The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Compared with most African-Americans, in the South and in the Northern cities, Wright had a middle-class upbringing, but not a sheltered one. In a sermon that deeply affected Obama, "The Audacity to Hope," Wright confided that when he was fifteen he was arrested for auto theft and that when he went away to college he briefly left the church and, under the influence of Malcolm X, flirted with Islam: "I tried one brief time being a Muslim: 'As salaam alaikum.'" He had experienced racism--in Virginia, in the military, even in enlightened Germantown--and understood the complexes that came with it. "When I was growing up," he said in a sermon called "Unhitch the Trailer," "folks used to buy a bleaching cream called Nadinola to try to change what God had done."

  In the nineteen-sixties, the United Church of Christ, a mainly white denomination, established a small parish on the South Side, at Ninety-fifth Street, hoping to draw on the privately owned homes in the area. In the early nineteen-seventies, the parishioners at the new church, Trinity, wanted to play gospel music rather than the traditional Anglo-European hymns; they wanted the church to be more involved in the civil-rights movement, in social activism, in African culture. Most of the ministers on the South Side at the time were cultural conservatives: wary of the black liberation movement; wary of reform in their services; reluctant to adopt political positions that would put them in opposition to their patrons in City Hall. As a result, young people, searching for greater black identity as well as a spiritual home, were leaving the church for the Nation of Islam, black nationalism, or small sects like the Black Hebrew Israelites. Trinity promised a Christian home for young people who were politically and socially aware, and wanted that awareness to be part of their church.

  Jeremiah Wright, who arrived in Chicago in 1969 and became Trinity's pastor in March, 1972, was among the young clergymen who reacted to the changing political atmosphere and rose to the challenge from rival confessions and sects. He had grown up in an educated household filled with both memories of segregation in Virginia and intense discussion about the heroes of black culture and education. At Virginia Union, he had become increasingly politicized, and at Howard he had heard Stokely Carmichael preach the ideas of Black Power, read the books of Afrocentric scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop, and studied with some of the faculty's most charismatic black scholars, including Sterling Brown. That was the moment, he said, "when the kids turned black." Wright, like many other young, educated preachers, felt that the time had come for a black church that was a center of racial solidarity and social justice, just as it had been in the years leading toward the Civil War. It was, Wright felt, as if he had been preparing to take over at a church like Trinity all his life.

  "The members of this church said, 'No, no, no--we're not going to become Islamic or Hebrew, we're Christian,'" Wright told me. "We're going to be a black church in the black community. As a matter of fact, we're doing nothing in this community. We need to change." In Chicago, Wright had seen churches that either had "throw-down good music" or "a strong social justice component," but rarely both. Wright wanted both. He presented himself to Trinity as a devout intellectual, seminary-trained, and also as a modern race man determined to build a church community committed not only to civil rights but to the day-to-day problems that afflicted so many on the South Side: crime, gangs, drugs, pregnant teenagers, discrimination, poverty, poor education.

  Wright began at Trinity with fewer than a hundred worshippers. At first, he told Roger Wilkins for the 1987 PBS documentary "Keeping the Faith," Trinity was a "white church in blackface." Eventually, he expanded the church to more than six thousand parishioners. He created dozens of educational programs and became one of the leading exemplars of black-liberation theology in the country. Wright's politics embraced not only the liberal and radical leaders of civil rights and Black Power--in 1977, he hung up a banner on the church reading, "Free South Africa"--but also an unusually progressive set of social views. He approved of female pastors, preached tolerance of homosexuals, and provided counseling for victims of H.I.V./AIDS. Above all, Wright was considered a brilliant preacher. In 1993, Ebony published a poll of the top fifteen black preachers in the country; Wright was second only to Gardner Taylor, and was one of the youngest in an august group including Samuel D. Proctor, Charles Adams, and Otis Moss, Jr.

  An important contemporary intellectual influence on Wright and his church was James Cone, a brilliant young professor of divinity from Fordyce, Arkansas. After enduring the humiliations of the Jim Crow South in his youth, Cone reacted to the ferment of the 1967 riots in Detroit by writing Black Theology and Black Power, an impassioned manifesto for a black church determined to "emancipate the gospel from its 'whiteness' so that blacks may be capable of making an honest self-affirmation through Jesus Christ." The book was published in 1969, when Cone was thirty-one.

  A student of the modern European theologians--Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, in particular--Cone recognized that, while his church preached justice and mercy, it had little or nothing to say about the suffering in his community. In an America that continued to oppress blacks, the church that preached a gospel of Christ must demand radical change: "Unless theology can become 'ghetto theology,' a theology which speaks to black people, the gospel message has no promise of life for the black man--it is a lifeless message." Cone had thought about leaving the church but decided instead to transform it. Blackness, for Cone, became a central metaphor for Christian suffering and Christianity itself a "religion of protest against the suffering and affliction of man." The text of Black Theology and Black Power cites the European theologians that Cone had been studying as a divinity student and as a young pastor, but it also leans on the ideas and language of Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon, the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Its tone is unapologetically ferocious. By way of explanation (and certainly not apology), Cone quotes Baldwin: "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in rage almost all of the time." Cone's book conceives a radical synthesis of Christian faith and Black Power, King's message of love and Malcolm's of insistence. For Cone, Christianity must focus on the oppressed, and for that role God has obviously chosen black men and women. (At times, Cone cautions that his concept of "blackness" is not restricted to African-Americans but, rather, is a metaphor for the dispossessed; he is not a separatist or a supremacist.)

  Cone reminds the reader that the American black church, born in slavery, was a singular institution, posed against a white society that had robbed black men and women of their liberty, families, languages, and social cohesion. The spirituals, Cone writes, were not merely protest songs but a "psychological adjustment to the existence of serfdom."

  The black-liberation theology that Cone conceived and that Wright brought to his church is rooted in nineteenth-century ideas: in David Walker's abolitionist Appeal, published in 1829, which refers to the "God of the Ethiopians"; in Frederick Douglass's slave narrative that distinguishes between the Christianity of Jesus Christ ("good, pure, and holy") and Christianity in America ("bad, corrupt, and wicked"); in Bishop Henry McNeal Turner's newspaper, Voice of Missions, where he wrote, "We have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that God is a Negro, as you buckra or white people have to believe that God is a fine looking, symmetrical and ornamented white man." In The Negro Church in America, E. Franklin Frazier writes, "The 'color' of God could only assume importance in a society in which color played a major part in the determination of human capacity, human privilege, and human value. It was not and is not a question of whether God is physically black, but it is a question of whether a man who is black can identify with a white God and can depend on His love and protection." Cone and Wright were part of a deep tradition when they married notions of rebellion and faith. Black-liberation theologians reminded their readers that Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey were not just rebel slaves; they were preachers. The A.M.E. Zion Church was known as the "freedom church," because it was a spiritual home for abolitionis
ts like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Eliza Ann Gardner.

  Wright was not a pure follower of Cone. Relying on his own reading in Afrocentric history and theology, Wright rejected Cone's notion that the white slave masters had stripped the black man of his spiritual and cultural links to Africa. Unlike Cone, Wright insisted on the African origins of spirituals and the blues; he was more deeply influenced by Afrocentric thinking, in general. In church, Wright often wore African-patterned robes. He also came to believe in some of the more dubious theories linked to Afrocentrism. For instance, to explain the so-called differences in European and African "learning styles," Wright endorsed the idea that Africans and African-Americans were "right-brain" people, who are not "object-oriented" but, rather, "subject-oriented": "They learn from a person" rather than a book.

  Initially, Obama approached Wright as an organizer. He wanted Trinity, with its thousands of parishioners, to consider joining a coalition of other churches on the South Side.

  Wright welcomed the young man but laughed at his idea. "That isn't going to happen in this city," he said. "I ain't seen it. I've been in this city since 1969. We don't agree with each other on whether you baptize in the name of Jesus or baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost." The churches in Chicago, he insisted, were just too various, too at odds. Some believe in speaking in tongues, some are sedate and traditional. Some support homosexuals and female ministers; others, most decidedly, did not. The divisions ran deeper than the divisions between Orthodox and Conservative Jews, between Hasidim and Reform, Wright said. The idea of organizing all the churches in and around Roseland, as Obama proposed, was impossible. Wright teased Obama for his dewy idealism, saying, "You know what Joseph's brothers said when they saw him coming across the field: 'Behold, the dreamer!'"

  Wright's reaction was typical among the pastors of some of the largest black churches on the South Side. Ministers like James Meeks, at Salem Baptist, told organizers that it was easier for them, politically, if they just picked up the telephone and called the Mayor. Meeks worked with the Developing Communities Project for a short while, Alvin Love recalled, "but Barack couldn't keep him in. One of the biggest problems for a community organizer is managing egos when you deal with the pastors." Wright, Love said, "figured he was already way ahead of any organizer on social-justice issues. Why deal with an organizer?"

  Nevertheless, Obama was fascinated by Jeremiah Wright and began to discuss more intimate things with him. Ann Dunham had always described herself as "spiritual" and did not hesitate to have her children read sections of the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and other religious texts, but she was never a churchgoer, never a believer in the standard sense. Not having been brought up in the church, Obama was full of questions, academic and theological. Wright said, "His search was: 'I need a faith that doesn't put other people's faiths down, and all I'm hearing about is you're going to hell if you don't believe what I believe.' He didn't hear that from me."

  Obama's colleagues were not surprised that he had found his way to the black church--particularly to Jeremiah Wright and Trinity. "Barack had no problem moving into the black church because it is rooted in social justice," Kellman said. "Some ministers can be awful and 'Where is mine,' but historically, this church saw these folks through from slavery. It was almost all they had to work with and it still is around these communities. He was vaguely aware of this but until he came to Chicago he didn't experience it. He had heard tapes of King, the music of it. He knew the church was central to the civil-rights movement. He wanted to be part of a community of people who make values part of the center of their lives. In Judaism, there is no individual salvation. It's community. Barack moves into that sense of the church. It took him years to figure out how to use some of that in his own rhetoric."

  If it was merely a large and influential church he sought, Obama could have chosen the Reverend Arthur Brazier's enormous Pentecostal church on the South Side. Brazier had worked with Alinsky in the Woodlawn Organization and had been one of the black ministers who stood by King in Chicago. But Wright was even more politically involved and more progressive. "Reverend Wright and I are on different levels of Christian perspective," Brazier said. "Reverend Wright is more into black liberation, he is more of a humanitarian type who sought to free African-Americans from plantation politics. My view was more on the spiritual side. I was more concerned, as I am today, with people accepting Jesus Christ. Winning souls for Christ. The civil-rights movement was an adjunct; as a Christian, you couldn't close your eyes to the injustice. But in my opinion the church was not established to do that. It was to win souls for Christ."

  The more Obama attended services at Trinity, the more Wright's rhetoric infused his thinking and language. Obama admired the way Wright responded to the needs of his community--he helped parishioners with AIDS, created support groups for addicts and alcoholics, developed an "African-centered" grade school, the Kwame Nkrumah Academy, and, every summer, took church members to Africa.

  The political pronouncements by Wright that, two decades later, plagued Obama's Presidential run were not yet in evidence. "The only troublesome issue was how to relate to Louis Farrakhan," Kellman recalled. "And in the black community people were willing to cross the line and not care about anti-Semitism as long as he was helping people. And I don't think Barack was engaging Wright on that issue."

  Obama's black and white friends say that his motives for joining Trinity were complicated, yet Trinity was undeniably a "power church" in town. Obama "saw it as a power base," Mike Kruglik said. "You can't interpret what Obama does without thinking of the power factor. Even then. For a long time, I wouldn't talk about this, but he told me way back then that he was intrigued by the possibility of becoming mayor of Chicago. His analysis was that the mayor in this town is extremely powerful and all the problems he was dealing with then could be solved if the mayor was focused on them."

  In fact, Obama, who was working with the poor and the working class, was initially concerned about Trinity from a class point of view. There were black churches--and white churches, too--that put affluence next to godliness and he wanted to make sure that he was in the right place. "Some people say that Trinity is too upwardly mobile," he remarked to Wright.

  In 1981, a committee at Trinity, chaired by a parishioner named Vallmer Jordan, had adopted a twelve-point document of "self-determination" called "The Black Value System." The document, which was written under the influence of the Black Power movement and came under scrutiny during Obama's Presidential campaign, calls for commitment to God, the black community, and family, dedication to education ("We must forswear anti-intellectualism"), a strong work ethic and self-discipline, charity for black institutions, and support for worthy black politicians. Article 8, on the "disavowal of the pursuit of 'middleclassness,'" warns that the black community is weakened by the division between its most fortunate and talented members and those whose lives are consumed by misfortune, crime, and incarceration ("placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons"). And while it is permissible to pursue middle-class prosperity "with all our might," members of the community must be wary of being seduced "into a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of 'we' and 'they' instead of 'us.'"

  Vallmer Jordan admitted that there had been a "hunk of resistance" to the article on "middleclassness" among church members, until it was made very clear to congregants, not least to the substantial number of well-to-do members who no longer lived in the neighborhood, and who drove to church each Sunday, that they were being warned against their own potential alienation, a drift away from the community.

  "We refuse to be silk-stocking," Wright says. The standing joke is that Trinity has B.A.s, B.D.s, M.D.s, J.D.s, Ph.D.s, and A.D.C.s, too--Aid to Dependent Childre
n. "We've got welfare, those letters don't matter here," Wright said. "What matters is that you're made in the image of God. That kind of message, and trying to push that kind of message, is what makes us different."

  When conservative critics suggested during the campaign that Trinity's Black Value System was a kind of black-nationalist manifesto, Obama replied, "Those are values that the conservative movement in particular has suggested are necessary for black advancement. So I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a document that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help."

  After a couple of years, Obama had built the Developing Communities Project into a good, small program, but he could readily see its limits. His relationship with Kellman had grown frayed at times, but they still were able to meet, take walks, talk about their work and politics. Obama found himself thinking about a larger arena, about ways to make a greater impact. Obama knew that he could not live the conventional life of a corporate lawyer or executive. Once, Kellman sent him out to Northbrook on a project, and Obama found himself dressing in a suit and commuting on the train. "I never want to do this on a regular basis," Obama told him. "I can't live like this. It's my idea of a nightmare."

  In late October, 1987, his third year as an organizer, Obama went with Kellman to a conference on the black church and social justice at the Harvard Divinity School. One night, as they took a walk in Cambridge, Obama told Kellman that he was thinking seriously about leaving Chicago. Obama talked with him about his father, about how he was learning from encounters with various half siblings how Barack, Sr., had lived the last years of his life--impotent with rage, unable to fulfill any of the personal and political dreams he had had when he was a promising student at the University of Hawaii. Obama was determined to do better; he was determined to acquire the proper tools to make his mark on a far broader canvas than he ever could as a community organizer.