photo courtesy of jsgraphicdesign

Sunday afternoon, one day before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, Hillary Clinton won one of the most influential African-American endorsements. Abyssinian’s pastor, Reverend Calvin Butts, endorsed Hillary Clinton as his candidate of choice for the presidency. Rev. Butts (who taught Black Church History at Fordham University) bolstered Clinton’s message in what has become an increasingly change-oriented election by opening with the statement that “experience is not synonymous with status quo…with the right experience comes change.”

The timing of today’s endorsement comes at a very opportune moment for the Clinton campaign. Clinton is doing damage control after days of attacks over her ill-chosen words, which seemed to suggest that Lyndon Johnson’s contribution to civil rights was greater than Dr. King’s. Sunday morning Barack Obama also courted African-American church-goers as he spoke from what was Dr. King’s pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. This announcement also arrived just hours before Clinton is scheduled to arrive in South Carolina, a state with many African-American voters, to begin campaigning there.

Race has become a major issue in the Democratic primary. Rev. Butts made clear, to the largely African-American crowd gathered outside Abyssinian, that his choice is not motivated by race: “This was not, and is not, and will not become a race-based decision for me,” he declared. Butts also made sure to placate African-American Obama supporters by saying the decision he made was not personal and assuring listeners that “I love him [Obama] like a brother.” Clinton too went out of her way to praise Obama, telling the crowd that “I am honored to be running with him” and extolling his “many contributions to our country and to our world.”

Although Butts’ and Clinton’s speeches were the main focus of the event, rival Clinton and Obama supporters who braved the cold outside the Abyssinian church added significantly to the drama of the press announcement . Vocal Obama fans stood out in the freezing weather for hours to support their candidate with a large banner, which by far overwhelmed the small signs and buttons Clinton supporters displayed. Feeding on the ire surrounding Clinton’s remarks about King, Obama followers shouted campaign slogans as HARLEM4OBAMA forcefully handed out red, white and blue flyers that equated King’s dream with Obama’s candidacy. Clinton supporters, for their part, reacted to the Obama followers by chanting “Harlem for Hillary” and “Madam President” to drown out the competition.

While acknowledging the amazing opportunity Democrats have in this primary season to support one of two truly historic candidates, Clinton also seemed intent on separating gender and race from what each candidate stands for. To this effect, she quoted the masthead of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper The North Star, which read, “Right has no sex; truth has no color.”