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Walk with me - Obama
21/01/2008 00:02 - (SA)
Washington - US presidential contender Barack Obama urged Americans on Sunday to overcome lingering barriers for black citizens, evoking the spirit of Martin Luther King at the church where the 1960s civil rights leader preached.
Fresh from a defeat by Hillary Clinton in a Democratic Party preference poll, Obama stopped by the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to mark the late Reverend King's birthday and rally African-American voters behind a vision of national unity for political change.
"In the struggle for justice and for equality, we cannot walk alone," declared Obama, 46. "In the struggle to heal this nation and repair the world, we cannot walk alone. And so I ask you to walk with me."
Obama, who would be the nation's first African-American president, told the Sunday sermon audience that blacks also must address "deep-seated violence", anti-Semitism and anti-gay sentiment in their community. Sacrifices
"All of us will be called upon to make some sacrifice," he said.
Clinton, 60, beat Obama in Saturday's Democratic caucuses in Nevada, the latest in a series of state-by-state preference polls to determine the party's presidential candidate.
South Carolina, the first state with a major black electorate, holds the Democrats' next contest on January 26.
He won over the Atlanta congregation with his personal story - a multiracial child abandoned by his Kenyan father at age two, raised by his white mother from Kansas and rising to attend Harvard and win a US Senate seat.
"The odds of me standing here are so small, so remote, I couldn't have gotten here without some hope," he said.
He repeatedly drew distant parallels between his campaign and King's struggle for black civil rights and desegregated southern US states in the 1950s and '60s. King, a Nobel Peace laureate, was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4 1968, sparking riots in dozens of US cities.
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