Clinton Cultivates a Crucial Swath of the Obama Coalition in Alabama
On the 60th anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks sat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and refused to relinquish her seat to a white man, Hillary Clinton traveled to the city in Parks’s honor. She took the pulpit at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church to commemorate the Montgomery bus boycott that Martin Luther King Jr. had organized there. But her focus was not, most specifically, on water fountains, diner counters, and Jim Crow segregation. It was on the role of lawyers in changing rotten laws.
She began her remarks with classic church cadences, making her case to a crucial swath of the Obama base. “This is the day the Lord has made,” she opened. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” “Justice is love correcting that which would work against love.”
The two-day anniversary program was hosted by the National Bar Association, the country’s largest network of African-American lawyers and judges, and Clinton spoke extensively of her work for Marian Wright Edelman, the first African-American woman to pass the Mississippi bar, at the Children’s Defense Fund. She spoke of a conversation with the civil rights lawyer John Doar, who calmed a raging mob after the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963. (Clinton recounted asking Doar, “Weren’t you afraid?” He replied, she said, “Of course I was, but I was representing the law. I was representing the Constitution.”) She thanked Paulette Brown, the president of the American Bar Association, and the first African-American woman in that position, for her words highlighting the role of women in the civil rights movement.
But in this setting, Clinton—an attorney, after all—seemed to find an unusual vitality. She spoke of unjust laws that get it wrong, injustices perpetrated “in spite of the law, and sometimes, unfortunately, in keeping with it.” She said that when that happens—when Rosa Parks is arrested in keeping with a fetid law—then the law can be changed. In the United States, Clinton said, “it’s up to lawyers and judges to get it right.
But, compensating for her lawyerly mien, she made an interesting segue. She said that it may be “unusual” to hear a presidential candidate “say we need more love and kindness,” but that love and kindness were exactly what the country needed. "Justice is really love in calculation,” she said. “Justice is love correcting that which would work against love.” And, “Standing beside love is always justice.”
After Clinton’s address, Bernice King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter—who pointed out that her father had aspired to become an attorney, and that she fulfilled his aspirations “and am a part of you as a member of the State Bar of Georgia”—offered a benediction. “And Lord as I believe this is the century of the woman,” King, a minister, said, “I pray that you grant great favor, grace, and anointing to Hillary Rodham Clinton in her pursuit to be the first woman president of the United States of America.”
And then Clinton locked hands with Bernice King, with Paulette Brown, with Benjamin Crump, the president of the National Bar Association and the attorney who represents the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, with Fred David Gray, the attorney who represented Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin, and Martin Luther King Jr. and sang “We Shall Overcome.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-12-01/in-alabama-clinton-cultivates-a-crucial-swath-of-the-obama-coalition
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So so smart.