Barack Obama has been revisiting his groundbreaking presidential campaign on occasion, retracing his steps and reliving the history of the movement that made him America’s first Black president. In a recent installment of his series of look-backs, Obama tells of his rainy day campaign visit to Greenwood, South Carolina, where he fulfilled a promise made to a SC lawmaker by showing up even if the crowd there was counted in the dozens, not the hundreds.
It was a long drive, said Obama, and he wasn’t too happy about the paltry turnout. Was he wasting his time?
But it turns out that one of his most inspiring supporters was there that day, Edith Childs. And it was that day Obama first heard the call-and-response chant, led by Childs, of “Fired up!” and “Ready to go!”
It was a chant that Obama would make his own after that, using it to energize far bigger crowds (and himself) as the campaign went on. Obama also learned the origins of the phrase, which Childs explained had long been used as a rallying cry for members of the NAACP, which was established 1909, nearly a hundred years before Obama began to emerge as the NAACP’s candidate of choice — and as America’s candidate of choice, too. “Fired up had been one of the chants,” Obama reveals, “that the NAACP had used back in the day.”
Obama’s story about turning what seemed to be a wasteful day into one of the most resonating and impactful campaign stops of his run has served as inspiration to people who are looking to turn their own small moments into larger opportunities.
One commenter writes: “This has always inspired me to be ready even when the odds seems to be against me. I remember this campaign speech, I believe it was raining during the speech. I am still inspired, Fired up and ready to go.”
Obama revisits Childs in the video above.
Background: The NAACP was founded by a group of activists, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary White Ovington, who were concerned about the lack of progress in securing civil rights for African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. The organization’s mission is to “ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination.”
