‘Amazing Grace’: Barack Obama delivers searing speech on US race relations at slain pastor’s funeral
President describes Confederate flag as a "reminder of systemic oppression and racist subjugation".
US President Barack Obama on Friday delivered a rousing eulogy for a black pastor slain in the Charleston massacre, addressing the strains in America over race and gun control before bursting into a soulful hymn.
Dubbed the “reverend president” by his South Carolina hosts, Obama led thousands of mourners in singing Amazing Grace – an emotive homage likely to be remembered as one of the defining moments in his presidency.
Clementa Pinckney, pastor at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and also a state senator, was shot dead along with eight of his congregants in Charleston last week, an apparently racially motivated attack that shocked the nation.
“What a good man,” Obama said, praising Pinckney, who he knew personally. “Sometimes I think that’s the best thing to hope for when you’re eulogised.”
Much of Obama’s address was focused not directly on Pinckney, but on social strains that his death has underscored: race, gun control and the country’s Civil War.
America’s first black president said the Confederate flag – the Civil War standard of the white slave-owning south that was taken up by alleged gunman Dylann Roof – was not just an emblem of heritage.