White House Race

Special report: The US presidential contest

The week the colour issue finally took centre stage

Obama's stirring riposte to preacher controversy had even his critics waxing lyrical. Leonard Doyle reports from Washington

Tears of raw emotion rolled down Charles Carter's cheeks as he sat in his "shotgun shack" in Greenwood, Mississippi, on Tuesday morning, watching Barack Obama give his speech on race in Philadelphia. Only the whimpering of his Alsatian guard dog was allowed to interrupt the 37-minute broadcast.

The high point of the speech for Mr Carter was not the loop that would be played endlessly on the news, where Senator Obama condemned the racially inflammatory rhetoric of his Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Nor was it the moment when he described how he cringed as a young man when his white grandmother made a racially inappropriate remark.

For Mr Carter, who restored and manages six old sharecroppers' shacks for tourists to stay in, the high point came when Mr Obama quoted from the Mississippi writer William Faulkner: "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past."

"So true, so true," he said. "Nobody wants to talk about what went on around here, nobody." What he is referring to is an appalling lynching that took place here in 1955, after a precocious 14-year-old black boy named Emmett "Bobo" Till - down from Chicago on school holidays - had the audacity to say "Bye, baby," to Carolyn Bryant, the married white owner of a shop. He was taken from his uncle's house, brutally tortured - his tongue was cut out - and his body thrown in the river.

In those days such deaths went unpunished, but Emmett's mother insisted on an open-casket funeral back in Chicago, so that everyone could see what had been done to her son. It was a seminal event in the emergence of the civil rights movement, but to this day there is no memorial of it in Greenwood.

A 65-year-old black man, Mr Carter has spent much of his life in the segregated South, and his experiences of racism in America could fill a book. He recalls drinking from "black-only" water fountains. He remembers, as though it were yesterday, the early Sixties, when he was in the air force. The bus taking him off the federally integrated base would stop just outside the gates. "That's when the driver would get up and shout, 'All you niggers move to the back of the bus,'" he told me, the hurt still blazing in his eyes.

For people like Charles Carter, who has registered to vote for the first time in two decades, Mr Obama's candidacy has restored faith in America. But at the beginning of last week, some of the initial fervour was beginning to fade among millions of others whose votes the candidate will need. The constant sniping of Hillary and Bill Clinton at his lack of experience had some effect, as did the fear that his soaring rhetoric might lack substance.

And always in the background was the question: when would race rear its head in the campaign? The Wright issue had bubbled for almost a year, but it was finally forced on to the agenda by a reporter from the right-wing Fox News channel, who simply bought some of the preacher's incendiary sermons from his church's online shop. Again and again viewers could see Wright urging his congregation, which had numbered Barack Obama as a member for 20 years, to sing "God Damn America".

Throughout this election Senator Obama has presented himself as a fusion candidate, the Tiger Woods of politics rather than an angry black man in the mould of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. If he had simply issued a routine repudiation of his preacher, it was possible that his candidacy could have evaporated almost overnight. He would have been asked how he could have listened to such sentiments year after year without saying anything. Surely it meant that he shared the preacher's views?

Instead he made a speech that drew comparisons with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D Roosevelt, as well as John F Kennedy's 1960 speech on religion. In it he said of Mr Wright: "I could no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother ... who once confessed her fear of black men who pass her by on the street."

Speaking before eight large US flags, he managed not only to reject the grim vision of his pastor, but offered Americans a more comforting vision of themselves. Race in America is still stained with the original sin of slavery, he suggested, but over the past 50 years the country has moved on, with each generation experiencing race differently.

While older blacks - like Charles Carter back in Mississippi or the Rev Wright- are scarred by their experiences of segregation laws, Mr Obama talked of those who carried a "legacy of defeat" from generation to generation. The result, he said, was an anger "exploited by politicians" that stops blacks "from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition".

He went on: "A similar anger exists within segments of the white community." He referred to the experiences of working and lower middle-class white people who arrived in America with nothing.