But just as the band was starting to play the song, police officers rushed the stage. “here was a lot of name-calling going on,” he tells Obama.ĭiallo’s parents showed up and “were really lovely.
But by the time he played it in New York’s Madison Square Garden later that month, the band was on the front page of the New York Post. The first time Springsteen performed the song, in June 2000 in Atlanta, “people mildly applauded,” he recalls.
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Springsteen recalls the tumultuous reception of his song “American Skin (41 shots),” a response to the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from West Africa shot by New York City police officers in the vestibule of his apartment building. He’s tried to bring awareness where he could - through music. Springsteen is equally torn over where the country stands: “We’ve consistently fallen too short for too many years, for too many of our citizens, and that inequality, social and economic, is a stain on our social contract.” “If our criminal justice system and the way we police are broken and we have to start it from scratch,” he asks, “are we obligated to just say that, even if the country is not ready for it? Even if you lose votes, even if you forgo the possibility of making more incremental progress, is it worth it to just articulate that truth?” Instead, five years after leaving office, Obama finds himself confronted with the limits of gradual change, as now-President Biden’s grand agenda comes up against the hard realities of governing in 2021. James Crowley, the white police officer who arrested him outside his Boston home, to have a conversation with him and then-Vice President Joe Biden. In the “beer summit” of 2009, for example, he invited Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. These were the kinds of divisions he had meant to bridge during his life in politics. Progress is stymied, he adds, in a country that still struggles “to provide decent schooling for inner-city kids” - and one where “the resentments, the fears, the stereotypes, the tribal lines that are drawn out in our country remain very deep.” But he says that “white resistance and resentment” made it unattainable during his presidency and that, while campaigning, he preferred to pursue more practical policy goals. Reparations could be part of an eventual reckoning, he says.
“I think that it is partly because we never went through a true reckoning,” Obama responds, “and so we just buried one huge part of our experience and our citizenry in our minds.” Out this week from Crown, “Renegades” contains unpublished anecdotes along with more than 350 illustrations, photographs and historical documents, including copies of Springsteen’s handwritten lyrics and marked-up drafts of the former POTUS’ speeches.īarack Obama has some advice for young activists: ‘Be clear and strategic’įormer President Obama joined filmmaker Ava DuVernay for a conversation about “A Promised Land,” his legacy and activism during a Book Club event.
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“I had wonderful experiences playing those rallies and those appearances with you,” Springsteen tells Obama in “ Renegades: Born in the USA,” a collection of intimate and thoughtful conversations between the president and the Boss, which builds on the duo’s eight-episode podcast series of the same name, released by Spotify earlier this year.
Barack Obama was campaigning to become the first Black president of the United States, and he invited Bruce Springsteen to perform a concert at a rally in Ohio. In 2008, an unlikely friendship began to flourish between a rock ’n’ roll legend and an American politician.
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