THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST
JEREMIAH WRIGHT RETURNS
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is drawing criticism for selecting President Barrack Obama’s former pastor as the principal speaker at an awards dinner in Maryland.
Perry Ealim, a black businessman who is scheduled to receive an award at the November 20 event, says many of his friends and associates refuse to attend the dinner because Rev. Jeremiah Wright is going to be the speaker.
“I am happy for your honor, however, I cannot support an organization that would have a racist/bigot such as Mr. Wright as (its) speaker,” one of Mr. Ealim’s friends wrote to him.
But a member of the Anne Arundel County chapter of the NAACP, which is hosting the dinner, says that Mr. Wright is widely respected in the black community and that his appearance at the podium is certain to make the event a success.
“The man’s an icon to many of us,” the spokesman said.
The Rev. Wright is the former minister of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago where Mr. and Mrs. Obama were longtime members.
In the wake of 9/11, Mr. Wright proclaimed from the pulpit:
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye… and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
During another Sunday morning worship service, he said:
“When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest 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.’ No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that’s in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human.”
The Reverend Wright performed the wedding ceremony for Mr. Obama and his wife Michelle; he baptized their two children; and he provided the title for Mr. Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope.
