In an unnerving intelligence bulletin issued this week, the FBI warned that the expected news this weekend that Officer Darren Wilson won't be indicted in the death of black teenager Michael Brown could set off violence across the country. A source told one of our reporters that some law enforcement officials fear that the reaction could be as bad as the deadly Watts riots of the 1960s.
"The announcement of the grand jury’s decision … will likely be exploited by some individuals to justify threats and attacks against law enforcement and critical infrastructure,” the FBI warned. “This also poses a threat to those civilians engaged in lawful or otherwise constitutionally protected activities.”
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) has imposed a state of emergency in St. Louis, gun sales have skyrocketed and Ku Klux Klan leaders have threatened “lethal force” against protesters.
But there might be a way to prevent the outbreak of violence.
President Obama could go to Ferguson on Sunday, the day the announcement is expected, and by his presence, his outreach and perhaps his eloquent words, he and he alone might be able to prevent an eruption of polarizing race riots.
You might say he was made for this moment. The son of a white mother and a black father, he has always preached the gospel of reconciliation — there are not two Americas, there is only a United States of America, he has told us. The country elected him in part because he appealed to the better angels of our natures with his call to move past the battles we've been waging for a generation. A large part of his success was due to his both-sides message — that we all have more common ground than uncommon, that we can best solve our troubles by pulling together as one human, post-racial family.
With good reason, Obama has been reluctant to wade too deeply into such polarizing racial events after making too many waves during earlier ones. In 2009, when Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested by Cambridge police for breaking into his own house, Obama criticized the arrest and the response by police, and immediately took flak from law enforcement organizations for bringing race into it when they felt like they were just doing their jobs. Obama later said he regretted his comments, and has shied away from stepping in when similar flashpoints have flared up. His counselors have generally warned him to stay above these frays, to remain once-removed and presidential about them.
But that may be a mistake this time. Obama may not be our ideal of a political dealmaker, but he's not bad as a motivator, a morale booster, and a renewer of spirit — all part of the job description as well. There are moments in a country's history when it needs the latter more than the former, when we need our top elected leader to model the right way to act in the heat of a moment like the one coming to Ferguson.
Is it wishful thinking to believe that a mere politician's presence could change the equation in Ferguson? Maybe, but it's happened before.
On the night the Rev. Martin Luther King was shot, Bobby Kennedy had been scheduled to speak at a small park at Seventeenth and Broadway in nearby Indianapolis, in the heart of one of the most impoverished black neighborhoods in the country. Riots had already broken out in Memphis, and Kennedy's aides recommended that he cancel the speech because of the danger.
Bobby would have none of it. And he told police to stay home.
His stage that night was a flatbed truck with a microphone on it. Many in the crowd didn't know King had been shot until Bobby told them so at the beginning of his speech. As journalist Joe Klein describes it, the crowd reacted with "screams, wailing — just the rawest, most visceral sounds of pain that human voices can summon."
"For those of you who are black," Bobby said quietly, "considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization — black people amongst blacks, and white people amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love."
Kennedy quoted an ancient Greek poet to his inner-city audience. "My favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote, 'Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. Until ... in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
Kennedy was connecting the pain of losing his brother John to the pain those in the crowd were feeling over the loss of their leader.
Kennedy finished seven unscripted minutes by appealing to the crowd's deepest humanity. "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people."
Riots broke out in every major city in the country that night, including Washington, but not in Indianapolis. Most of the crowd in front of the flatbed truck stood in silence after Bobby's speech, some weeping. Others rushed the truck, reaching their hands up to him. They drifted away from the park quietly afterward, going back to their homes with bowed heads. Not a gun was fired in the city that night.
Forty-six years later, as Klein put it, "Kennedy's words stand as an example of the substance and music of politics in its grandest form and highest purpose — to heal, to educate, to lead."
We find ourselves at another moment when we need politics to heal, to educate, to lead.
If Obama is on a golf course in Las Vegas while the country is burning he may never be forgiven by his most ardent constituents. What's more, he will have missed the defining hour of his presidency, the moment he was meant for, the moment he might have truly helped reconcile the country's still-divided soul.
Obama has a chance to show us what politics is capable of. The life of this world — more than ever — still needs someone to make it gentle.