Obama in speech: It's time to move past 'racial stalemate'

PHILADELPHIA -- Americans must move past a "racial stalemate" to solve long-term problems, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Tuesday in what his campaign billed as a major address on race and politics.

Speaking at the National Constitution Center near Philadelphia's Independence Hall, where the nation's founders in 1787 drafted a Constitution that counted each slave as three-fifths of a person, Obama used the lingering controversy over comments made by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, to illustrate what he said was a central struggle with race relations in America.

The controversy reflects "the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through — a part of our union that we have yet to perfect," Obama said. "And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American."

Attention has been placed on sermons by Wright, a Chicago minister whom Obama has identified as a key spiritual adviser. Wright is the retired pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which Obama attends, and his sermons included scathing denunciations of the nation's foreign and domestic policies.

Obama repudiated the statements, and Wright resigned Friday from the senator's African American Religious Leadership Committee. But Obama again made it clear Tuesday that he would not — and essentially, could not — break completely with Wright.

"As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children," Obama said. "He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," Obama said. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother … a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."