We shall overcome

Our rainy week in Dorset was conducted with the backdrop of the Democratic Convention transmitted by the the BBC Parliament channel.

Most American political conventions have a mixed effect on me. On the one hand, the awesome choreography and precision messaging grates on a politician whose formative years were spent listening to Neil Kinnock beat his party into submission with a lyrical rhetoric, never again be repeated in modern politics. On the other, the magnitude of the stakes faced in the US can’t fail to grip you.

This year, those Democrats left me with an unusual anxiety. Would Barrack Obama rise to the occassion? Every commentator made reference to the great “I have a dream” speech – no pressure for Obama there! For me though, the Obama speech owed as much to an moving oratory by LBJ as it did to Martin Luther King.

Last week, it was hundred years since the birth of Lyndon Bains Johnson. 43 years ago he delivered a speech that was, in my view, one of the most significant of the last century. No one can describe that event in history better than Robert A Caro:

“Only a week before the March 1965 speech, Dr. King had said that at the rate voter registration was going, it would take 135 years before even half the blacks in Mississippi were registered. And as the limousines were pulling through the gates that night in March, the protesters were singing “We Shall Overcome,” as if to tell Lyndon Johnson, we’ll do it without you.

But they didn’t have to.

When Johnson stepped to the lectern on Capitol Hill that night, he adopted the great anthem of the civil rights movement as his own.

“Even if we pass this bill,” he said, “the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.”

And, Lyndon Johnson said, “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

He paused, and then he said, “And we shall overcome.”

Martin Luther King was watching the speech at the home of a family in Selma with some of his aides, none of whom had ever, during all the hard years, seen Dr. King cry. But Lyndon Johnson said, ‘We shall overcome’ — and they saw him cry then”

If you want to read majestic prose, then read the whole article by Mr Caro in the New York Times last week: “Johnson’s dream, Obama’s speech” It’s very moving.

Gary Younge, with equally majestic prose, sums up last weeks acceptance speech: “It compressed into an evening what they thought would never live to see in their lifetime. And it had left them incredulous.”

Politics is generally a brutal game. But in our rainy little holiday cottage in Dorset, I don’t mind saying that I shed a tear when when Barrack Obama took took the rostrum.