Obama's World

This is part 3 of a three part series of Obama's background in South Side Chicago politics. Well worth a read.

Until recently, Barack Obama's presidential campaign was premised on the future. The senator from Illinois orated floridly about bringing "change" to the country; a New Political Man, he pledged to soothe the feuds of old and usher in a national reconciliation amid troubled times. With the emergence of divisive figures like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's longtime friend and acerbically Afro-centric pastor, the focus has shifted to the past, and with good reason. As FrontPageMag.com senior editor Jacob Laksin discovered in his recent reporting from Chicago's South Side, the predominantly black community where Obama launched his political career in the eighties and nineties, Wright may be the best known of Obama's friends and allies, but he may not even be the most controversial. In a series appearing in FrontPage over the last three days, Laksin explores Obama's ties to the South Side personalities who helped propel him to power, but whose continuing – and reciprocated – friendship with the candidate raises troubling questions about his ability to forge a new political consensus, especially on the fractious issue of race. To evaluate Obama's campaign and its grand promises, readers must first come to know the world of Chicago politics from which he emerged.

The first thing that catches your eye when you enter Trinity United Church of Christ, the erstwhile address of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is a bronze plaque above the reception desk that states: “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.”

It is an explicit declaration of the Afrocentric politics that animate this church, and a powerful refutation of the objections, feebly offered by the struggling campaign of Barack Obama, that the candidate who has called the church home for twenty years never once witnessed the radicalism that has put it on the national map.

All evidence suggests that the opposite is more likely. In joining Trinity in 1992, Obama purposely was seeking to align himself with the radical tradition – a polarizing but undeniably popular combination of black-power fulminating, racial separatism, and community outreach – that Trinity had come to represent.

Here are parts one and two.