Not poverty: Obama’s pastor
By Morton A. Klein
The whole world now knows that for nearly 20 years, Sen. Barack Obama has attended Chicago’s Trinity United Church and that his pastor is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In his http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3934.
African Americans suffered, many even horrifically, in the past, but Rev. Wright was not one of them.
How do I know?It happens that, as a Philadelphian, I attended Central High School – the same public school Jeremiah Wright attended from 1955 to 1959. He could have gone to an integrated neighborhood school, but he chose to go to Central, a virtually all-white school. Central is the second-oldest public high school in the country, which attracts the most serious academic students in the city. The school then was about 80 percent Jewish and 95 percent white. The African-American students, like all the others, were there on merit. Generally speaking, we came from lower/middle class backgrounds. Many of our parents had not received a formal education, and we tended to live in row houses. In short, economically, we were roughly on par.
I attended Central a few years after Rev. Wright, so I did not know him personally. But I knew of him, and I know where he used to live – in a tree-lined neighborhood of large stone houses in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. This is a lovely neighborhood to this day. Moreover, Wright’s father was a prominent pastor and his mother was a teacher and later vice principal and disciplinarian of the Philadelphia High School for Girls, also a distinguished academic high school. Two of my acquaintances remember her as an intimidating and strict disciplinarian and excellent math teacher. In short, Rev. Wright had a comfortable upper-middle class upbringing. It was hardly the scene of poverty and indignity suggested by Obama to explain what he calls Wright’s anger and what I describe as his hatred.
In recent days, we have seen clips of several of Rev. Wright’s sermons, showing him declaring “G-d damn America,” blaming America for intentionally creating the drug problem, for creating the AIDS virus, for supporting Israeli “state terrorism against Palestinians,” for being responsible for causing 9/11, for being white supremacist and racist and for intentionally keeping people in poverty.
We have also learned that, last year, Rev. Wright’s church honored with a lifetime achievement award Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has said that “Judaism is a gutter religion,” that “Hitler was a very great man” and that “white people are potential humans; they haven’t evolved yet.” In fact, Rev. Wright accompanied Farrakhan in the 1980s on a visit to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2635’s Libya, which was then illegal under U.S. law. Nevertheless, the church and Wright’s successor as pastor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, have issued a statement defending and praising Wright, while completely ignoring Wright’s horrific statements.
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