The just-retired pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago is pictured by apologists as a man who suffered in the preintegration South, who bore the indignities of segregated drinking fountains, whites-only diners and apartheid buses rolling through the night on the back roads deep in Dixie.
Wright’s attacks on white people are only natural, his advocates say, for a man who endured the endless humiliations of Jim Crow.
Wright, 66, actually spent very little time in the South, no farther south than Richmond, Va., where he attended a historically black college for a couple of years. After service in the Marines and the Navy, Wright got his bachelor’s degree from elite historically black Howard University, a mile from the Capitol.
Howard’s distinguished alumni include former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young, the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder and former secretary of the Army Togo West.
Wright earned a master’s degree in Chicago, and his doctorate in ministry in Dayton, Ohio.
He came from a comfortably off family in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. His father, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Sr., had been pastor of a Baptist church there since 1938, retiring in 1980. His mother, Mary Henderson Wright, had the leisure and resources to earn a doctorate in education from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania.
Among African-Americans, Wright was an advantaged young man who prospered in post-segregation America. It prompts the question as to the wellspring of a fury that leads Wright to blame whites for infecting black people with AIDS and to spread the lie that white America supported Apartheid in South Africa, and that 9/11 was America’s just deserts for past aggression.
Why would an ordained minister who enjoyed so many benefits of a middle-class upbringing in the North engage so regularly in hate speech against whites?
Was it good business and smart politics in an upscale parish?
Hmmm?
-source- The Buffalo News.
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