'nuff said:
Also hear Diana Ross:
7.4.2015: Michiko Kakutai’s essay on the eulogy Obama delivered in Charleston on Friday June 26, 2015 is a moving and informative discussion of the speech and the week it was delivered in. He writes, “it [the speech] was the capstone to a dizzying and momentous week in which Southern politicians began calling for a renunciation of the Confederate battle flag, while the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act and found that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriages.
It was a week in which a lot of Americans felt they were actually watching the arc of history bend in front of their eyes*, and it was a eulogy that both spoke to the moment and connected that moment to the past and the future of what Mr. Obama calls the great “American experiment.”
* This quote originated with the 19th Century abolitionist, Theodore Parker (NPR segment).
"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."
A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. paraphrased these words to great effect in his famous "Where Do We Go From Here?" speech of August 1967 to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, when he said, "The arc of the Moral Universe Is long, but It bends toward Justice".