Words Worth Remembering: The Audacity of Hope
On Friday, March 6, 2026, former President Barack Obama stood behind the cross-shaped podium at House of Hope in Chicago, the casket of the Rev. Jesse Jackson—who had passed away on February 17 at age eighty-four—laid before him.
Speaking of Jackson’s influence, Obama said, “the message he sent to a 22-year-old child of a single mother, with a funny name—an outsider—was that maybe there wasn’t any place, any room, where we didn’t belong.”
A champion of the marginalized—from Black folks to Latinos, from white folks to the persecuted gay community, from rural farmers to environmentalists—Jackson was quintessentially American because he championed the central American value of hope.
“Wherever you are tonight, you can make it,” Jackson told the Democratic National Convention and listeners nationwide in July 1988. “Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don’t you surrender. Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end faith will not disappoint.”
As he ended his address that summer, Jackson said, “Keep hope alive,” not once but four times. “Tomorrow night and beyond, keep hope alive!”
Today, for many Americans, hope seems a distant concept. Obama said as much at Jackson’s memorial service. “We are living in a time when it can be hard to hope,” he sermonized.
“Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions, another setback to the idea of the rule of law. An offense to common decency. Every day you wake up to things you just didn’t think were possible. Each day we’re told by those in high office to fear each other and to turn on each other—that some Americans count more than others, and that some don’t even count at all.
“Everywhere we see greed and bigotry celebrated, and bullying and mockery masquerading as strength; we see science and expertise denigrated while ignorance and dishonesty, cruelty and corruption reap untold rewards. Every single day we see that. And it’s hard to hope in those moments.”
And yet hope remains something each of us can see, feel, and hold for ourselves. Great Americans like Jackson, Obama said, “call on each of us to be heralds of change, to be messengers of hope.” Such is the American way.
When deciding on the title for his 2019 “invitation to the great American story,” the historian Wilfred McClay chose Land of Hope. “Nothing about America better defines its distinctive character than the ubiquity of hope,” he wrote, “a sense that the way things are initially given to us cannot be the final word about them.”
Hope has long been an expression of the American soul. Writing in 1776, when the war for independence seemed to have already dimmed the burning fire of revolution, Thomas Paine spoke of hope.
“Let it be told to the future world,” he wrote, “that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”
The following summer of 1777, George Washington echoed Paine in a private letter to one of his officers. “We should never despair; our situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust it will again,” he wrote. “If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth new exertions and proportion our efforts to the exigency of the times.”
Writing to Congress in December 1861, as America faced the reality of civil war, Abraham Lincoln reminded his readers: “The struggle of today is not altogether for today; it is for a vast future also.”
And at Gettysburg two years later, Lincoln urged America “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work” of hope “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
In the poignant evening hour of June 6, 1944, Franklin Roosevelt also spoke of hope. “Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor,” he prayed over the radio, “a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
“They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.”
In August 1963, Martin Luther King Jr., called on America once again to embrace “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream… that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” With such faith, King declared, “we will be able to hew out of a mountain of despair a stone of hope.”
The audacity of hope. That is the phrase Barack Obama used in 2004 to describe his own American experience. “In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation,” he said; “the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead.”
Today, as in days past and doubtless in days to come, hope remains the light by which we are led—the source of strength in despair, the fountain of life in drought, and the call to action in times of defeat.
As Paine and Washington did during the fight simply to have a nation at all, and as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and countless others have done since, we ought to look at our present not as a finished painting but as a canvas still unfinished—left to us to pick up the brush, choose the colors, and help create a picture we will all be proud to look upon and see hope.