The political truth about Barack Obama was revealed during the 2008 presidential campaign, when video clips of sermons by Reverend Jeremiah Wright made it impossible to deny the radicalism of the candidate’s spiritual advisor and mentor. It’s not that Obama shared Reverend Wright’s belief that, say, the United States government had created the AIDS virus as an instrument of genocide against black people. It’s rather that Obama put up with nonsense like that because he shared Wright’s socialist worldview.
Obama saw Wright as an important element of his long-term political strategy. As a politician-organizer, Obama hoped to inspire and mobilize a movement of the religious left. That movement was to be led by an activist black church under the guidance of preachers like Wright. That is why Obama featured Wright’s “audacity of hope” theme in his career-making keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and made the phrase the title of his second book. Wright—and the radical black-church movement he represented—was to be an important element of Obama’s populist-bred, socialist-led coalition. Reverend Wright’s basic political stance is very much along the lines of the Socialist Scholars Conferences, UNO of Chicago, the Gamaliel Foundation, ACORN, the Midwest Academy, and Bill Ayers.
The difference between these other radicals and Wright is the latter’s indiscretion. Wright got caught boldly shouting the sort of things the other inhabitants of Obama’s political network believed, but typically buried under sugary rhetoric, or just keep quiet about—or restricted to obscure publications none but the converted ever bothered to read. Wright’s famous “God damn America” remark followed an oration blaming black poverty and imprisonment on the government—and implicitly on America’s entire political and economic system. Bill Ayers made these sorts of points constantly in his latter-day writings, but with a good deal more rhetorical subtlety.1 We’ve seen that Ayers eventually dropped his more extreme Weatherman rhetoric, even as he charted his new life course by the original Weatherman forecast. For Wright, on the other hand, even on the matter of rhetoric, it might as well still have been 1969.
So the point is not merely that Obama has always known about Wright’s beliefs and deceived the public when he claimed not to have known. The deeper point is that Obama chose Wright as his political and spiritual advisor because he largely shared his former minister’s politics.
“Sound bites” and “snippets”—that’s how Reverend Wright and his supporters dismissed the explosive excerpts from his sermons, played frequently on television at the height of the Wright affair in the spring of 2008. If only we understood the broader context within which Wright had damned America and blamed the United States for the terrorist attacks of 9/11, apologists insisted then, the storm would pass.2 As early as March of 2007, when challenged by conservative FOX News host Sean Hannity about some of his more controversial beliefs, Wright had insisted that his faith be placed within the broader context of the “black liberation theology” created in the late sixties by James H. Cone, the Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary.3 For those unfamiliar with the scholarly left, Cone’s academic pedigree seems proof of reasonableness and respectability. Once you actually read Cone’s theology, however, it’s evident that the only thing worse than quoting Jeremiah Wright out of context is quoting him in context. More important, a bit of digging reveals that Obama was well acquainted with the radical theology that inspired his favorite preacher.
James Cone published Black Theology and Black Power, the founding text of black liberation theology, in 1969.4 That pivotal year saw the birth of the Weathermen from the ashes of the SDS, and the programmatic beginnings of what would someday become the Midwest Academy. Black liberation theology was another radical survivor of that era. While Obama and his supporters have tried to portray his church’s theology as well within the mainstream, Trinity United Church of Christ was in fact an outlier. The writings of Cone’s followers are filled with attempts to come to grips with the overwhelming rejection of their radical political theology by mainstream black churches.5 But while Cone’s theology is little more than a leftist relic of the sixties for most black churches, in select university-based divinity schools and a few congregations, it lives on. Cone himself cites Wright’s Trinity as the church that embodies his theology more fully than any other.6 So Obama arguably belonged to the most radical black church in the country.
On Cone’s own account, Black Theology and Black Power is written in the voice of an angry black man.7 Cone, in fact, demands and commends anger in black liberationist preachers. In the book, Cone sometimes addresses or refers to whites as simply “the oppressor” or “whitey.”8 The black intellectual’s goal, says Cone, is to “aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.”9 Such destruction requires both black anger and white guilt. To stir that guilt, the Black Power theologian must tell the story of American oppression so powerfully and precisely that white men will “tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil.”10
So what exactly is “Black Power”? Here, Cone follows Malcolm X, defining it as “complete emancipation of black people from white oppression by whatever means black people deem necessary.”11 Like the radical anti-colonial theorist Franz Fanon, on whom he sometimes draws, Cone sees violent rebellion as a transformative expression of the humanity of the oppressed. For example, Cone defends those who looted during the urban riots of the late 1960s as affirming their “being,” rather than simply grasping and destroying.12
Cone also makes a point of leveling strident attacks against white liberals. According to Cone, “When white do-gooders are confronted with the style of Black Power, realizing that black people really place them in the same category with the George Wallaces, they react defensively, saying, ‘It’s not my fault’ or ‘I am not responsible.’”13 But Cone insists that white, liberal do-gooders are every bit as responsible for black suffering as the most dyed-in-the-wool segregationists. Well before it became a cliche, Cone boldly outlined the case for institutional racism—the notion that “racism is so embedded in the heart of American society that few, if any, whites can free themselves from it.”14
For Cone, the deeply racist structure of American society leaves blacks with no alternative but radical transformation or withdrawal. So-called Christianity, as commonly practiced in the United States, is actually the racist Antichrist. Cone believes that, theologically, “Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’”15 The false Christianity of the white-devil oppressor must be replaced by an authentic Christianity fully identified with the poor and oppressed. This, in turn, requires “the replacement of middle-class consciousness with ‘black consciousness,’” with “a theology which confronts white society as the racist Antichrist, communicating to the oppressor that nothing will be spared in the fight for freedom.”16
Cone’s radicalism is evident in his rejection of anything short of total social revolution—a revolution justified because, in Cone’s view, black life in America is essentially a slow-motion version of the Jewish Holocaust.
So Jeremiah Wright’s angry rhetoric, grounded in his conviction that America is racist to the core—even genocidally so—is indeed fully backed by black liberation theology. Trinity’s famous rejection of “middle-classness” has a similar theological basis. Wright’s most infamous statements were not momentary outbursts, as his defenders in the campaign implied, but deliberate products of a developed theological tradition instead.
As for Obama, he understood his pastor’s theology perfectly well. During the 2008 campaign, the Obama camp acknowledged that Cone’s writings were regularly included in packets of material handed out to new members of Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ.17 Obama, however, refused to answer oral or written inquiries in 2008 about his knowledge of Cone’s work.18 In the few cases where interviewers obliquely raised the issue of black liberation theology, Obama sidestepped the question and steered the conversation toward the “social gospel.”19 An obscure footnote in Sasha Abramsky’s 2009 book, Inside Obama’s Brain, however, quotes Obama mentor John Kretzmann confirming that Obama did indeed read Cone during his days as a community organizer in Chicago—the very time he met Wright.20 Indeed, Obama surely learned of black liberation theology even earlier, at the Socialist Scholars Conferences in New York.
Given this record, not to mention Obama’s well-known affinity for Malcolm X and Franz Fanon, on whom Cone freely drew, we have every reason to believe that Obama settled on Trinity United Church of Christ in full knowledge of Wright’s radical theological views. In fact, a large body of evidence fairly screams that Obama joined Wright’s church precisely because of those radical views.
In the early sixties, Trinity United Church of Christ was one of the few predominantly black congregations in the liberal United Church of Christ denomination. In those days, the goal of the civil rights movement was integration, and Trinity’s decidedly middle-class congregation embraced that goal with enthusiasm. With the rise of the Black Power movement in the late sixties, however, Trinity’s integrationist congregants found themselves out of step with the times. Attendance fell sharply until 1972, when Wright came on board, charged with developing a more black-identified style of worship.21
But Trinity wasn’t prepared for the extremes of Wright’s liberationist theology—or the extent of his Afro-centrism. After Wright revamped Trinity’s worship, attendance shot way up. Yet within three years, all the members who had originally invited Wright had left the church. By 1983, yet another group of prominent church members uncomfortable with Wright’s approach went elsewhere. In 1978, a national official of the United Church of Christ attempted to distance UCC from Wright’s church, calling it a “cult” (only months after the Jonestown suicides) and accusing Wright of having an “ego problem.” This official was eventually forced to apologize to Trinity.
Wright’s nominal Afro-centrism was supercharged in the eighties when he visited Africa for the first time. Never entirely comfortable with Cone’s claim that whites had succeeded in stripping blacks of their culture, Wright started emphasizing continuities between Africa and what he would soon begin to call “Africans in America” (rather than “American blacks”).22 Around this time, Wright ramped up his Africa-related activism—one of the first things that caught Obama’s eye about Wright’s church.23
But Wright never abandoned Cone. On the contrary, what was distinctive about both Wright and Cone was their blending of black-identified politics with a scarcely concealed Marxism. Prompted by his contacts with Latin American liberation theologians and his growing cooperation with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America, Cone made it clear in the eighties that he wanted to see American capitalism replaced by some form of democratic socialism. “I do not think that racism can be eliminated as long as capitalism remains intact,” wrote Cone in 1982.24 Not long afterward, Cone appeared at the 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference, following which he visited Cuba along with a group of followers that included Jeremiah Wright. “Perhaps what we need today,” wrote Cone, “is to return to that ‘good old-time religion’ of our grandparents and combine it with a Marxist critique of society. Together black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us the way to build a completely new society.”25
Cone’s coy formulations frame his approach to socialism as that of an outsider in search of ways to cooperate with socialists. This allows Cone and his followers to avoid the socialist label, while embracing socialism in substance. We know that Wright splashed a glowing account of his trip to Cuba across the pages of his Trinity Trumpet church newsletter. It was obvious from that account that Wright and his fellow black liberation theologians supported Cuba’s communist revolution and viewed it as a model for the United States. Any politically sensitive observer—and Obama was surely that—would quickly have picked up on the socialist tenor of Wright’s theology.
The 1988 “Audacity of Hope” sermon that had so storied an effect on Obama invoked the privation and oppression of “black and brown” citizens in Africa and the rest of the world. To a superficial ear, the sermon may seem simply to call for aid to the world’s hungry. For those attuned to Wright’s theology, however, it contains a barely disguised attack on Western capitalism, which Wright believes is the true cause of the suffering and privation of the “black and brown” world.26 “White folks’ greed runs a world in need,” as Obama quotes Wright in Dreams.27 This view, by the way, echoes the Marxist “dependency theory” we saw Obama drawing on during his time in New York.
Obama biographer David Remnick describes one of Wright’s favorite sermons, an oration that stresses Martin Luther King’s radical side. According to Remnick, Wright’s sermon maintains that King “was not the plaster saint of popular memory but, rather, a rebellious minister who opposed ‘the maniacal ménage à trois’ of militarism, capitalism, and racism.”28
We saw in Chapter Three that Obama likely attended a panel featuring James Cone at the 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference, where it was argued that Martin Luther King, Jr., had experienced a late-life conversion to democratic socialism. Wright pushes the same line. Recall that Wright’s 1984 trip to Cuba with Cone shortly after that year’s Socialist Scholars Conference was billed as a seminar in honor of Martin Luther King. It was on this trip that Jesse Jackson courted controversy by publicly chanting, “Long live President Castro! Long live Martin Luther King! Long live Che Guevara!”
King’s supposed late-life rejection of capitalism was a favorite Wright theme. You can find it discussed not only in his sermons but in Wright’s column in Trumpet Newsmagazine. In 2005, Wright converted his Trinity Trumpet church newsletter into a glossy national “lifestyle magazine for the socially conscious.” Trumpet is filled with radical politics, from Wright’s regular column to the writers he featured—many of them on staff at Trinity Church. In a January 2007 column, Wright tries to spin Martin Luther King’s late-life opposition to the Vietnam War as a challenge to America’s economic system:
When one goes against the war, one tampers with the financial institutions and the financial system that was put in place by the Founding Fathers of this country to keep the rich, rich!
Dr. Martin Luther King’s sermon at Riverside put him at odds with a government that is only interested in protecting business interests. He was attacking the financial institutions of our country when he came out against the war.29
Obviously, Wright is not a fan of the financial system put in place by America’s founding fathers. The same issue of Trumpet contains a piece by freelance writer Obasi A. Kitambi that conveys the flavor of the magazine’s take on capitalism:
The Western world’s insistence on pimping people, places and economies in support of capitalist imperialistic wet dreams of excessive booty and international penetration is the … crutch [of colonialism and imperialism].
The consistent pasty face of this level of domination makes it difficult for non-westerners to believe that race is not one of the defining criteria for membership in this economic boys club.30
Harshly spoken anti-capitalist tirades are so pervasive in Wright’s sermons and publications that Obama had to have seen them.
An abundance of evidence indicates that, when Obama chose Wright as his pastor, he knew exactly what he was getting into. Alvin Love, one of the ministers Obama consulted with before joining Trinity, quotes Obama saying: “I don’t want to join a church for convenience’ sake. I want to be serious and be comfortable wherever I join.”31 So Obama did not approach his choice of a religious home lightly. Obama biographer David Remnick explains that another pastor advising Obama, L. K. Curry, recommended Wright after hearing of Obama’s strong interest in “social justice.”32 Remnick goes on to explain that if Obama had merely been in search of a large and influential church, he could have chosen a popular Pentecostal church on the South Side whose minister, Reverend Arthur Brazier, had worked with Saul Alinsky years before. Brazier told Remnick that Obama preferred Wright because “Reverend Wright is more into black liberation.”33 Wright himself told Remnick that Obama actually hesitated to join Trinity for fear that it might be “too upwardly mobile.”34 Clearly, Obama took Trinity’s pledge to struggle against “middle-classness” very seriously. In short, Remnick makes the case that Obama chose Wright out of a specific preference for Wright’s politically oriented theology.
Yet, while he provides a good deal of what appears to be damning information, Remnick rescues the president by relying on assurances from Obama’s original organizing mentor Jerry Kellman that back when Obama chose Trinity, the “political pronouncements by Wright that, two decades later, plagued Obama’s Presidential run were not yet in evidence.”35
This is utter nonsense. It also fits a pattern in Remnick’s relatively uncritical book. Drawing on his interviews with Obama’s former colleagues, Remnick repeatedly conveys damaging information withheld by the president’s friends during the 2008 election, only to neutralize the effects of those revelations with false assurances from his sources. Obama’s college friends tell Remnick that they were socialists at Occidental and that Obama shared their views, while insisting that the young socialist Obama was never particularly doctrinaire. Bill Ayers apparently reveals that he did in fact help select Obama as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, yet assures Remnick that he was never really that “into” a “moderate” like Obama. We’ve seen that these assurances are false. Kellman’s claim that Wright only recently developed the habit of courting of political controversy is false as well.
As early as 1984, Wright had been cited on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page as the American contact used by communist intelligence agencies to arrange a visit to Cuba by Cone’s religious circle.36 The op-ed piece gave Cone’s group the benefit of the doubt, generously claiming that they had merely been manipulated by the Cuban government. In reality, Wright touted his Cuba trip on the pages of his Trinity Trumpet newsletter, with a story making it clear that he and his fellow black liberation theologians saw Cuba’s communist system as a model and inspiration for American blacks. Wright couldn’t have felt manipulated by the revelation that Cuba’s government had used his visit for propaganda purposes, since he personally led yet another delegation of black liberation theologians on a return visit to Cuba in 1996, only a year before he first met Obama. Obviously, Wright was practiced at in-your-face political antics well before 2008.
In Dreams from My Father, Obama explains that when he first met his future pastor, Wright warned him that some preachers thought him too radical. Wright also warned Obama that some clergy considered him not radical enough.37 That is hardly proof of moderation. Wright’s Black Muslim and Afro-centric colleagues saw him as too moderate simply for remaining Christian. Trinity’s motto, “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian,” expresses the duality of its stance—to the liberationist left of most Christian churches and to the right of Black Muslim or “Kemetic” (Afro-centric) sects (to the “right,” simply in the sense of remaining Christian). We’ve seen from our quick tour of Cone’s theology that there was nothing moderate about this black liberationist stance.
Drawing on interviews conducted before the 2008 Wright controversy broke out, Obama biographer David Mendell has shown that part of the bond between Obama and Wright was intellectual. Wright’s University of Chicago experience allowed him to relate to Obama on a more “cerebral” level than other ministers Obama might have chosen, says Mendell. “We talked about race and politics,” Wright told Mendell, adding, “I was not threatened by those questions.”38
So let’s add up what we know about Obama’s initial encounter with Wright. Obama was looking for a serious religious home, not sim- ply a respectable place to park. Wright had been recommended to Obama as the local minister most devoted to “social justice.” And around the time he met Wright, Obama was also reading James Cone’s work. Obama even hesitated to join Wright’s church for fear that it might be considered too middle class. Wright offered Obama genuine intellectual companionship, and they discussed race and politics in depth.
Given all this, it’s obvious that Obama had to have understood Wright’s radical politics from the start. Moreover, Wright and Obama must have discovered their mutual links through Cone’s Black Theology Project and the Socialist Scholars Conferences early on. It took Wright less than five minutes to justify himself to Sean Hannity in 2007 by highlighting his status as a James Cone disciple. Once the topic of Wright’s radicalism came up with Obama—which we know it did right away—the pastor would have quickly explained to Obama that he was one of Cone’s foremost disciples. Surely Obama would then have told Wright about his encounters with leading black liberation theologians at the Socialist Scholars Conferences in New York. Then there are the repeat anti-American trips to Cuba. Remember, Wright proudly touted the whole Cuban experience to his parishioners in Trinity Trumpet, so why would he have hesitated to tell Obama? How better for Wright to prove his leftist credentials to a young radical worried that Trinity might be too middle class than by recounting his Cuban escapades?
The Cuban adventure aside, if Obama had only familiarized himself with James Cone’s writings—and we already know that he did—that by itself would be enough to prove Kellman’s assurances wrong. Just about every radical statement Wright has ever made echoes an equally over-the-top pronouncement by Cone. So from the moment Obama joined Trinity United Church of Christ, he fully understood that Wright was a prominent follower of the strident and socialist-friendly James Cone. The conclusion is unavoidable: That is precisely why Obama chose Wright’s church.
One of Obama’s ways of distancing himself from Wright after the 2008 campaign controversy broke was to say that he had not so much joined Trinity because of its pastor as to be part of the larger congre- gation.39 Given Obama’s writings in praise of Wright, as well as testimony from several sources that the two enjoyed a close friendship, this claim was an obvious evasion.40 Yet Obama’s distancing strategy contained a kernel of truth. He did in fact form ties to other Trinity congregants, especially Sokoni and Ayana Karanja. Yet through Obama’s little-known alliance with the Karanjas, we find still more evidence that Obama had to have known about his church’s disturbing radicalism.
Obama had a close and longstanding working relationship with fellow Trinity United Church of Christ congregants, Sokoni and Ayana Karanja. In 1971, Sokoni Karanja founded the Centers for New Horizons (generally called “Centers”), to operate a series of daycare centers constructed by the Chicago Housing Authority. The curriculum at Centers is Afro-centric, featuring birthday celebrations for figures like Malcolm X, for example. In 1982, three years before Obama’s arrival, Centers began operating an early learning center at Altgeld Gardens, the Chicago public housing development where Obama did his organizing.41 Around the same time, Sokoni Karanja became one of the first Woods Charitable Fund board members not from the Woods family.42 The Woods foundation funded Obama’s early organizing work, and Obama eventually joined the Woods Fund board.
Sokoni Karanja was a member of the Illinois Project Vote advisory board when Obama ran that organization in 1992.43 In 1994, Obama and Sokoni Karanja co-founded the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, a community-organizer training institute on Chicago’s South Side.44 Obama himself taught classes there. Sokoni’s wife, Ayana, a professor of anthropology and Africana literature, helped run the Lugenia Burns Hope Center.45 As a Woods Fund board member, Obama kept foundation money flowing to the Centers for New Horizons and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center for years after Karanja’s departure from Woods.46 So Obama did have important alliances with Trinity members other than Reverend Wright. But what exactly would Obama’s ties to Sokoni and Ayana Karanja have taught him?
Sometime around 1982, Ayana Karanja headed a group of Trinity congregants who wrote and and assembled a collection of essays to be used during the yearly “Church-Wide Study Course Week.” This volume, Perspectives, a view from within, a compendium for churchwide study, contains essays by Sokoni Karanja and other influential Trinity congregants.47 For example, Wright’s longtime theological collaborator, Iva Carruthers, has an essay in Perspectives. Wright contributes an essay as well, along with an introduction to the collection.
Sokoni Karanja’s essay in Perspectives is pervaded by the same anti-capitalist anger that motivates Reverend Wright. Karanja focuses on the three great evils confronted by American blacks: racism, sexism, and capitalism. According to Karanja, capitalism “exploits through control of police powers, all earthly resources and protects property and profits above human concerns.”48
The interesting twist in Karanja’s essay is the way he uses capitalism to explain the dysfunctional aspects of black “intimacy”:
The cash connection grows out of the commodity character of society. It is informed by several capitalistic assumptions… . Here we observe older and younger Black men pursuing young Black girls with money and material accouterments as the only points of attraction, and p——y the only objective. [The letter “p” followed by four blank letter-spaces appears in the original.]49
At this point, Karanja launches into classic Marxist language, describing the “species alienation” created by capitalism and again connecting this to problems between black men and women:
Community development goals are thwarted by the incessant drive for more and more p——y… . P——y is our point of focus and conflict precisely because of the powerlessness imposed on all us by a capitalist, racist, and sexist system.50
The cure for all this, in Karanja’s eyes, is “African-centered socialization, inspiration, education, and respect guided by the Nguzo Saba (unity, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, faith, creativity, purpose and self determination).”51 In other words, a more collectivist economic framework inspired by Afro-centric values is the cure for the exploitative social and sexual practices imposed on the black community by capitalism. This certainly embodies the blending of Afro-centrism and socialism championed by Reverend Wright. Karanja also makes it clear that these same principles inform the curriculum at the Centers for New Horizons.
The Perspectives compendium, assigned annually for week-long study by all members of Trinity United Church of Christ, contains a good deal of disturbing material. Iva Carruthers, one of Wright’s theolog- ical colleagues, devotes her essay to advocating the development of “melanic deficiency theories.” This refers to the Afro-centrist belief that the lack of the chemical melanin in white skin accounts for the superiority of black culture. If you object that such theories are pseudoscientific, Carruthers replies that Western science itself is a method of oppressive control.52 Another essay in the compendium suggests that the large number of black volunteers in America’s army amounts to a form of racial genocide—a product of America’s unjust economic system.53
Contrary to assurances from Obama’s Alinskyite organizing mentor Jerry Kellman, then, it’s clear that back in the 1980s, when Obama first encountered Wright, Trinity Church’s members were exposed to statements every bit as disturbing and radical as the ones that got Wright into trouble in 2008. Attacks on capitalism, pseudo-biological theories of race and culture, and accusations of American genocide against blacks were commonplace at Trinity for decades. Kellman’s testimony is a transparently bogus attempt to cover for Obama. Yet for years, the mainstream American press has relied on Jerry Kellman— a very interested party, to say the least—for accurate information on Obama’s past.
We’ve already learned that, from the beginning of his tenure at Trinity, Wright ran into trouble with many in the congregation. We’ll see that these troubles continued for years. Not everyone at Trinity was happy with Wright’s wilder pronouncements, and many left his church. Yet the congregants whose work was compiled in Perspectives were Wright’s strongest supporters. Some of them were also Obama’s close associates. With the entire congregation studying these essays and others like them on a yearly basis, Obama had to have known what Wright and Trinity were all about. Obama’s close partnership with Sokoni and Ayana Karanja would have made this clear as well. It’s even possible that Obama would have consulted with Karanja before finally choosing Trinity, since Karanja at that time was a board member at the Woods Fund, which was supporting Obama’s work.
If Jeremiah Wright’s socialist sympathies drew Obama to Trinity United Church of Christ, there were other factors as well. Wright was a political player on the Chicago scene. The extent of Wright’s political influence has not been properly appreciated. And Wright’s way of exercising his power shows that Obama had to have worked closely with his pastor on substantive political issues.
It’s tough to exaggerate the extent to which Jeremiah Wright believes that religion and politics are intertwined. In his own words:
There was no separation biblically and historically and there is no separation contemporaneously between “religion and politics”… . The Word of God has everything to do with racism, sexism, militarism, social justice and the world in which we live daily.54
In his contribution to the Perspectives anthology, Wright proudly touts his interest in political education:
Educating constituents as to all the nuances and subtleties of the racist political system operative in Chicago, and suggesting ways to address that system as free children of the Most High King, is a very definite part of our ministry at Trinity.55
Over and above the political education he offered his congregation, Wright was active in Chicago politics. When Harold Washington was still a congressman, Wright served on his education task force.56 Documents in the Harold Washington Archives and Collections indicate that Washington’s education task force encouraged then mayor Jane Byrne to appoint Jeremiah Wright to the Chicago school board. We even have a copy of Wright’s resume and his application for the post, which includes his answers to a series of questions about his views on Chicago’s school system.
From his columns in Trumpet Newsmagazine, we already know something about Wright’s views on education. His main concern is to teach children about “white supremacy.” Here is how Wright put it in the days following Hurricane Katrina:
We need to educate our children to the reality of white supremacy… . We need to educate our children about the white supremacist’s foundation of the educational system… . When the levees in Louisiana broke, alligators, crocodiles and piranha swam freely through what used to be the streets of New Orleans. That is an analogy that we need to drum into the heads of our African American children (and indeed all children!)… . In the flood waters of white supremacy … there are also crocodiles, alligators and piranha! … The policies with which we live now and against which our children will have to struggle in order to bring about “the beloved community,” are policies shaped by predators.57
That was Wright in 2006 speaking freely in his own publication. It’s perhaps more remarkable that on his application to Mayor Byrne for a school-board appointment in 1982, Wright promised to advocate for programs designed to educate Chicago school children about “the racism which is rampant from the Board room to the classroom.”58 As someone who believes that the entire American system is racist to the core, Wright-endorsed programs in racism education might have raised, shall we say, a bit of controversy for Chicago’s school board. On his application for Mayor Byrne’s appointment to the school board, Wright even promised to work for the abolition of the system of mayoral appointments to the school board. Clearly, Wright has been ha- bitually reckless in speech—another reason why Obama surely knew his pastor’s outlandish political views from the start.
Wright’s board-of-education flame-out in 1982 didn’t stop him from playing an important role in Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign in 1983. Wright helped lead the coalition of black clergy that propelled Washington’s candidacy to success. Wright actually drafted the advertisement, signed by a group of clergymen, that helped launch the Harold Washington crusade in Chicago’s black community in 1983. The large group of congregants who left Trinity that same year did so in the belief that Wright had become too political. Wright tells this story himself, in a little-known article where he adds: “My work with the political process says something about my conception of ministry.” Wright tells us that he was actively involved in the Harold Washington campaign “at every level” during both the 1983 and 1987 elections. Once in office, Washington appointed Wright to the City College Board.59
All this is directly relevant to Obama’s relationship to Wright. Wright was on the advisory committee of Obama’s proposed youth counseling network. Obama had hoped to meet periodically with Mayor Washington, with his advisory committee in tow. By including Wright on that panel, Obama was showing Harold Washington that he had the approval and partnership of one of the mayor’s most prominent supporters. In other words, Obama’s connection to Wright had a strongly political character from the start. Obama wanted access to Harold Washington’s administration, and Wright was a way in.
The most striking—and hitherto unreported—fact about Wright’s political past is the fact that, even before Barack Obama, Wright had yet another Illinois state senator in his congregation. His name was Howard B. Brookins, Jr.60 After serving two terms in the Illinois State House, Brookins was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1986, and re-elected to a four-year term in 1988. So when Obama first encountered Wright, in 1987, Trinity United Church of Christ already had its very own state senator—further proof of Wright’s kingmaker status.
Obama appears to have taken pains to avoid leaving a paper trail during his years in the Illinois State Senate. In contrast, Howard Brookins did preserve some of his legislative papers at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. Sufficient material exists to offer us an intimate glimpse of the way Jeremiah Wright relates to a state senator from his own congregation.
Wright had no compunction about offering Brookins detailed advice on legislation, including instructions on how to contact other members of Wright’s political network. Consider the following excerpt from a 1985 “Dear Howard” letter from Wright:
[P]lease be in contact with our senator, Senator Dawson, and our good friend, Senator Richard Newhouse, to urge them to please support SB721 (The Economic Development Emergency Employment Development Act), and to support the Amendment to the DCCA appropriation, which will make it possible to begin this program on July 1st—this coming fiscal year!
Please also be in dialogue with Senator Howard Carroll. Ask Senators Dawson and Newhouse to emplore [sic] Senator Carroll to push this important jobs program bill.61
Wright goes on to describe precedents for the proposed law in other states and to offer additional strategic advice. He sends copies of his letter to Brookins to Senators Newhouse and Dawson, but not to Senator Carroll. To say that Wright was a politically involved pastor is obviously an understatement.
Wright was not above using Trinity’s congregation to put pressure on Brookins on very specific legislative issues. A 1990 letter to Brookins from Wright begins:
Please be aware that I have asked the members of the church to talk with you to ask you to take back to the black legislators and any other colleagues and cohorts that you have down in Springfield, to ask them to be sure to override this line item please!62
It’s evident from these letters that Wright was less concerned to influence Brookins’s votes—no doubt Brookins and Wright agreed on most things—than to push his senator-congregant into assembling legislative coalitions.
Brookins fought hard on behalf of the interests of Wright’s inner circle. In 1983, Sokoni Karanja’s Centers for New Horizons got into serious trouble with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). Centers owed DCFS seventy-seven thousand dollars, yet had no funds to pay the debt. At first, DCFS canceled the state’s contract with Centers as punishment. Later the state relented and agreed to renew Karanja’s contract on condition that the debt would be paid. Brookins intervened aggressively on behalf of Karanja, calling on DCFS to forgive the debt. When the state refused, Brookins threatened to draft legislation forgiving the debts of all such programs. How the matter was finally resolved is unclear.63
Reverend Wright may have been directly involved in this fracas, since the application he submitted for the school-board appointment in 1982 indicates that he had served for the past three years as treasurer of Karanja’s Centers for New Horizons. Had Wright himself mismanaged the money Karanja’s Centers owed DCFS? In any case, as an Illinois state senator who co-founded a community organizer training institute affiliated with Sokoni Karanja’s Centers for New Horizons, Obama fit right into Wright’s political network.
In 1983, when Brookins made a concerted effort to secure the appointment of blacks to the Illinois State Board of Education, he turned to Reverend Wright for help. Brookins solicited Wright’s recommendations on potential candidates, and duly wrote to each of them proposing that they send in resumes. Brookins told all of the potential candidates for the State Board of Education that he’d gotten their names from Wright. One of the names Wright submitted to Brookins was that of Iva Carruthers, Wright’s theological partner at Trinity—whose Perspectives essay promoted the melanin-deficiency theory of culture.64
This, then, is the sort of access and influence Wright had come to expect from an Illinois state senator in his congregation: detailed advice on votes and coalition-building, aggressive intervention in his allies’ dealings with the state, and major influence over nominations for government posts. Since Brookins was in office at the very moment Obama began his own close association with Wright, Obama would likely have seen something of the Brookins-Wright partnership in action. How likely is it that Obama could have maintained Wright’s support without offering his pastor at least some significant influence on his own political world?
David Mendell, who had access to both Wright and Obama, and whose very friendly biography of Obama was published well before the 2008 Wright affair, called Wright Obama’s “counselor and mentor.”65 In fact Mendell offers a fairly detailed account of the future president’s political consultations with Wright as Obama was deciding whether to throw his hat into the ring for the U.S. Senate.66
When the Wright controversy broke in the spring of 2008, Obama denied having sought political—as opposed to religious—advice from his pastor.67 Yet Obama’s claim is plainly contradicted even by a friendly biographer. When we combine Mendell’s account with the Brookins papers, it’s obvious that Wright served as a political mentor to Obama. That is the relationship Wright would have expected, and anything less than that could have endangered Obama’s standing with this important power on Chicago’s political scene. From Reverend Wright’s point of view, in fact, the very separation between politics and religion that Obama invoked to distance himself from his pastor in 2008 was an imaginary distinction.
Once you’ve read through several years of Jeremiah Wright’s columns in Trumpet Newsmagazine, it’s next to impossible to believe that Obama could have remained ignorant of his pastor’s political views. Wright oozes politics from every pore, and his in-your-face style is a constant. Wright repeatedly drives home the same set of points. If you missed it in last Sunday’s sermon—or column—you’ll surely hear or read it again, in slightly different words, within a few weeks.
Although Wright’s available Trumpet columns only go back to late 2004, we know his wild rhetoric was nothing new. In January of 1994, for example, Wright went on a tirade against the United States during his keynote address for a ministerial installation ceremony at a Philadelphia church. There he called America “the number one killer (in other countries)” and railed against “pop-up pastors—part punk and part pimp” who “say what the administration wants to hear and keeps the Negroes in line.” According to the Philadelphia Tribune, when Wright added, “God has got to be sick of this shit,” a number of those in the pews were shocked at the use of an obscenity in church. Given the fact that Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell and various other local politicians were in attendance, we certainly can’t call Wright shy.68 David Remnick reports that Wright gave largely the same sermon—including the obscenity—a year earlier at another installation ceremony in Washington, D.C.69 Clearly, then, Wright was controversial from an early date, and spoke his most shocking lines repeatedly.
One example of Wright’s thematic repetitions stands out, because it arguably points to Obama’s knowledge of the very views that set off the Wright affair in 2008. By 2004, Wright was tangled up in a protracted war with a faction in his own congregation over his remarks about 9/11. We also know that around April of 2004, Obama was attending Wright’s services on a near-weekly basis. During the same period, a Chicago Sun-Times reporter who interviewed Obama at length about his churchgoing habits described Wright as Obama’s “close confidant.” In other words, we know that the very same controversial claims that got Wright in trouble in 2008 were being made at Trinity during a period when Obama himself was likely listening.
One of the most controversial Wright sermon “snippets” endlessly looped on video during campaign 2008 featured his response to the 9/11 attacks. Wright’s remarks were delivered on September 16, 2001, the first Sunday after the destruction of the World Trade Center. At the climax of that sermon, Wright angrily shouts: “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens! Are coming home! To roost!”70 So what got Wright into trouble during the presidential campaign was his holding America’s support for Israel (“state terrorism against the Palestinians”) responsible for 9/11.
In fact, this was no passing “snippet.” Wright had apparently made same political point in his sermons long after 9/11. In the January 2005 issue of Trumpet, Wright not only repeats his 9/11 charges, but angrily attacks the efforts of those in his own congregation who want him to stop such talk. Here is Wright:
It is a war [in Iraq] that does not take into account what it is the Saudis have been saying to us since 9-11-01. That part of the Arab world told us clearly that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had to do with our government’s shameful and shameless support of Zionism … we ignore the real enemy in this “war against terrorism!” We don’t want to tell the truth about Israel as a country. We don’t want to be honest as to what caused the attacks on 9-11-01.71
Here Wright was making the very same point that sparked a national scandal when it was shown on television in 2008. Not everyone at Trinity was happy with Wright’s endless political tirades, however. This is how Wright took them on:
What I find most interesting, however, is that when I mention these things [the connection between Israel and 9/11] from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ, I get attacked (by our own members!) as being “too political,” or I get attacked as a person who is turning our worship services into a political rally when people do not come to church to hear about politics. They want to hear about “Jesus!” … Trying to talk to this level of ignorance is like trying to talk to elementary school students about DNA. In the meantime, however, these so-called “members” continue to write me “hate mail.” They continue to denigrate my 33 years of service.72
It appears as though the Iraq War gave Wright repeated occasions to make the same point about American responsibility for 9/11 that he’d made after the terror attack itself. In fact, the conflict over Wright’s incessantly politicized sermons had kicked off a virtual civil war within Trinity, to the point where Wright was openly attacking his own congregants in the pages of his nationally distributed magazine.
To repeat, we know that in late March or early April of 2004, Obama assured a Chicago Sun-Times reporter that he was attending Trinity on a virtually weekly basis.73 That reporter also called Wright Obama’s “close confidant.” How likely is it, then, that Obama could have been unaware of Wright’s view of 9/11, or of the bitter internal conflict roiling his church in 2004? Yet so far from picking up and leaving the congregation (as Oprah Winfrey had years before, out of concern with Wright’s inflammatory talk), Obama went on to write a book with a title borrowed from one of Wright’s sermons.74
The truly troubling thing about Obama’s relationship with Wright is not the future president’s mere awareness and tolerance of his pastor’s extremism, but Obama’s broader political plans for Wright. Even if Obama did reject AIDS conspiracy theories and melanin-based interpretations of culture, the extent of his political agreement with Wright nonetheless remains disturbing. Obama’s goal was not to repudiate Wright’s religious radicalism, but to channel its fervor into an effective and permanent activist organization.
How do we know this? We know it because Obama himself has told us.
Consider Hank De Zutter’s “What Makes Obama Run,” a 1995 political profile of Obama published by the Chicago Reader just as Obama was embarking on his first run for office.75 De Zutter writes that Obama rejects “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation—which helps a few upwardly mobile blacks ‘move up, get rich, and move out.’” This statement might surprise those who think of Obama as the epitome of integrationism. Yet Obama’s repudiation of integrationist upward mobility is fully consistent with his career as a community organizer, his general sympathy for leftist critics of the American system, and his membership at Wright’s Trinity Church. Obama, De Zutter tells us, “quickly learned that integration was a one-way street, with blacks expected to assimilate into a white world that never gave ground.” These statements match closely to Wright’s characterization of assimilated blacks as “sell-outs,” and to Wright’s justifications for Afro-centric education as well.76
But Obama’s real interest in Wright and the other radical preachers he worked with was the role the clergy might play in building a radical political movement. In that 1995 profile, Obama criticizes “the politics of black rage and black nationalism”—although less on substance than on tactics. Obama upbraids the politics of Black Power for lacking a practical strategy. Instead of diffusing black rage by diverting it to the traditional American path of assimilation and middle-class achievement, Obama wants to capture the intensity of black anger and use it to power an effective political organization. Obama says “he’s tired of seeing the moral fervor of black folks whipped up—at the speaker’s rostrum and from the pulpit—and then allowed to dissipate because there’s no agenda, no concrete program for change.” The problem is not fiery rhetoric from the pulpit, then, but merely the waste of the anger it stirs.
De Zutter insists that “the lack of collective action among black churches” is a “favorite topic” of Obama’s. Obama, we’re told, is sharply critical of churches that try to help their communities merely through food pantries and community service programs.” Obama rejects the strictly community-service approach of apolitical churches as part of America’s unfortunate “bias” toward “individual action.” Obama believes that what he derogates as “John Wayne” thinking and the old “right wing … individualistic bootstrap myth” needs to be replaced: “We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.” So as Obama first ran for office in 1995, he was using exactly this sort of communitarian language recommended by the Midwest Academy as a surrogate for socialism.
Back then, Obama’s plans for more collectively oriented forms of social and political action depended on leadership from the black church: “Obama … spoke of the need to mobilize and organize the economic power and moral fervor of black churches. He also argued that as a state senator he might help bring this about faster than as a community organizer or civil rights lawyer.” Says Obama, “We have some wonderful preachers in town—preachers who continue to inspire me—preachers who are magnificent at articulating a vision of the world as it should be.” Obama continues, “But as soon as church lets out, the energy dissipates. We must find a way to channel all this energy into community building.” Obama seems to be holding up Jeremiah Wright as a positive model for the wider black church. In 1995, then, Obama didn’t want Trinity’s political show to stop. His plan was to spread it to other black churches, then harness Trinity-style activism to a political movement of the left.
Obama presents these same ideas in his 1988 essay, “Why Organize: Problems and Promise in the Inner City.” This piece was written shortly after Obama first cemented his alliance with Reverend Wright. The following excerpts show very clearly what Obama hoped to get out of the relationship:
Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership and—most importantly—values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago.77
After acknowledging his frustration with apolitical black churches focused only on traditional community service work, Obama lays out his vision: “Should a mere 50 prominent black churches, out of thousands that exist in cities like Chicago, decided to collaborate with a trained and organized staff, enormous political changes could be wrought.”78 Give me fifty Jeremiah Wrights, Obama is saying, tie them to a network of grassroots activists like ACORN or the Gamaliel Foundation, and we can revolutionize urban politics.
So the goal of a politically awakened and organized black church was no side issue for Obama, much less a merely personal spiritual matter. It was the signature theme of the future president’s grand political strategy during the era of his alliance with Wright. Obama didn’t simply understand and tolerate his mentor’s radical political views, which are extreme by any measure. Rather, he wanted them spread far and wide.
Together with Bill Ayers, Obama also funded highly politicized programs in Afro-centric education from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Just as Jeremiah Wright and Sokoni Karanja advocated a kind of blending of Afro-centrism with socialism, the Afro-centric programs Obama and Ayers funded through Annenberg had a strong anti-capitalist component. The “rites of passage” movement that inspired the educators Obama funded was designed to replace the (supposed) American values of “capitalism, competitiveness, racism, sexism, and oppression” with a more collectivist culture modeled on African society.79 Although Obama may not have bought every historical claim of these Afro-centrist educators, he obviously found the anti-individualist and anti-capitalist themes that inspired them congenial.
When the Jeremiah Wright controversy broke in the spring of 2008, Obama emerged with a series of excuses, explanations, and justifications. Supposedly, he’d never heard Wright condemn America, blame our foreign policy for the terror attacks of 9/11, or make other comparably outrageous statements. The controversial remarks continuously looped on video were but tiny and atypical fragments of Wright’s distinguished thirty-year career, we were assured. Mostly, Obama said, Wright talks about Jesus, God, faith, values, caring for the poor and family. Nor, Obama maintained, had he sought Wright’s political counsel. When he joined Trinity, Obama said, he was committing to a church, not to Wright. Obama also reminded us that Wright had performed many charitable works in Chicago.80
Each of these responses was deeply dishonest. Obama surely had heard wildly radical statements by Wright, since they were not only constant, but a topic of great controversy at Trinity Church during a period when Obama was in frequent attendance. The broader con- text of Wright’s black liberation theology—with which Obama was quite familiar—is at least as disturbing as Wright’s most notorious statements, if not more so. Wright openly denies the distinction between religion and politics, disdaining preachers who refuse to connect Jesus to liberationist militancy. Obama has indeed taken political counsel from Wright, and Wright’s history strongly suggests that this was a common occurrence. Obama greatest hope, in fact, was to build a political movement around Wright and preachers like him. Wright’s inner circle of followers at Trinity were every bit as radical as their pastor, and this was Obama’s circle as well. Obama spent a career advocating politicized religion and derogating conventional charity, only to hide behind Wright’s charitable work when the campaign controversy broke. Finally, Obama and Bill Ayers jointly funneled foundation money to radical education programs that echoed Wright’s anti-capitalist Afro-centrism.
So it was only through a collection of egregious falsehoods that Obama managed to stave off political disaster.
In his 2009 memoir, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe blames himself for the Obama camp’s failure to properly research the Jeremiah Wright issue, or to game out responses in case some inflammatory statement by Wright should become a campaign issue. “We were in denial,” Plouffe concludes.81 Plouffe manfully shoulders responsibility for the Wright fiasco, but I suspect that someone else was actually at fault.
In February of 2007, a front-page investigative article in the Los Angeles Times suggested that Obama may have taken too much credit for the anti-asbestos crusade he recounts in Dreams from My Father.82 This was one of the first negative Obama stories of the campaign. Determined not to be caught flat-footed by attacks, as John Kerry had been in 2004, the Obama camp sprang into action. Campaign research director Devorah Adler was charged with digging up the real identities of characters from Dreams, so she could write a rebuttal.
The odd detail here is that Adler had to determine the true identities of the characters in Obama’s memoir on her own, when, as Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet remarked, “It would have seemed simpler for her to ask Obama.”83 It would appear, then, that Obama was reluctant to let even his own campaign research director question him directly about his past. Could this also explain why the Obama camp was “in denial” about Reverend Wright? Obama is apparently reluctant to speak freely about his past, even to those responsible for defending him.
Obama’s socialist past is his secret. Reverend Wright is one of several gateways to the truth about that past. No wonder Obama did everything in his power in 2008 to suppress the truth about his relationship to Jeremiah Wright.