"The Speech of a Lifetime," Charles Kaiser is calling Barack Obama's address on race this morning over at RadarOnline, and I'm inclined to agree. But here's why:

As a demonstration of grace under immense pressure, his performance in Philadelphia will be a classic study for orators. As an act of moral witness and prophecy for a trans-racial America, the speech was straightforward yet profound in an inimitably American idiom that few partisans and pundits, soused in stale pieties and rancid evasions, comprehend.

He's gambling that most Americans will comprehend him anyway. Here's hoping. Let me explain what I think Obama accomplished with a story I'm sure he'd appreciate, an experience I had 15 years ago with Brooklyn's equivalent of Obama's pastor and mentor, Jeremiah Wright.

In the fall of 1993, as Rudolph Giuliani was challenging New York City’s first African-American mayor, David Dinkins, Al Sharpton’s long-time pastor and mentor, the Rev. William Jones, was reported to have denounced the Giuliani campaign as “fascist.” What happened next anticipated much of what Obama is responding to now, and it shows how well he has responded.

There was no video of the Rev. Jones like the ones we have now of Obama’s long-time pastor and mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Accounts of Jones’ remarks were unclear and contradictory. That didn’t stop political operatives and pundits from heaving themselves and the city into convulsions over Jones, of course.

Even though I was leaning toward Giuliani as a columnist at the Daily News at the time, I held my tongue about Jones and went to see him.

I knew that Jones, a former president of the National Black Pastors’ Conference and the pastor of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s gothic Bethany Baptist Church, was a magisterially angry leader of blacks in their ‘50s -- a cohort, sketched by Obama in his Philadelphia speech, that followed men like Obama’s Pastor Wright and sometimes the even angrier Louis Farrakhan or the City College of New York Prof. Leonard Jeffries. These were African-Americans of a certain age who’d come of age when northern cities’ racism was as rigid and enraging as their opportunities were bedazzling to recent arrivals from the South.

In Brooklyn, Jones had mentored not only Sharpton but the Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, a leader of the same exemplary community organizing Obama later undertook in Chicago. Jones, a former colonel in the Army Engineers and the first black graduate of the University of Kentucky, might have been a Colin Powell had he been born two decades later. Instead he’d come to Bedford-Stuyvesant with a doctorate from Crozer Theological Seminary, in 1962, a complicated, formidable man.

So I waited one Sunday in 1993 as Jones pronounced the baptismal formula in stentorian tones, lowering infants into the water with strong arms, as his father had done before him in the Kentucky bluegrass country’s oldest black congregation.

I listened as he told his congregants, brooding high in his pulpit, “Anybody who portrays me as a purveyor of slurs doesn’t know me and is perverting grossly what I said. I have been the victim of the worst ethnic slurs all my life, and I know better, by experience and professional training, than to portray anybody as less than human. I am a free man in a free pulpit, proclaiming freedom’s story. The easiest way to upset people in power is to tell the truth.”

As we sat together later, I asked Jones why he’d said that Giuliani’s backers include “elements that can best be described as fascist.” “As I move about the city,” he replied, “I sense a deliberate distortion of reality to demonize Dinkins. It’s a storm-trooper mentality. You needn’t be Mussolini to have it. You can be a [radio talk-show host] Bob Grant. There are black fascists -- Roy Innis,” a well-known New York conservative demagogue at the time.

Jones had written what Wright and many other blacks of their generation believe: that a true black Christian is a race man. “Though not a racist, the race man is the embodiment of racial pride and has absolute distaste for the system. He begs no favors from the establishment but demands justice for his people.”

Like Wright, Jones had joined at times with Jesse Jackson to pressure white businesses in black communities to hire blacks. But he wrote also of “an interim ethic of black asceticism,” in which blacks withdraw from white society psychologically and culturally to plumb their own history, arts, and religion, “a step in the movement from [being] property to pride to power.”

It’s easy to imagine how thinking like this can take wrong turns, and Obama cautioned in his speech that “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism [but] that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made.”

It’s a bit harder to understand why the purse-lipped, finger-wagging scolds we’ll be hearing from can’t acknowledge that men of offended dignity such as a Jones’ or a Wright might talk sometimes as if the racist world they knew in their formative years hadn’t changed -- and that younger blacks like Obama might listen to them but move on.

It’s especially hard to understand why certain Jews -- of all people – can’t acknowledge this and, in fact, actually emulate the worst of it by peddling or succumbing to fears of an anti-Semitic Obama that are far more fanciful than a black preacher’s fears of, say, a racist Republican leader or two.

The answer is that some Jews, rather like Jones and Wright, can’t get past memories of having been classic urban intermediaries between urban elites and the black poor. In New York and Chicago in the 1950s and early ‘60s, Jews often decided whether blacks could get credit at the store, a job, an apartment, a passing grade, an acquittal. But those Jews, too, were struggling and vulnerable; they were white folks whose skin blacks could get under, the first to take alarm at black rage.

No wonder that every so often, some Jews, no less than Wright, Farrakhan, Jeffries, or Jones, ushers listeners of a certain age into a psychic landscape flickering with old, familiar demons. No wonder that neither side admits that Louis Farrakhan has been in eclipse since 9/11 made “The Nation of Islam” a difficult place to be, and, indeed, since 1995, when hundreds of thousands of black men turned his Million Man March into a poignant manifestation of hope unlike anything he’d intended or understood.

For those who can’t notice or acknowledge how times are changing, Obama was never more effective in Philadelphia than when he put partisan strategists and pundits on the spot by listing the ways they flash race cards on the pretense of responding to someone else’s having done it.

It’s one thing for a white writer on urban racial politics like me to criticize black demagoguery and to draw some distinctions in connection with a Jones, Leonard Jeffries, or Louis Farrakhan. It’s something else for a black man do that, as Obama did in Philadelphia on Monday. That he did it was historic, his observations towering above the nit-picking and rumor-mongering which the speech will prompt as surely as every true call for hope has always done.

Anticipating all this, Obama confronted his listeners with a choice:

“We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

“We can do that.”

“Or….. we can come together and say, ‘Not this time.’ This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children…. about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care… about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life…. and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.”

These words were addressed in no small way to a lot of journalists I know. Let’s watch what they do. And let’s also start talking about them if they find choices like the one Obama offered so scary that they leap to scare the rest of us with a Bill Jones or a Jeremiah Wright instead.