Standing in the sanctuary of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one floor above the site of the 2015 attack by a white supremacist who murdered nine black people, Booker said the present moment amounted to a national crisis in which Americans must choose sides and confront their own past.
“Racist violence has always been part of the American story, never more so than in times of transition and times of rapid social change,” Booker said, describing the country as facing a “crossroads.”
“There is no neutrality in this fight,” he said. “You are either an agent of justice or you are contributing to the problem.”
Booker’s address began a day that promised to renew the Democratic presidential candidates’ denunciations of President Donald Trump, for his opposition to gun control and his caustic rhetoric about race and immigration. Later on, former Vice President Joe Biden planned to deliver remarks in Iowa about the problem of white nationalism, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas was also expected to be in the spotlight as Trump visited his native city, El Paso.
Though his speech did not mention Trump by name, Booker left no doubt that he laid responsibility for the rise in hate crimes with the occupant of “the highest office in our land.” The hatred that motivated a racist gunman in Texas to kill 22 people, Booker said, “was sowed by those who spoke the same words the El Paso murderer did: warning of an ‘invasion.’”
“It was sowed by those who spoke of an ‘infestation’ of disgusting cities, ‘rats and rodents,’ talking about minority communities,” Booker said, in an unmistakable allusion to Trump’s recent comments insulting Baltimore.
The speech by Booker, one of two leading black candidates for the Democratic nomination, had the potential to be one of the most important moments of his campaign, testing his power as a voice of moral clarity and racial justice in a crowded Democratic race that has largely focused so far on debates about economic inequality. He has been something of an outlier in the primary field so far in his insistence on trumpeting themes of national healing, at times clashing with his party’s prevailing mood of hot indignation.
That healer’s ethos, however, may register differently with voters at a moment of mounting violence, frequently aimed at racial minorities and women.
And in Charleston on Wednesday, Booker entwined specific policy demands — including new licensing requirements for firearms and a comprehensive law-enforcement strategy for fighting white nationalism — with thematic appeals to the power of love.
Few venues for that message could have been as laden with symbolism as the one Booker chose: The predominantly black congregation in downtown Charleston became the focal point of a wrenching national confrontation with racism after the 2015 attack by a racist gunman who has since been sentenced to die for his crimes.
A funeral for the victims became the site of one of the most memorable moments of former President Barack Obama’s time in office. During the ceremony, he broke into a rendition of “Amazing Grace” and called both for the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s capitol building and for a remedy to “the mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation.”
There may have been some political risk involved for Booker in delivering his speech from a place so freighted with history. Some Democrats believe he has suffered in the 2020 campaign, fairly or not, from voters’ instinct to measure him in their minds against the example of Obama.
But this week of turbulence and trauma has developed into a vitally important one for Booker, who after months of toiling away in relative obscurity has begun to show signs of breaking through in the presidential race. He had a standout performance in the second round of Democratic debates last week, besting Biden in a series of exchanges on race and criminal justice and displaying for a national audience the kind of sunny pugilism that has made him a force in New Jersey and in the Senate.
Booker earned several bursts of applause and murmurs of appreciation throughout the speech, including with a prominent quotation from “our beloved Toni Morrison,” the Nobel laureate who died this week. Borrowing her words, before a modest audience of six or seven dozen people clustered at the front of the church, Booker said: “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
Deirdre McClain, who watched Booker speak from the pews on Wednesday morning, said she found his remarks moving and persuasive in their linkage of the American past with the bloodshed of the present, including with his invocation of Morrison and a recitation of the names of the nine people murdered in the church four years ago.
“I was surprised at how he made the past come to the present, how he knew the names of those who had passed in this very church and that he connected it to freedom,” said McClain, 53, a database administrator. “That resonated with me.”
McClain said Booker was among several candidates she was considering in the presidential race, along with Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Biden.
If the starkest contrast this week has been between Trump and the Democrats vying to unseat him, the speeches on Wednesday by Booker and Biden also appeared to highlight some of the important gradations in worldview between the various Democratic candidates. Biden, for instance, has described Trump as an aberration from the American political tradition, and called for defeating him in order to secure something of a return to normalcy. Other Democrats, including Booker, have diagnosed Trump instead as a symptom of more pervasive social problems.
Those differing perspectives were reflected in Booker’s speech and in selected excerpts from Biden’s planned address in Iowa, which his campaign released to the press. In the afternoon, Biden intended to brand Trump as abandoning an American tradition of presidential leadership against hate, citing Bill Clinton’s conduct after the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, George W. Bush’s decision to visit a mosque after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and Barack Obama’s leadership after the 2015 massacre in Charleston.
“We don’t have that today,” Biden planned to say. “We have a president who has aligned himself with the darkest forces in this nation. And that makes winning the battle for the soul of this nation that much harder.”
Trump, he was to say, “has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation” and “has more in common with George Wallace than George Washington.”
Booker, while taking aim himself at Trump, made plain that he saw the president less as a wild departure from the American tradition than a new incarnation of forces rooted in George Washington’s day.
“We need to go back to the beginning and acknowledge that the very founding of our country was an act of profound contradiction,” Booker said, linking the violence of the present to slavery and segregation, and “demagogues throughout generations who stoked racist and anti-immigrant hatred, often for votes, and then enshrined their bigotry into laws.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.