This weekend, at the Detroit commemoration of Aretha Franklin, Al Sharpton hailed her as “the soundtrack to the Civil Rights movement.” That movement had its very roots in too many funerals.
At the 1955 funeral of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, Till’s grieving mother invited thousands of mourners to view his open casket — millions more had their eyes opened to the violence inflicted on the black body when Jet magazine published the photographs.
But the Western tradition of the game-changer funeral goes back centuries, past Mark Antony inciting Romans to avenge the murder of Caesar, to the Ancient Greeks. The classical model for a funeral oration has always been that given by Pericles, an Athenian statesman, during Athens’ wars with Sparta.
“Our government does not copy our neighbors’, but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy. … Fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and then reflect that this supremacy was won by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it.”
President Barack Obama started his eulogy with a greeting to each of the other former Presidents and Vice Presidents present in the room: Bush, Clinton, Gore, and Cheney. Nothing made Trump’s absence from the ceremony more conspicuous. The references to Trump continued, oblique, but clear.
Despite McCain’s heroism, Trump notoriously mocked him during the 2016 election campaign. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured,” said the now-President, who was exempted from the draft after a doctor diagnosed him with bone spurs.
But McCain’s funeral was not the only farewell to an American icon this weekend, nor the only funeral to an icon recently insulted by Donald Trump. The friends and family of Aretha Franklin gathered on Friday, not for a funeral but a homegoing — a service drenched deep in the traditions of African-American church and the civil rights movement.
While McCain’s funeral recalled Eurocentric classical traditions (Athenian democracy, after all, did not extend to women and slaves), Franklin’s evoked the scores of civil rights funerals at which she had sung, or at which her father had preached. The singer Fantasia performed a mashup version of the gospel anthem “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” which Franklin had performed at a memorial for Martin Luther King Jr., 50 years ago.
In Detroit, there was clear anger toward President Trump — particularly after comments in which he claimed the icon had “worked” for him “on numerous occasions.” Many noted that Franklin’s long involvement in the black civil rights struggle should not have left her to be obituarized as entertainment for wealthy white men — especially a man who once took out ads in New York City’s newspapers to demand the death penalty for the Central Park 5, five young black men later exonerated of rape, in the wake of their arrest.
But as with McCain’s funeral, the call to political resistance was largely implicit. As befits a great artist, the moments that spoke most powerfully of Franklin’s spirit were moments of poetry and song: Cicely Tyson repurposed Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “When Malindy Sings;” Pastor E. L. Branch quoted Longfellow: “‘Dust thou art, to dust returnest’ was not spoken of the soul.”
Lieberman’s pally anecdotes about McCain will not have wide outreach. Voters whose loyalties have been won by partisan promises are rarely keen on their representatives hobnobbing in international hotels with the opposition. When civility becomes chumminess, politics looks like the game of a clubbable elite.
There was one further question hanging in the air this weekend. Where do we go from here? Could we ever see Obama, Dyson and Williams organizing in the same civil rights movement? A rallying cry for voter registration is at least a start. At McCain’s commemoration, former Presidents from the GOP and the Democratic Party were able to give speeches touching on the same virtues of civility and political self-sacrifice.
But on the frontlines of this November’s election battles, the tone is still set by Donald Trump and his Twitter feed. To many American voters, the very bipartisanship of Saturday’s gathering at the National Cathedral will testify to the herd mentality of a Washington elite.
Pericles had an advantage. If we believe his biographer, the historian Thucydides, his listeners shared his definition of his nation’s values. They just needed an eloquent reminder. The broken body of Emmett Till exposed an evil so explicit that its presence in America could no longer be denied. But it is not clear that the vast TV audiences for Aretha Franklin’s homegoing are all on the same page about racial justice. Nor that the millions who watched John McCain’s funeral share his vision for America. Meanwhile, to many voters elsewhere in America, unity looks like weakness.
Source : Nbcnewyork