The Obama team's selections for inaugural invocation speakers have been lacking. First, it was megachurch preacher Rick Warren in 2009, then, this year, Pastor Louie Giglio who wrote anti-gay remarks in the 1990s. Giglio withdrew from the post.
But their new choice for the benediction will make history in more than one way. When I read this, I got the chills:
Myrlie Evers-Williams will become the first woman and the first layperson to deliver the invocation at a presidential swearing-in ceremony. Just as the use of Martin Luther King Jr's bible is symbolic of the civil rights struggle in this country, Mrs. Evers-Williams is herself a living legacy of that struggle, which continues. [...]
Though news stories about Evers-Williams selection often refer to her simply as the widow of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who was assassinated on June 12, 1963, her widowhood is not the sum total of her being, nor of her life before and after that date almost 50 years ago.