animal in Mississippi, and in the same state, those three brave young civil rights workers were viciously murdered. And one can't forget the incredible sacrifice that those four young girls made when they were blown to premature martyrdom in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Spike Lee's very fine documentary, Four Little Girls, captures the sense of terror we all faced during those times, but also the dig­nity and courage of the people too.

As far back as 1956 I had to face the real possibility that I would die. After all, my house was bombed during the Montgomery bus boycott. When I look back on many of the sermons and speeches that I gave during the sixties, I can clearly see that I was trying to address our people's grief and suffering, and trying to inspire them to keep going in the midst of the death and hatred we faced on a daily basis. But to be honest, I was also trying to come to grips with my own mortality in a movement where it seemed guaranteed that I would be made a sacrificial lamb. But contrary to what some might have believed, I had no martyr complex. I repeatedly stated that I wanted to live as long as anybody, and so...

QUESTION: Well, that's certainly borne out by a statement you made in Montgomery, Alabama, in May of 1965, where you expressed a great deal of frustration and anger over the killing of Negroes while the government sat idly by. You said that "when they kill Negroes and civil rights workers in Alabama, nothing is done about it. Under the administration of Governor George Wallace alone 10 peo­ple have been killed during civil rights demonstrations." Do you remember that statement?

KING: Absolutely, like it was yesterday. I also said, "What we are saying now is that we are tired of this. Our lives are too precious. We are saying to the State of Alabama, now you're not going to frighten us into submission. If you kill one Negro, or one white ally, then you're going to have to kill ten, and if you kill ten, you're going to have to kill 20, and if you kill 20, you're going to have to kill 100, and if you kill 100, then you're going to have to kill a thousand!"

QUESTION: But did you ever have a stronger sense you were going to die than at other times? There's famous newsreel footage of you explaining in rather stark and dramatic terms how you thought you were going to die one night in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Could that be considered such a moment?

KING: Yes, it really can. There were policemen who were preceding us as we marched, and they spotted several peo­ple in trees ahead of us, ready to shoot us if they could get us in their sights. I really just gave up. As I said then, I wouldn't say I was so afraid, as that I had yielded to the real possibility of the inevitability of death. I really had concluded that day in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that it was all over. When I look back, I can find a kind of humor in the situation that was awfully difficult to see then. But we had stopped to speak and pray, and I gave a few words, saying that the murderers of the three civil rights workers who had gone to Mississippi to work, Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, were probably around us somewhere. And all of a sudden, my speech was interrupted by a man standing behind me who said, "You damn right, I'm right behind you." I just knew my life was over, because I could tell that he wasn't bluffing at all. And when it was time to pray, Ralph Abernathy said he kept his eyes open as he spoke to God. We had a good chuckle about that later.

QUESTION: Some people who've heard it think that the speech you gave on April 3rd, 1968, before an audience of striking sanitation workers and their allies at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, contained a strong sense of premonition of death. It's not one of your better known speeches, and the only reason I bring it up is because scholars who've studied the civil rights movement and your life suggest that it might have become one of your best known speeches had you been killed that night, or shortly afterward. In retrospect, it does tend to read as a last will and testament. Did you think you would be murdered soon after you delivered that speech?

KING: Well, as I've said, death was our constant companion in the movement, and I was having an especially tough time of it. The first demonstration on behalf of the striking workers in Memphis in late March had turned violent, and there was rioting; a young black man was shot and killed. I was extremely depressed. Then the Poor People's Campaign was not going very well either. I was wearing myself out, ruining my health, really, ripping and running from one side of the country to the other trying to drum up support for our mass mobilization in Washington, D.C. My own SCLC board was against me, especially our wonderful benefactor Marian Logan, the fiery and brilliant wife of the renowned physician Arthur Logan, with whom I had many heated disagreements about the direction of our group in 1968. On top of all that, when I was flying into Memphis to lead the march, the pilot announced, before we took off, yet another bomb threat because I was flying on the plane. Of course this kind of thing had by then become routine, but I must say to you, the thought of being killed never gets old or routine. There's an insistent, and troubling, freshness to each new threat, as if the possibility of being snuffed out renews in one's spirit a deep sense of one's fragility and finitude. I beat the feeling back, or at least I tried to, but when we landed in Memphis, there was a horrible downpour, and tornadoes in the area had already killed several people. The bleak weather seemed to match my dampened spirit, and I retreated to the Lorraine motel to get some rest, since I didn't feel very well. I sent Ralph over to the Mason Temple to speak in my place at the rally that night. Ralph rang the room and insisted I get right over because it was, how did he frame it, a Martin moment. I got dressed as fast as I could and rushed over to Mason Temple.

What you and the folk who were there that night probably heard was my fatigue, my despair, my depres­sion, my feeling out of sorts. All of that came gurgling to the surface, I suppose, when I spoke. I can't honestly say I had any more a sense of my impending end that night than on many other nights when I felt that I could die at any moment because of the actions of our sick white brothers. In fact, I was much more convinced of my death in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964 than on that night in Memphis. By the way, it turns out that the man who shouted his warning was Neshoba County Sherrif Rainey, who was allegedly implicated in the murders of those young men along with his deputy, Cecil Price. Sick broth­ers indeed.

QUESTION: Since you've already mentioned it, can you speak to us a bit about your depression? You were one of the most famous black people ever to publicly acknowledge that you've struggled with depression, a subject that's not often spoken about since mental health remains a big taboo in black circles.

KING: Certainly. Although I know some who read this may think I'm grossly exaggerating, I consider the announce­ment of my struggles with depression nearly two decades ago every bit as important in the psychological realm as breaking my silence about my opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967 was in the political realm. I decided to break my silence about my depression so that I could encourage more of our people to own up to the enormous psychic burden and emotional stress that we too often carry around. And it can have a horrible impact on our overall health. Black people have been shouldering the weight of the world, and it tells on our physical and mental health.

I figured that if I told the truth, perhaps a few others might be heartened in their own struggles, and encour­aged to confront what we now know is an illness that is just as much biological and physical as anything else. There should be no shame in addressing the profoundly dispiriting emotions that sometimes seize us. I began experiencing severe bouts of depression in Montgomery during the bus boycott, when the pressures and anxiety were building at such a fast pace, and I had to call on every spiritual resource I had. I remember once I was on the podium about to speak at a mass meeting, when a wave of deep emotional suffering washed over me so strongly that I couldn't continue. My own ego and my sense of male pride kicked in, and later, when folk started saying I nearly passed out and had a small emotional breakdown, I denied it, but I eventually confessed that it was true. Of course that's not something that's easy to admit for any of us, especially for men, but I felt I had to tell the whole truth of my own battles with depression, because I'd sought the same way out—through excessive drinking and other habits of which I'm not proud—that many others have taken. But it ultimately doesn't work. Oh, it may narcotize you for a while, but it doesn't address the underlying causes of depression, which range from the chemistry of the brain, to deep psychological suffering that comes from enduring different traumas, to the stress and strain of our professions and personal lives.

Remember, I started in the movement as a very young man of 26 years of age, and by the time I was in my early 30s, I'd already confronted a huge degree of pain and suf­fering as a result of our push to destroy Jim Crow and institutional racism in the south. When I look back, I see it even invaded my language. I spoke in Chicago one night of how tired I was. And I...

QUESTION: I don't mean to interrupt you Dr. King, but it's very interesting that you mention that speech, because I had pulled it out so I could quote some of its poignant phrases to you, and ask you about them. Here are a few. "I don't mind saying to Chicago or anybody, I'm tired of marching for something that should have been mine at birth. I don't mind saying this to you this night . . . I'm tired of the tensions surrounding the days. I don't mind saying to you tonight that I'm tired of living every day under the threat of death . . . Yes, I'm tired of going to jail; I'm tired of all of the surging murmur of life's restless sea." I mean, those are remarkably direct and powerful expressions of the troubling emotions you were confronting. The imagery of your suffering is simply haunting.

KING: Yes, I suppose I felt, as sociologist Max Weber called it, "world weary." I think that as much as I was trying to inspire the troops to keep pushing in the war to win America's bitter battle with itself over whether it would do the right thing by Negroes—I mean black people; I still revert back to the language of that era from time to time, it just sneaks up on me, the old ways, the old phrases, just slip right in. But as I was saying, while try­ing to lead our people in the fight for equality, I also found myself fighting the gloominess of spirit that some­times sunk me quite low. I had a number of physical and psychological battles. First, I often had horrible hiccups when I got anxious or depressed, and they simply wouldn't go away—until, miraculously enough, it was time for me to speak. Then I could get up and deliver a speech that had no trace of a hic­cup, but then, as soon as I was finished, they'd come right back on me. I have no way of explaining it except to tell you that, as I used to hear the old saints say, "God's grace is truly sufficient." Then I'd overeat. Even though one of my great sins, as I've always said, is eating good food, especially soul food, when I was depressed I was nearly eating myself into an early grave. It was quite unhealthy. I even remember Andy Young telling me once, "Martin, it looks like we might live through this revolution, and if we're going to be around, we might as well be healthy." But I kept piling my plate higher and higher, and as a result, I became extremely overweight, and had to go on a serious diet to get my weight under control, although I still battle with it to this day. From a psychological standpoint, I had such gloomy days that sometimes I just couldn't rouse myself out of bed. A couple of my aides in the sixties—long before it became even remotely acceptable to visit a therapist among the masses of Americans, much less black folk— strongly hinted that I needed to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist. My mood swings were getting progressively worse, except there wasn't much of a bi-polar manic depression going on, since I was stuck for very long peri­ods in the depression side of that equation. I finally sought out a very smart and compassionate therapist who helped to guide me through the haze of mental injury to a healthy psychological state where I could come to grips with my wounds and bruises and recover enough to be an even more effective leader.

QUESTION: Wow, that's truly amazing. But that's not the only thing you've bravely broken your silence about. You also announced your support for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. You even spoke at a huge rally they held in Washington, D.C., last year to oppose amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage. What led you to such an unpopular position, especially as an ordained Baptist minister?

KING: Well I said a long time ago that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. I could not in good con­science refuse to weigh in on such a gross injustice to a precious group of God's children, our lesbian, gay, bisex­ual and transgender brothers and sisters. I find it abhor­rent that President Bush would try to bully the country into adopting a vicious and narrow view of the Constitu­tion by trying to use it to define marriage in such a tradi­tional and conservative fashion. This certainly reminded me of those vicious white supremacists in the 50s and 60s who used the law and religion—and racial customs and cultural traditions—to justify their evil assaults on black folk. Now the same reactionary forces are trying to deny to sexual minorities the right to say "I do" as they see fit. It strikes me as extremely hypocritical that conservatives, who claim they want a limited government, want to expand the power of the state to tell citizens what they can do in their bedrooms. And then the religious side of this business is quite disturbing to me as well. The same white evangelical Christians who are crusading against the rights of gays and lesbians are often descended, theologically speaking, from the very Christians who opposed us during the hey­day of the civil rights movement. They pointed in their bibles to those passages that admonished the slave to obey his master; they justified segregation and racial discrimi­nation based on twisted readings of the bible and religious history. I'm afraid black Christians haven't done much better. The homophobia in black religious circles is so thick you could cut it with a knife. I try to challenge black clergy and laypeople alike with the message of Jesus' love for all people. There is no asterisk in the bible when Jesus bril­liantly boils down the majestic sweep of the law and prophets to two central commandments: to love God with all of your heart, soul and mind, and the second one, to love your neighbor as yourself. And many black Christians seem to have no sense of either irony or history when they trot out biblical justifications for why they are opposed to homosexuality in the same manner conservative white Christians used the bible against them. I'm ashamed to say that in the sixties I felt I had no choice but to get rid of my trusted advisor Bayard Rustin because of the vicious politics played by Adam Clayton Powell. The powerful congressman had threatened to lie and say that Rustin and I were lovers if I didn't discourage Bayard from leading a protest at the Democratic conven­tion over the party's failure to aggressively support civil rights. It wasn't one of my shining moments of standing up for truth and righteousness. I let Adam bully me into firing a man whose strategic brilliance was unquestion­able, all because of the poisonous politics of homophobia. I have since seen the errors of my way, and I hope that we as a people, and as a nation, can welcome our gay and les­bian brothers and sisters in all aspects of our culture and nation.

QUESTION: Since we're on the topic of the black church, do you care to comment on the so-called "prosperity gospel" movement?

KING: Quite frankly, the prosperity gospel movement is a tragic development within the Christian church in gen­eral, but especially for the black church. I've never roman­ticized the black church; even during the height of our movement in the sixties, we never had more than a small percentage of its leadership involved. Most of the minis­ters in the black church and their members, I'm sorry to say, were bystanders, spectators and observers of our move­ment—and sometimes, they were even critical or hostile to our movement. There are a variety of reasons for such actions; black people were deathly afraid of white suprem­acists, and that's quite understandable. Others were bitten by the bug of otherworldly religiosity, and as I used to say about the white church, they mouthed pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. I'm afraid the prosperity gospel has taken this trend a step further into dangerous ground. Whenever you reduce the gospel promise of freedom and liberation from oppression, and make it essentially about finding and exploiting wealth, you have perverted the meaning and intent of Jesus. I realize those are strong words, but that's simply how strongly I feel about the direction large quarters of the black church have taken by adopting the prosperity gospel perspective.

The question we must relentlessly pursue in judging the effectiveness of our religion is who are we helping and how does this serve God to bring about the transformation of the lives of the vulnerable and the forsaken. The carrot of a payoff for service in the Kingdom may drive a great many of our people to tithe or participate in the cloistered rituals of sanctuary bound politics, but it won't nudge them to actively resist economic oppression or contribute to the lives of the least fortunate. I'm terribly disturbed by how much ground we've lost in the black church to this brand of the gospel—and here I don't think we can take the metaphor lightly, because the gospel has been virtually turned into a commodity, into a designer religion which places being fashionable and trendy above the enduring concerns of sacrificing for and fighting for the poorest members of our community. The prosperity gospel move­ment sells the gospel at a cost, and turns a fetish with cap­italism into a full-blown religious experience. The high priests of dollarism have muted the prophetic and revolu­tionary accents of the black Christian message of libera­tion and freedom and turned the sanctuary over to the money changers that Jesus drove from the temple.

QUESTION: Wow, those are strong words from you Dr. King. In light of your statement then, what do you make of the recent criticisms of prominent black figures of the black poor?

KING: Just as I am disappointed by the prosperity gospel movement, I'm equally disturbed by well-known black people and other celebrities beating up on vulnerable poor black folk. I have spent the bulk of my public career now addressing the systematic exploitation of the poor all over the world, and of course, concentrating on the American poor, especially the black and brown poor. There are horri­ble economic and social burdens that poor black people carry. As I've said time and time again, the civil rights movement did a great job of opening the doors for the black elite and the black middle class. The civil rights act and the voting rights act were marvelous pieces of legisla­tion that enacted freedoms for black people who could afford to take advantage of them. Now of course all black people can, and ought to, vote. And all black people can enjoy the freedom from Jim Crow restrictions, but if we're honest with ourselves, the civil rights movement in the sixties primarily helped out those black people who could take advantage of the new opportunities we helped to make available.

But the nagging persistence of poverty for one-fourth of the black community is a staggering blight on the record of our movement, most especially on the failure of our government and society to address their plight. It does precious little good for prominent black people to 258 take aim at the black poor, especially when the problems that make black people poor can't be solved by the moral­istic recommendations that some of these figures offer. For example, as a Baptist preacher, I'm all for black folk of every economic strata behaving properly. I have always preached the discipline of nonviolence, which holds dear the notion that folk must ethically purge themselves in order to concentrate on redemptive social action. Good personal behavior has always been an ally in the fight against racism because of the punishing double standard that the Negro, I'm sorry, that black folk, have faced when trying to make public arguments about black advance­ment. It was exceedingly hypocritical for many of our white brothers and sisters to hold black people to a stan­dard that they weren't willing themselves to uphold. I'm afraid that the hypocrisy that many of our white brothers and sisters have given up has been transferred on to the upper black middle class, and the black elite. Too many well-to-do-black folk hide behind the safe security of class status and bourgeois values and look down their noses at the unwashed black poor, and yet they—and really I should say we—have moral shortcomings of our own. So it simply does no good to divide the world by class when examining the question of moral excellence; as I said in an essay I wrote when I was barely nineteen, some of the smartest white people during the height of Jim Crow were also the most racist. And some of the most well-to-do black folk are also some of the most morally judgmental and, quite frankly, some of the most hypocrit­ical members of our race. And listen, I'm not trying to be either hostile to the black elite, or celebratory of factions of the black poor who struggle with horrible habits. But the crushing circum­stances of poverty that lead to all manner of social ills have barely been scoffed at, let alone strongly resisted or criti­cized, by the black elite. If I saw the same people who are harshly critical of the black poor make equally harsh state­ments about the social barriers that prevent the black poor from advancing—or if I saw them just as vigorously take to task the white brothers and sisters whose personal and corporate interests are masked behind the maintenance of black poverty and social and economic inequality—then I'd be much more inclined to see their judgment of the black poor as moral and intellectual consistency. As it stands now, their words ring rather hollow when they have not taken the time to critically analyze the complex fac­tors that shape human behavior and that leave the poor vulnerable the world over.

QUESTION: One of the major criticisms of the black poor made by the black elite, and the black middle-class, and even a lot of working class black people, is that the family structure of the black poor, especially soaring rates of teen pregnancy leading to single female headed households, which the poor themselves can control, makes them more vulnerable to the social ills they confront.

KING: There's little doubt that we have to do a better job at family planning among the poor. I made this argument in an address that Mrs. King delivered for me on May 5, 1965, at the National Conference on Family Planning. Margaret Sanger, as you know, was at one time quite con­troversial because she went up against hostile cultural forces that opposed family planning as the instrument of evil, especially when it recommended birth control and later, when women gained the right of choice around the volatile issue of abortion. We must surely encourage the poor to do a better job of taking care of the homestead, and of making healthy decisions that don't unduly tax their families or overburden their resources. But neither can I pretend that the major burden for the plight of the black family falls on the poor themselves. What we have done is basically moralize what is essen­tially an economic and political question. By demonizing the black poor as somehow ethically incompetent in the choices they make, we relieve the state of its responsibili­ties toward the poor. We make little black girls the worst offenders of the morals of society—though that is hardly the case when we examine the malfeasance that happens at the top levels of this society and government every day— and let off the hook all those who perpetuate crimes against the poor in the name of fiscal conservatism, family values and social virtue. The harsh and punitive social policies of Republican administrations over the last two decades has done more to harm the black poor family than anything any "Shaniqua" could do to harm herself. I'm not saying that poor black girls don't need to be taught a more productive and healthy way to conduct themselves, but I'm also saying that policies of our govern­ment bear an even greater burden in the responsibility equation. And I shouldn't just speak of Republican admin­istrations. President Bill Clinton did an awful thing when he signed the legislation for welfare reform. I personally lobbied him to think very carefully while weighing the competing interests of a conservative hegemony that was exercising tremendous political influence and the needs of the black poor who hardly had advocates in high places. Again, this is why I am personally depressed that the black elite work so vigilantly against the black poor in the name of "cleaning up" and "policing" our community morally, when they did little to nothing with their celebrity, fame and influence to lobby government and political leaders to do the right thing by the black poor. In that sense, the black elite who remained silent while the black poor were led to the political slaughter have blood on our hands too. And in the end, let's be even more honest: there are few of us who can stand up in public and say we've never made a mistake, or done the wrong thing in a time of passion or desperation, so we should go just a bit easier on the poor who have even less of a social cushion and cultural comfort to absorb their mistakes.

QUESTION: Speaking of the conservative hegemony, what do you make of this war in Iraq and the so-called war on ter­ror that the president has been prosecuting?

KING: It seems to me that we're heading way in the wrong direction. Let me say immediately and unequivocally that I have been saddened by the way stigma has been heaped on the heads of our Muslim brothers and sisters around the world, but especially in our country. While I stand opposed to any religious expression or justification of vio­lence, I know that most brothers and sisters who follow Islam want peace, and love truth and justice just as much as the rest of us. I also know that the terrorists that we were concerned about for much of our history as a people bowed their knees to Jesus, not Allah. They burned the religious symbol of the cross on our lawns, and into the American collective unconscious. They dressed in cowards' garb when they donned white sheets to purify their das­tardly and evil deeds. They hid behind God's name to wreak havoc and terror on black people through lynching, castration, rape and social and political intimidation. So when I think of terror, I don't think first of Al Qaeda; I think of the Ku Klux Klan and other white hate groups that have perverted and recruited a warped Christian theology in the service of truth. As for the war in Iraq, I think it is on par with Viet­nam as a tragic misuse of American might and a misled campaign to end terror when we have merely helped light a torch for terror in the minds and hearts of millions who perceive us as unjust in our exercise of power. When I called America the greatest purveyor of violence in the world in the sixties because of our involvement in Viet­nam, I was accused of being unpatriotic. The rest of the country eventually caught up to my stance on that issue, it's safe to say. But the seeds of violence and empire we then sowed halfway cross the world have germinated in the soil of people in the Middle East who have felt for a long time the pressures of American empire. Let me be clear: I do not at all condone the terrorist activity of any group, for any reason, under any circumstances, even as I understand a people's or country's desperation to be released from the yoke of visible and invisible oppressions. If America is going to successfully fight terror, it must do what black folk who were fighting terror in the sixties did: we purged ourselves morally; we examined our own habits to make sure we weren't contributing unnecessarily to violence; we sought divine leadership in our pursuit of truth and justice; and we appealed to the consciences of our oppressors, while refusing to demonize them in the process of demanding fair treatment before the law. Amer­ica is dealing with a dangerous threat to her borders, but she must never capitulate to blind violence and wholesale demonizing of people who have felt the crushing blows of the despotic American will across time. Since most Amer­icans are ignorant of the tragic consequences of our foreign policy, the hatred we face as a nation comes as a surprise. But in fighting terror, we must also fight the impulse to be self-righteous and arrogant; we should practice a bit more humility, which might go a far longer distance in getting the sort of justice and balance and security we need—and that we need to guarantee for others as well.

QUESTION: I know we're running out of time, but your quick take on three subjects: hip hop, Barack and Oprah!

KING: My goodness, what a magnificent trio of issues. Of course, I am quite critical of the violence and misogyny at the heart of so much rap music. I oppose violence in all forms, and I can't offer rap music a pass because it's made by black youth, mostly in our urban centers. But the terri­ble pain I face in listening to the misogyny in rap is that it is the child of our neglect as older, wiser black people.

I remember once when a young lady was brought to the SCLC, complaining of being fairly ravaged by a staffer, and the men gathered there, including me, I'm ashamed to say, were cruelly insensitive to her complaints. We men have been nurtured in a male supremacist society where the needs and claims of women are at best marginal. I was

a chauvinist to my wife for many, many years, and it caused a great deal of strain in our relationship, until I had to finally admit that my ways had to be reformed. It was a difficult process, and I suppose you could say I'm a recov­ering male supremacist. It's hard to see yourself as an oppressor on gender when you've been oppressed by race, but it's a truth we've got to face nonetheless.

That's not to say I don't like rap music; in fact, aside from its vicious sexism and misogyny—and these are words we had no idea about when we fought racism in the sixties—I like the powerful stories and incredible lyrical genius of some of the young folk in rap music. I think at their best they have done what the black pulpit has too many times relinquished doing: telling the ugly truth about painful realities that demand brutal honesty in cor­recting. And if we can forgive sexist, lecherous preachers for their sexual sins—and you can include me in that number, unfortunately—then we can certainly hold our youth accountable while not doing it from a vague, abstract sense of superior morality that won't stand up under even the slightest scrutiny.

As for Barack Obama, I think he's a wonder of nature. I said in the sixties that we hadn't yet produced in black circles a political personality that had the magnetism and respect of John F. Kennedy. I think we may have found that person in Senator Obama. He is incredibly well- prepared, very bright, very thoughtful, and not full of bombast—though by nature, every politician has to brag about what he or she has done, or will o, to lead the country. The thought of having such a worthy person in the highest office is simply wonderful. And the sheer charisma and magnetism that he brings revives a sense of expectation and hope in the electorate, and that's a stun­ning thing to witness coming from a black man whose people in the South couldn't even vote for the most part until the mid-sixties. I do caution people, however, in expecting too much from Senator Obama should he become president. A black president won't stop black suffering, but he can use his bully pulpit to speak out on social issues that matter to us, and he can help enact legis­lation that will address our most pressing needs—like universal healthcare, tax cuts for the poorest and neediest, not the richest Americans, and jobs and boosted wages for the working class and poor. But the need for prophets outside the system won't disappear with a black president. We must hold him accountable just as we would any other president. Now that would be a sign of real racial progress: to witness a black president engaged in his duties while facing serious scrutiny by prophetic black voices in the culture. Finally, I am the world's biggest fan of Oprah Winfrey. I think she is a stunning figure, a woman who best repre­sents our people's magnificent spiritual genius. Oprah's show, and her sparkling, luminous presence in the world, has done more good than a million sermons and acts of Congress. Her will to better the American people by offer­ing an alternative to smut media is remarkable and coura­geous. Her support for the black poor in this country when it wasn't even popular has been stirring. Her loving embrace of our brothers and sisters in Africa has been nothing short of miraculous. She is the symbol of our will to survival through the word and spirit translated into therapeutic doses of information and transformed moral habits that provide her the most powerful pulpit in the world today. I applaud her sterling and impeccable sense of conscience, and her refusal to do anything to tarnish the black moral treasury and integrity with which she has been endowed. She has proved that white America can listen to a black voice that resonates with pure love and extraordinary compassion for the ordinary human being.

I must say, I love Oprah.

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