Flashback 2009 - The Inaugural

Sherrilyn A. Ifill dictates a powerful description of the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

Friends: Please know that I haven’t called you because I still can’t talk about yesterday without busting out crying. This piece was supposed to be a commentary on NPR, but they were inundated with pieces today and it couldn’t go up. I hope this tells you something about my feelings today.

Surprisingly, it was Aretha that got me bawlin’ the first time. Draped in gray and wearing a spectacular church hat; the great Aretha Franklin sang My Country ‘Tis of Thee, and to paraphrase Michelle Obama for the first time in my life, I really heard the song. When I was first in school in the 1960s, this was a song we sang every Friday at our elementary school assembly. Like standing for the color guard, and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and singing “Freedom Isn’t Free” at commencement exercises, we did these things with a sense of bore routine. But today, I heard Aretha Franklin sing the lyrics, “let freedom ring” as she closed her song and I felt it to my very toes. She sang it like we expect Aretha to sing - with full-throated power and bone-shattering melismas. She riffed. She squeezed her eyes tight and made us believe. It was church. I started to get dizzy. Was this really happening? Was Aretha Franklin singing like this at the inauguration of the first black president of the United States?

Aretha Franklin at President Barack Obama’s Inaugural
I cried through Obama’s speech. I “amen”-ed” and applauded the honesty and the challenge of his words. It seemed somehow fitting that Obama, the nation’s first African American president, should give our country the “tough love” talk we so desperately need. It was as if by electing Obama as president, the American people signaled that we’re ready — grown-up enough to accept the complexity of who we are, and what we should expect of ourselves.

My brother wept and told me that he thought of our grandfathers – both of whom we’ve never met. They died in a country thousands of miles away nearly 80 years ago when our parents were still children. And yet their sacrifices and vision and those of my grandmothers helped infuse in our parents a spirit of possibility that enabled them to take the risk of immigrating to this country. Still I’m sure that even our grandparents - men and women of spirit and courage — could not have imagined what we saw today.

The long march to find an open metro station cleared my head a bit. It took 3 hours to even get on a train. I was tired and exhausted by the time I got back to Baltimore County. And then I rushed to the T.V. to see Michelle Obama’s ball gown and to see the First Couple’s first dance at the Neighborhood Ball. And I lost it again. Pop princess Beyonce sang the dizzying and mesmerizing Etta James love song, “At Last” as President Obama in white tie and tails, and Michelle in a one-shouldered yellow gown, danced awkwardly and sweetly, like so many black couples I know. The lyrics of the song speak of romantic love, but also tonight of the long-awaited dream of so many African Americans that our lives, our marriages, our work ethic, our intelligence, our integrity would be recognized and accepted fully into the fold of American life. I literally could not breathe. The Obamas were as authentic, and in love, and . . . well, black, as any couple in my church, my community, my family. Even now, I’m crying again as I write this.

You may not — perhaps you cannot — understand what these moments meant to me today. I have long prided myself on a certain cynicism about American public life, and certainly about American race relations. I remain deeply aware of the wide chasms that still exist between the conditions of blacks and whites in education, incarceration, employment, housing opportunities, and so many aspects of our social and political condition. And I remain committed to devoting my life’s work to closing those gaps, and to elevating the condition of all of those who have been marginalized and disenfranchised. But I cannot deny that something melted in my heart today — something hard and stony, something forged and calcified in my earliest memories of racism in my integrated elementary school — the school to which I was bused and where I first learned “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” It was a place I loved, and where I excelled, but where I also saw that all children were not equal in the eyes of all teachers. The stone that melted today was one that solidified when I learned that many whites thought that we weren’t clean, that we weren’t smart, that we couldn’t achieve, that we didn’t love passionately and deeply, that our families weren’t the center of our lives; that there were Christians who believed that I was unfit to enter heaven, or to worship with them.

Today that stone melted. Not because those people don’t still exist. Some are my neighbors. But they are not the majority, and because their existence cannot, will not, change the truth of who we are, and what must be, if this country is to be saved.

Sherrilyn A. Ifill is a civil rights lawyer and Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Schoo