I missed reading some news yesterday because I taught school last night. Today I see that the blogs are full of righteous wingnuttery over Joseph Lowery’s benediction at Tuesday’s inauguration. Here’s a fairly mild little rant from Lewisville, Texas:

That’s not a prayer, that’s a travesty. If a white man had made similarly racial comments, there would have been hell to pay. Racism is truly stronger from black to white, than from white to black. They really need to get over the fact that their skin is black, and join the rest of the human race.

And in case anybody expected that the hate Obama campaign would go away or die for lack of participants, a look at this thread will be sobering.

I loved the Lowery prayer, and I particularly loved its weaving together of material from the history of the civil rights movement. Its peroration was a blues riff, embedded in the history of white privilege to be sure, but also embedded in the humor and toughness of the blues singer’s minstrelsy. It was a human prayer, and its closing call and response, “That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen” (a quotation from Micah), was exactly appropriate, I thought.

Here’s the apparent source of Rev. Dr. Lowery’s blues riff. Katie Sherrod has some background for the song, for which she depends partly on Louie Crew, in a reference I’ve not been able to track down. But here’s the song, “Black, Brown and White,” as recorded by Bill Broonzy in the nineteen fifties.