The Rustorian

Issue date: 11/13/09 Section: News

Rev. Jeremiah Wright

The Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, a one-time minister to President Barack Obama for more than 20 years will make an appearance here at Rust College.

Wright, a theological scholar and former senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Ill., will serve as keynote speaker at the 14th annual National African American Student Leadership Conference, Friday, Jan. 15, 2010.

According to the coordinator of NAASLC and professor of political science at Rust, Dr. A.J. Stovall, the convention organizers had invited Wright to give people the opportunity to see him up close and gain a better understanding of who he is and what he has done, especially in the black community.

Santez Bogard, a senior social science major, said he respects everything Wright had done and how he handled the controversial situation in the media. Bogard loves the fact that Wright will come to Rust.

Wright, a controversial figure during the last presidential campaign of the then senator and candidate Obama, gained national attention in March 2008 when ABC News, after reviewing dozens of Wright's sermons, excerpted parts which were subject to media scrutiny and considered to be racist and anti-semitic.

After critics pressed Obama about his relationship with Wright, he gave a speech titled, "A More Perfect Union", in which he denounced the statements in question and distanced himself from the pastor.

Stovall said Wright's sermon style faulted by some mainstream media is very much patterned to the black theological tradition in Black churches. "If the same media went into just about any of the black churches in the U.S., they would have come up with the same conclusions as with Reverend Wright."

Stovall added that people try to place black people in a box anytime "we say something they are not familiar with or they do not want to hear, then the media blow it up." He said the underlying scheme then was to derail the Obama's presidency bid.

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