Obama Echoes King's Call For Unity at Atlanta Church

For her part, Clinton on Sunday was also moving to address the race's new demographic dynamic, in which African American voters will also play a pivotal role in many of the Feb. 5 "Super Tuesday" primaries that follow South Carolina's, including those in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, New York and New Jersey.

Clinton appeared Sunday at the landmark Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem -- where the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a pioneering black congressman, once preached -- to accept the endorsement of the Rev. Calvin Butts, one of New York's most prominent black pastors. At the church, Clinton described traveling with a youth group to hear King speak, and the "transforming experience" it was for her.

In a sign of just how fractious the Democratic race has become, the Obama campaign said it will ask the Nevada Democratic Party to review reports that Clinton caucus organizers had sought to block entry to certain caucus sites a half-hour before they closed. But the campaign said it is not contesting Clinton's victory and wants only to prevent such confusion in future caucuses.

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said the Obama campaign was peddling "false claims" and "grasping at straws" to explain its loss.

And Obama, in an interview taped for broadcast Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America," took issue with Bill Clinton's criticism of his record. "The former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling," he said. "This has become a habit, and one of the things that we're going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he's making statements that are not factually accurate."

In the spacious, light-filled sanctuary Sunday, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the young pastor of Ebenezer Baptist who invited Obama to address the church, asked parishioners not to wave Obama signs, for fear of giving the occasion an undue (and possibly illegal) political bent.

But Warnock's own position was hard to miss, as his sermon implicitly held up Obama -- "a brother [who] is committed and brilliant and has a spiritual foundation" -- as an answer to the "unfinished business" left 40 years after King's assassination. Warnock said it includes millions without health insurance, a growing divide between rich and poor, and a disproportionate share of young blacks behind bars.

Obama took care to avoid appearing presumptuous in offering himself explicitly as King's heir in the civil rights struggle. But he portrayed his campaign's message as descended straight from King and declared that "unity is the great need of the hour," adding, "Unity is how we shall overcome."

Obama drew applause by evoking grievances distant and recent for African Americans, including the controversial charges brought against black teenagers in Jena, La. But he added that "we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean," citing homophobia, anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant bias in the black community.

He grew most impassioned as he veered from his text to rebut Hillary Clinton's notion that he offers "false hopes." Without hope, he said, he would not be running for president, considering that he grew up with a single mother and "got in some trouble when I was a teenager."

If King had listened to such skeptics, he told the crowd, he might have "stood on the Lincoln Memorial and said 'You all go home, we can't overcome' " instead of giving his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.

"That's what hope is. Imagining and fighting and struggling for it and sometimes dying for it," Obama said. "There's no false hope in that."

Staff writer Shailagh Murray contributed to this report.