Let's Not Forget Obama's Spiritual Mentors

Pastor James Meeks


While John McCain has been hammering Barack Obama on the issue of Bill Ayers and ACORN, he has apparently taken Jeremiah Wright off the table. Apparently, McCain thinks that the issue of Jeremiah Wright is known to everyone, and there is no need to bring it up again.

I have three points for consideration:

In addition to Wright, one figure who has received little publicity is another radical preacher in Chicago, Reverend James Weeks. Weeks is cut out of the same cloth as Wright. A few years ago, at a rally in Chicago, Weeks said (actually shouted) this:


“We don’t have slave masters. We got mayors. But they still the same white people who are presiding over systems where black people are not able, or to be educated.”

“You got some preachers that are house niggers. You got some elected officials that are house niggers. And rather than them trying to break this up, they gonna fight you to protect the white man."

Meeks is another man who Obama has, in the past, identified as a spiritual mentor. For a while, Meeks appeared on Obama's campaign website. He was part of Obama's exploratory committee prior to his run for the presidency. While running for the US Senate, Obama campaigned in Meeks' church.

We have also been treated to sound bites from another radical "man of God", Father Michael Pfleger, the radical Catholic priest of Chicago's St Sabina Church, who mocked Hillary Clinton in racial terms in a sermon at Wright's church and physically threatened a Chicago gun store owner at a rally a few years back.

You might never have heard this tape also recorded at Wright's Trinity United Church :

"It's time to move on. It's like saying to a woman who's been repeatedly raped over, and over, and over, and over, over, and over,... You need to get over it. The HELL I do. Get the sucker who's been raping me and make him pay. Well America has been raping people of color and America has to pay the price. America has to pay the price for the rape. I dare you say get over it."


As for Wright, there is one little fact that has appeared on various blogs, but escaped attention from the general public. Remember when the Wright tapes first surfaced, and Obama claimed he had never been present during the more controversial sermons by the fiery preacher?

Cut now to Obama's first book, "Dreams of my Father", first published in 1995. The book never made a dent until it was re-published in 2004 subsequent to Obama's electrifying keynote address at the Democrat Convention.

In the book, Obama describes "The Audacity of Hope" speech by Wright, which he (Obama) borrowed for the title of his second book.

Obama quotes Pastor Wright as describing a world "where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere. ... That's the world! On which hope sits."

And then,

"Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policymakers in the White House and in the State House."

Don't take my word for it. You can read it in Obama's book or hear it on tape. (a taped audio version of the book in Obama's voice is available.)

The point here is not to bring up another inflammatory statement by Wright. The point is that Obama wrote about these statements as far back as 1995. Then, during the campaign, he told us he never heard them.

John McCain may have decided not to bring up the issue of the "spiritual mentors" who Obama has associated with. It cannot, however, be shoved to the side and neglected as a legitimate issue as we choose our next president.

One of the reasons for Obama's astounding success, in my view, is the fact that so many millions of Americans desperately want to put our troubled racial history behind us. Most all of us do-including those of us who will vote for McCain. I, for one, have a hard time believing that any person who comes from this kind of church background is going to "bring us together."