by Joy-Ann Reid
Moreover, white people weren’t even allowed inside Trinity Church, which was little more than a “black separatist cult” allied with Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan! Some of the questions about Obama’s faith had their origins in the Clinton campaign, and strategist Mark Penn’s desire to dirty up the candidate who the Clinton team believed was getting a free ride from the media. Others swirled in the ideological basin of right-wing blogs, e-mail lists, and talk radio. Obama was forced into repeated assurances that he was a Christian and to distance himself from his provocative pastor.
The Wright revelations—snipped from selected sermons, bandied about on cable talk shows, and sometimes fueled by Wright himself—represented a growing danger to the campaign. After this, Obama instructed his staff to pull copies of every sermon Wright ever preached and review them, to insulate the campaign from further revelations. David Axelrod agreed, but the assignment fell by the wayside—an oversight Obama and his team would regret.
In March, after the Wall Street Journal ran an article that questioned whether speeches and sermons by Obama and Wright violated the church’s tax-exempt status, ABC News’ chief investigative reporter, Brian Ross, fielded a request from the executive producer of Good Morning America to do their own piece on the church and the Obama-Wright relationship. Ross asked his staff to purchase DVD copies of every Wright sermon they could find on the church’s website.
What they discovered would upend the campaign.
In a sermon delivered five years earlier, on April 13, 2003, Wright engaged in a lengthy exposition that was profoundly political. “This government,” Wright said, referring to the United States at its creation,
lied about their belief that all men were created equal. The truth is they believed that all white men were created equal. The truth is they did not even believe that white women were created equal, in creation, nor civilization. The government had to pass an amendment to the Constitution to get white women the vote. Then the government had to pass an equal rights amendment to get equal protection under the law for women. The government still thinks a woman has no rights over her own body, and between Uncle Clarence [Thomas], who sexually harassed Anita Hill, and a closeted Klan court, that is a throwback to the ninteenth century, handpicked by Daddy Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, between Clarence and that stacked court, they are about to un-do Roe vs. Wade, just like they are about to un-do affirmative action. The government lied in its founding documents and the government is still lying today. Governments lie.
The sermon was expansive, reprising “the government lied” riff to include the Tuskegee experiments, the HIV virus, and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
“Prior to the Civil Rights and equal accommodation laws of the government in this country,” Wright thundered, “there was black segregation by the country, legal discrimination by the government, prohibited blacks from voting by the government [sic], you had to eat and sit in separate places by the government, you had to sit in different places from white folks because the government said so, and you had to be buried in a separate cemetery. It was apartheid, American style, from the cradle to the grave, all because the government backed it up.”
“But guess what?” Wright intoned. “Governments change. Under Bill Clinton, we got a messed-up welfare to work bill, but under Clinton blacks had an intelligent friend in the Oval Office. Oh, but governments change. The election was stolen. We went from an intelligent friend to a dumb Dixiecrat. A rich Republican who has never held a job in his life; is against affirmative action, against education . . . against health care, against benefits for his own military, and gives tax breaks to the wealthiest contributors to his campaign. Governments change. Sometimes for the good, and sometimes for the bad.”
Wright walked his listeners through a litany of American horrors: the theft of Native American land and the consigning of the remaining tribal nations to scattered reservations; the internment of the Japanese; and the enslavement of Africans:
When it came to treating the citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them in slave quarters. Put them on auction blocks. Put them in cotton fields. Put them in inferior schools. Put them in substandard housing. Put them in scientific experiments. Put them in the lower-paying jobs. Put them outside the equal protection of the law. Kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing “God Bless America.” Naw, naw, naw. Not God Bless America. God Damn America! That’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating us citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is Supreme.
For the first time, Obama’s opponents had something to work with, something that could render the candidate’s essential narrative of racial equanimity as an insidious lie. Conservative media kept up a steady drumbeat against the pastor, the church, and the Obamas, rife with insinuations that behind the Ivy League educations and the portrait of midwestern probity and nuclear family bliss lay a pair of stealth black radicals, waiting to ensnare white America in a bloody, political revenge fantasy.
(Months later, in July, this image would be lampooned on the cover of The New Yorker, which depicted a “fist bumping” duo clad in Muslim garb [Barack] and an Angela Davis–style Afro, combat fatigues, and machine gun [Michelle], with an American flag burning in the Oval Office fireplace and a picture of Osama bin Laden on the wall. The cover would produce torrents of outrage from liberals and African Americans, who saw no humor in the parody.)
With snippets of Wright’s sermons in heavy rotation on YouTube and in Republican TV ads, Obama called a meeting with his senior staff. The politics called for Obama to say he was no longer associated with the church. But according to one former adviser, “It took a while to get there. And I think it says something about his loyalty and his respect for not just this man and this church in particular, but the institution of churches in general. It’s like, ‘I’m not gonna go there unless I have to.’ ”
Obama told a reporter from the New York Times that neither he nor Michelle was at the church on the day the sermon was delivered. The campaign issued a statement in which the senator condemned Wright’s language. More news outlets called, in rapid succession. The Wright remarks had touched off a full-blown media frenzy.
Obama knew there was no way around the uproar. “If people have full information and decide on the basis of that information that I’m not qualified to be the president of the United States, then that’s their decision,” he told his team.
The candidate and his team decided to try for the long ball. They’d put the truth out there and let the chips fall where they may. Obama was a student of history, and he remembered that John F. Kennedy had faced a country deeply skeptical of his Catholicism, but rather than ignoring the public’s angst, JFK had taken it head-on. The campaign announced that Obama would give a speech on race the next month, during a planned trip to Philadelphia to campaign for the Pennsylvania primary.
In Chicago, Wright’s longtime friends and colleagues accused the media of distorting Wright’s sermons and making a caricature out of a man who’d spent his life in the service of the poor, the locked out, and his country. Wright was a marine and navy veteran who as a young medic had monitored the intravenous drip as doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital operated on President Lyndon Johnson’s gall bladder, a memory revived in an interview with Wright in late April by Bill Moyers, a fellow member of the United Church of Christ denomination who at the time of the surgery was Johnson’s press secretary. Wright had even received a personal letter of commendation from the president, dated December 19, 1966.
Trinity was unique inside the body of the United Church of Christ—a liberal, socially active, and mainly white denomination whose adherents have included John and Joh
n Quincy Adams, Julian Bond, Moyers, and Howard Dean. Wright, a gifted orator and son of a Baptist preacher, had joined the denomination after being unable to find a Baptist church home. He became the senior pastor of the church on Chicago’s South Side in 1972.
Wright injected a fiery, Afrocentric vision into Trinity. Frequently dressed in a flowing dashiki, he preached “liberation theology,” fixing on Jesus as a liberator of the poor and oppressed. Wright’s flamboyance in weaving the fight for racial justice into the gospel left the church, and its most famous member, wide open to attack.
“They gave only a very selected part of that sermon,” said Timuel Black, a Chicago historian and longtime civil rights activist who’d helped to organize the Chicago contingent of the March on Washington in 1963. “Wright started that sermon talking about the continuous injustices” inflicted by the government of the United States. “Louis Armstrong said in the 1950s that if the president of the United States couldn’t help those children in Little Rock, then to hell with the United States,” said Black. “I know that because I knew him. [He used] almost the same words as Wright. They only took the ending to try and demonize Obama.”
Others pointed out that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. denounced the Vietnam War in 1967 by calling the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and on the day he died, King was preparing a sermon he intended to deliver at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, titled “Why America May Go to Hell.”
But those arguments came to nothing.
On March 15, Tavis Smiley was speaking at a banquet in Miami Gardens, Florida. Though he began the speech by referring to Obama as “a friend of mine,” he then laid into Obama for “throwing Jeremiah Wright under the bus” and said, “If you’re gonna condemn the remarks every time someone shows you a transcript, you’re gonna be throwing Negroes under the bus every week.” He then added, “We ain’t got to demonize ‘us’ to prove our loyalty to ‘them.’ ”
Smiley questioned the Illinois senator’s fundamental fealty to black people, reminding “all the Obama supporters in the room” that voting for Barack Obama for president wouldn’t clear the historical slate over the country’s racial past, “just as voting for Hillary won’t do away with the legacy of sexism in America.
“The thing about the Jeremiah Wright situation that’s so troubling to me is that you can’t let other folk define the terms,” Smiley said. “Some folk have learned to love this country ‘because’ . . . most of us in this room have learned to love this country ‘in spite of,’ and we’re still patriots. So I’m not gonna let Sean Hannity, or John McCain, or anybody else define for me what patriotism is. You’ve got to love your country enough to tell the truth.” That, Smiley inveighed, is what it means to be a “free black man or woman.”
Smiley closed his speech by asking an absent Obama: “If you’re asking for black folks’ support, do you love us? Will you tell the truth about our suffering?”
Cornel West was echoing this same critique in his own travels around the country. West had signed on as a surrogate to the campaign, but he continued to be such a consistent critic of Obama and the campaign that his fellow surrogate, Dyson, later said of West, “I don’t think he understood what being a surrogate was.”
Obama was being battered in mainstream circles for not being definitive enough in either explaining or severing his ties to Wright, while Smiley and West were beating him up for not being loyal enough to his black pastor, and by extension, to the cause of social justice for African Americans. Smiley’s assault also came before he had even heard what the candidate would say in Philadelphia.
On March 18, Barack Obama delivered the speech he’d written—one the campaign hoped would be his final word on the Jeremiah Wright affair. Titled “A More Perfect Union,” it was both a rebuke of Rev. Wright and an embrace of him. It explored Obama’s own biracial, multicultural roots and the complex alchemy of America’s racial history, from slavery through to Obama’s own family, in a depth not previously heard in public discourse, let alone in a presidential campaign.
“I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Rev. Wright that have caused such controversy,” he said. “For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely—just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”
Obama called Wright’s words “not only wrong but divisive . . . at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems—two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health-care crisis, and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.”
He spoke of his attraction to Trinity and its ministry, and praised Wright as “a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth—by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.”
Obama declared, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
“These people are a part of me,” Obama said. “And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”
The speech was widely praised and was compared to addresses by John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., though Obama could never mollify his most adamant conservative critics, who accused him of throwing his white relations overboard in the service of his campaign.
In the end, Obama’s message of racial balance won the day. The speech enraptured the media and cooled the histrionic coverage of the Wright sermons. At the same time, the uproar tightened Obama’s grip on black public opinion, as the growing sense of siege against an African American candidate by the media, the Clinton campaign, and conservative critics drove even skeptical black voters to his defense.
On April 3, Hillary Clinton addressed the Wright imbroglio for the first time, telling the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.” There had been a debate inside her campaign over what to do with the Wright controversy. One faction, led by Mark Penn, wanted to use it, to try to keep the narrative and questions about Obama’s “real beliefs” alive in the press by keeping surrogates actively talking about Wright and further exploring what went on inside Trinity. The other thought it should be allowed to develop on its own, arguing that it was Clinton’s public image that took a hit when she swung too hard at Obama. In the end, the latter view prevailed.
On April 11, Smiley announced on the air that after twelve years he was leaving the Tom Joyner Morning Show. No reason was given, but colleagues speculated it was due to listener complaints about Smiley’s constant criticism of Obama, who by that time enjoyed the overwhelming support of black voters—and of Joyner.
Two months before, Smiley had again rejected Obama’s proposals to send Michelle to the State of the Black Union symposium, being held in New Orleans that year. The feud with Obama now metastasized to the popular radio host, who privately and increasingl
y publicly was lashing his onetime protégé Smiley as little more than an Obama hater, whose envy at the senator’s meteoric rise was getting the better of him. Smiley’s constant critiques were also roiling Joyner’s listeners, who were increasingly vocal in their objections to his continuing platform on the show. Joyner spent four hours every morning taking the pulse of black America on the air. He knew, intrinsically, that Smiley no longer had his finger on it. As a longtime friend of both men explained, “Tom made the decision that, ‘Tavis, I just can’t have you on anymore.’ It wasn’t just what Tavis was saying. The listening audience was calling in and saying, ‘You shouldn’t have him. This brother’s lost his mind. Why is he so angry?’ . . . So Tom said, ‘Tavis, you’re done.’ ”
Indeed, black Americans had arrived at a full turn, from utter skepticism of Obama—the Harvard-educated, exotic enigma from Chicago by way of Hawaii—to profound hope, that the dawn of a real first black president was near. Smiley’s criticisms felt small and petty and too personal in that moment. He seemed to be throwing a roadblock in front of not just Obama but the very hopes of African Americans, seemingly because those hopes hadn’t traveled through him and through other members of the black intellectual, political, and civil rights elite. There would be a time when criticism of Obama and his manner of dealing with black suffering would break into the open among black folk. But in the spring of 2008, Smiley’s attacks felt jarring and out of place. Moreover, Smiley was known to have close ties to the Clinton camp, and senior campaign members said they expected he would eventually become a surrogate for Hillary. This was known to Obama World at the time and further stained Smiley’s critiques with the scent of self-interest.
