Obama, in Dallas speech, sought to console and reassure

DALLAS — President Obama said Tuesday that the nation mourned along with Dallas for five police officers gunned down by a black Army veteran, but he implored Americans not to give in to despair or the fear that “the center might not hold.”

Obama acknowledged that the killings — “an act not just of demented violence but of racial hatred” — had exposed a “fault line” in American democracy.

Obama acknowledged the limitations of his own words, and quoted from the Gospel of John: “Let us love not with words or speech but with action and in truth.”

Obama, as he has before, balanced praise for the heroism of police officers with a blunt acknowledgment of racial bias in the criminal justice system.

The president appealed for an honest debate over the tensions inherent in policing and the nation’s legacy of racism.