Tuesday night, John Kennedy, Barack Obama and the African American basketball coach John McLendon visited my house. It has taken me several days to understand that night.

Everyone in America who pays any attention at all knows that Tuesday night Obama delivered one of the most extraordinary speeches in recent memory. Readers of this blog know that by some strange coincidence, Tuesday night I chose to publish John Kennedy’s speech to the Houston Ministerial Association in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. I finished my essay at about the same time Obama was polishing up his speech.

Few people know about John McLendon, which is a shame, because he deserves mention in the same breath with his mentor James Naismith, the founder of basketball, and UCLA Coach John Wooden. John McLendon’s story aired as part of an extraordinary ESPN documentary, Black Magic, whose second and final episode appeared Tuesday night.

Black Magic tells the story of basketball at America’s historically Black Colleges and Universities, but that night it also provided the link between John Kennedy and Barack Obama. Only by understanding McLendon’s life can you truly comprehend the importance of what Barack Obama said Tuesday night and why his words rank with Kennedy’s speech as one of the most important public statements about equity and justice ever delivered in this nation.

Obama’s speech evokes Kennedy’s in another way, for just as Kennedy needed to confront the issue of his religion, Obama had to confront the issue of his race. In the media version of the tale, which these days becomes the only version, the trigger for Obama’s remarks came from his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., but frankly the Reverend Wright’s remarks were merely a pretense for something that was bound to happen at some point in this campaign.

In 1960, Kennedy knew he would have to deal with the religious issue, but the original plan was to deliver a speech in October, late in the campaign. Remarks by the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, who is now a footnote in history but in 1960 was the most-well-known religious leader in America, forced Kennedy to deliver the speech earlier.

Wright’s words spread across the Internet like one of those science fiction creatures which expands at a ferocious rate into something at once ugly and terrible. What fed that creature was racism, that now-forbidden fare that once had openly fed the baser impulses of the American mind, but now we keep hidden away like an alcoholic hides bottles of liquor to fuel a craving that is at once inexplicable, inescapable, and indefensible.

If it has not been Wright it would have been someone else. As Obama recognized in the speech, the media had tried to fan the fires of prejudice the week before with its story on Geraldine Ferraro’s remarks. Even before then, it was clear that race had become the over-riding issue of the Democratic Presidential race. It lay behind all those veiled references to exit poll data and the almost perverse way the media seized on any small reference to race, something Obama recognized in his speech.

The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

The time and place of Obama’s speech reverberate through American history as the opening lines from his speech testify. Just as Kennedy deliberately chose the heart of the Bible Belt for his speech, Obama chose the place where the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall and Betsy Ross’s house all lay within walking distance of where he spoke. Here America gave birth to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Of all the immortal words penned there, Obama chose to pick the opening phrases of the Preamble to the Constitution:

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy.

Much has been made of the famous crack in the Liberty Bell, but I have always thought that crack was race. True freedom could not resound through the land until all Americans were truly free. According to the history at the Liberty Bell website, no one knows when the bell really cracked, although the site relates several apocryphal stories. Our memories of race are like that.

What we do know, but prefer to not acknowledge is that even as Thomas Jefferson penned the words to the Declaration of Independence that stated “all men are created equal” and even as the framers of the Constitution argued about what percentage of a human being lay in an African American, a slave named William Lee lived in Philadelphia, serving as the valet to the father of our country, George Washington. In his will, Washington freed William Lee, writing:

And to my Mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee) I give immediate freedom; or if he should prefer it (on account of the accidents which ha<v>e befallen him, and which have rendered him incapable of walking or of any active employment) to remain in the situation he now is, it shall be optional in him to do so: In either case however, I allow him an annuity of thirty dollars during his natural life, whic<h> shall be independent of the victuals and cloaths he has been accustomed to receive, if he chuses the last alternative; but in full, with his freedom, if he prefers the first; & this I give him as a test<im>ony of my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War.

Those “faithful services” included being in charge of Washington’s most important papers, a role that put him at the very center of the founding of American democracy.

Obama’s words acknowledged the hypocrisy of our nation’s founding.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States.

One of those Americans was William Lee, a name few Americans know, fewer still know what role he played, and no historian has written his long-overdo biography. Not even during Black History Month is the name of William Lee mentioned.

John McLendon would understand William Lee’s story only too well. Barack Obama could have been speaking about him when he said:

They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

As Black Magic tells the story, McLendon enrolled at the University of Kansas where he studied under the legendary James Naismith, the inventor of basketball. Curiously, as the Black Fives website points out, Naismith never acknowledged McLendon or African American basketball in his seminal book, Basketball: Its Origins and Development.

What McLendon would take from Naismith is a belief that basketball was made to be played at a fast pace that was complemented by an in-your-face defense, from which McLendon created one of basketball’s most sophisticated and innovative styles. Black Magic tells the story of McLendon and that style with some of the most remarkable hoops footage I have ever seen.

But most white folks have never heard of John McLendon any more than they have heard of William Lee. The why of that goes deep into the heart of racism. McLendon, his players and teams suffered deeply from prejudice, but what Black Magic forces you to acknowledge is that there was an even deeper cultural prejudice at work.

McLendon’s fast-break style was so radical for its time–and still is today–that it put to shame the slow, deliberate pace of the dominant white basketball coaches. Former player Harold Hunter, the first African American to play in the NBA testifies:

McLendon invented a game that was vigorous, lively, at top speed.

In the 1950s when white college teams routinely played games averaging in the 50s, McLendon’s teams scored at a pace almost double that. Black Magic documents not merely how the white majority never gave this style a chance, but also turned it into a parody of itself, a hoops minstrel show with the Harlem Globetrotters as headliners. Former Temple Coach Don Cheney talks about how he couldn’t take playing for Globetrotters because he didn’t know any tricks; he could only shoot and dribble. Obama had this one in his sights when he said:

We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news.

Watching Black Magic you cannot help but ask what would American basketball have been like had John McLendon been permitted to bring his style to the entire country just as you have to ask what would America have been like had William Lee been a free man?

It was here that Obama’s speech attempted to reframe a centuries-old debate. At the heart of this reframing was Rev. Jeremiah Wright. A line that has not received much attention caught my ear:

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic.

Obama’s speech would have been better had he left this paragraph out. In its pure form, endemic means that a “disease” like racism is tied to its region, like dengue fever is tied to the tropics. Even at his most outspoken, Wright never implied racism sprang from the American soil like a plant, but rather saw it as endemic to its culture–something Obama acknowledged in his speech:

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States.

In his attempt to unify Americans, Obama sought to compare what John McLendon and William Lee faced with the grievances of white Americans. A key paragraph in the speech begins by evoking what drove white voters to Ronald Reagan:

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends.

No matter how hard anyone tries to rationalize it, white anger is not the same as white racism. In fact white anger often fuels white racism, as it did with John McLendon and William Lee and as it did during the Reagan era. This is where Obama’s speech and Kennedy’s have a large philosophical and rhetorical difference. In dealing with the anti-Catholic prejudice that threatened to derail his campaign as it had that of Al Smith, Kennedy purposely did not venture into the past. In fact he does not even mention America’s history of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudice. Instead he looks to the future, acknowledging that he will not let his religion guide his decisions.

Obama could have followed Kennedy’s lead, for the history of racism in this country is well-known as are the contemporary racial grievances Obama acknowledges.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education,

The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.

Instead in his attempt to link racism and white anger, Obama picks on America’s favorite target, corporate greed.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

In his Houston speech, John Kennedy did not delve into history, or attempt to diagnose the roots of anti-Catholic prejudice nor point fingers at who was to blame for it. Instead, he turned the argument upside down saying he will not let the past guide the future. The rhetorical strategy he uses is a continual repetition of the phrase I believe:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish.

Had Obama followed Kennedy’s strategy would he could have done was to say while he understood the Rev. Wright’s remarks, he believed differently. Interestingly, he does this in the most memorable part of the speech–its final section. He begins this part the speech by stating:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.”

A bit later comes the line for which that this speech should be remembered:

This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.

Curiously, that is one of the main messages of Black Magic, for even as it details the sad stories of great African American players who were denied a chance to play professionally in the National Basketball Association, its also shows how the NBA went from being an all-white league to one where African Americans now have become the stars.

It may be that race has so polluted this country that no one could possibly deal with it in a single speech and certainly not in the midst of what has become a racially-charged campaign. Barack Obama could have easily dismissed the Rev. Wright’s remarks in a variety of ways. He could have even thrown him under the bus and announced he was switching churches. That he chose not to do so reflects both moral and political courage.

In end what Obama’s speech teaches–and what makes it such a remarkable document–is that it affirms maybe it is time we quit ignoring our problems but rather, as Obama did, confront them and deal with them.

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