III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 97OBAMA HELPED FUND WRIGHT’S MICROPHONE
Obama did not just listen to this tripe; he financed it and made it possible financially. In 2006,
the Obamas gave $22,500 to Wright’s church, and this represented the vast majority of their
charitable contributions. Wright’s church was foundation-funded: for example, in 2001 the Woods
Fund, where Obama was a board member, awarded a $6,000 grant to Trinity United. They were
paying for an agitational machine disguised as a church. Wright, for his part, needed the money to
buy his new Porsche. Worldly asceticism was not a part of the Protestant ethic as interpreted by
Wright. He rejected middleclassness in favor of upperclassness, or, more simply, elitism.
Obama has described Wright as his spiritual mentor and his sounding board. A key phrase from
one of Wright’s sermons is the “audacity of hope,” which Obama has affixed as the title of his
compendium of observations on his own presidential campaign. Wright is a great admirer of Louis
Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, and traveled with Farrakhan to visit with Libyan leader Muammar
Qaddafi. Farrakhan has gotten his picture on the cover of Wright’s parish magazine several times,
sometimes in the company of Obama. Wright’s church gave Farrakhan the “Dr. Jeremiah A.
Wright, Jr. Lifetime Achievement Trumpeteer” Award at the 2007 Trumpet Gala at the United
Church of Christ. According to some reports, Wright himself was for a time a member of
Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen noted that the Trinity United house organ had once
named Louis Farrakhan as its person of the year, praising the Nation of Islam leader. Cohen called
on Obama to denounce such praise of Farrakhan, known for statements deemed anti-Semitic. In his
January 15, 2008 Washington Post column, Richard Cohen wrote: “Every year, [Trumpet] makes
awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to
a man it said ‘truly epitomized greatness.’ That man is Louis Farrakhan.”
Farrakhan was a hero to some, but for others who looked at him from the left, he fell far short of
what was needed. There was for example Farrakhan’s address to the Million Man March of 1995,
when titanic efforts had been marshaled by ordinary black men to demonstrate for the survival of
the black family. Farrakhan was the main speaker. He had no legislative program to outline to
mobilize and sustain the efforts of the black men who had come so far at such expense to hear him.
Instead, he launched into a raving tirade about numerology, babbling about the number of steps
leading to various buildings in Washington, or their height as measured in feet. It was an appalling
performance. He finished up with a kind of pledge by those present, but there was no mention of a
political party or something concrete to express so much need and so much energy. Not
surprisingly, the momentum generated by the Million Man March quickly dissipated. Farrakhan had
proven once and for all that he was no political leader. He had not been able to point to the next
step, to the next link in the chain of meaningful political action.
Many wondered what Farrakhan was about after all, with his idiotic and self-destructive anti-
Semitic outbursts. There had been a time after that fabled trip to Libya when he had seemed to
suggest that he had become a kind of paymaster for Qaddafi. Some claimed that he had had a role in
the assassination of Malcolm X, who had been a rival of sorts to him for the NOI succession. Did
Farrakhan have connections to the US intelligence community? If he did, then everything would
begin to fall into place, including his indirect association to Obama. Farrakhan has endorsed Obama
for the presidency, saying that the Illinois senator “is the hope of the entire world, that America will
change and be made better.” It was Farrakhan who had been quoted saying, “White people are
potential humans — they haven’t evolved yet.” Was Farrakhan a provocateur for the FBI? When
the spotlight was trained on this matter, Obama has run away in the other direction.