Rev. Wright meets Bill Moyers--and a return to my boyhood home

Two men on the political fringe, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and PBS' Bill Moyers, sat down for an interview today--it will air on Friday night.

But first an aside: Last week I drove to Chicago's South Side on blog related business. One of my stops was Wright's former house of worship, Trinity United Church of Christ to take some photographs. The neighborhood is almost entirely African American, so the sight of a white man standing on a median on one of Chicago's busiest streets with a camera--in front of Chicago's most notorious church--was not well-received. Horns were honking constantly, and one woman slowed down, rolled down her car window, and pointedly waived her finger at me in disapproval.

I was wearing a White Sox cap, she must have been a Cubs fan.

Behind Trinity there is a parking lot with room for about fifty cars, it was almost full, there was a quite a bit of coming-and-going on the church grounds--and this was a Friday afternoon, not a Sunday morning. Trinity appears to be a seven-days a week church.

Back to the Moyers interview: Not surprisingly, Trinity's pastor emeritus tells Moyers he is misunderstood and is being treated unfairly. Still, he'll soon be moving into a $1,000,000 church-owned house miles away from Trinity, in the almost completely white-suburb of Tinley Park.

Audacity! I wish I'd be treated as unfairly.

ABC 7 Chicago has more:

Obama's former pastor reflected for the first time publicly on the firestorm of controversy that followed the 24-7 airing of his most inflammatory comments during sermons about American racism and foreign policy.

"Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic," Wright said.

"What do you think they wanted to communicate?" Moyers asked.

"I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic and I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech. And by the way, guess who goes to his church? Hint, hint, hint," said Wright.

Yeah, we know, presidential candidate Barack Obama is a member. But remember folks, that ABC and Fox News purchased DVDs of Wright's sermons from Trinity's web site. The pastor said what he said, and parishioners wildly cheered the Reverend's toxic statements. What was communicated by Fox, ABC and others came out of Wright's mouth.

After I completed the photo shoot, I drove around a bit, and stopped in front of this modest bungalow, which is exactly ten block's south of Trinity United Church of Christ. That's my first home, at 10536 S. Eggleston, where I lived from 1961-1968.

I wonder if my beloved sandbox is still in the back yard?

Technorati tags: religion Chicago Obama politics Barack Obama Election Democrats Jeremiah Wright PBS Bill Moyers