The 2015 church massacre in Charleston would precipitate Obama giving a poignant eulogy. But behind the scenes, speechwriter Cody Keenan recalls in his new book, ‘Grace,’ Obama doubted whether he could bring himself to say anything at all.
The day after nine people were slaughtered inside their Charleston, SC church, in June of 2015, would be the fourteenth time Presidentaddressed the nation after a mass shooting. The fourteenth time I’d have to find a new way for him to offer some reassurance that the world would keep spinning, even when it was full of holes.
I thought back to twenty-six months earlier when Senate Republicans blocked a vote on universal background checks following the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut—with many of the children’s parents looking on—and Obama, as frustrated and cynical as I’d ever seen him, told me, “the next time this happens, I don’t want to speak.” His words could have cracked the planet in half.
An attack on a place of Black dignity, community, and safety conjured up some of America’s oldest and ugliest demons and echoed the violence visited on Black Americans like Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, four little girls in Birmingham, and untold, unnamed others through centuries of slavery and Jim Crow—violence meant to “keep people in their place,” to instill fear in Americans who posed a “threat” to the established order.
By Friday morning, not even two days after that act of terror, whether Obama would travel to Charleston and deliver another eulogy was all anybody wanted to know. Some of the president’s advisors upstairs were pushing for it already., shared my feelings. “I’m with him if he doesn’t want to. It’s not on him alone to fix this every time,” Peri said. “Or you,” she added. “But it’s hard, though. This time is different. This one is way too fucked.
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