Say What? Rev. Wright Claims Fox News Ruined His Granddaughter's Senior Prom

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s longtime minister and permanent embarrassment, preached in Washington on Wednesday, reported  Hamil Harris of The Washington Post. (It was nowhere to be found in my Thursday paper.) Harris suggested Wright's nastiest words were saved for Fox News, which wanted to ruin his granddaughters. It sounded a little like paranoid Ross Perot in 1992. The anti-Obama press was at their senior prom?

The YouTube videos focused damaging attention on his family, Wright said, and especially on his youngest daughter, Jamila Wright, and a granddaughter.

"The day I took Jamila to campus, Fox News was on the sidewalk taking my picture. My granddaughter got into a fistfight at FAMU [Florida A&M University] because people only know the press narrative about Jeremiah Wright," he said. "The press didn't care what they did to my family. They ruined their senior year in high school. They were at the senior prom, the graduation, waiting on something to try to destroy Obama."

Clearly, even if a media outlet was looking to follow Reverend Wright around, waiting for more fiery sermonizing, it probably wouldn't find him at his granddaughter's senior prom.

Harris did find a little bit of the old-time Reverend of Race as he discussed his new book on the history of Trinity United Church of Christ (and his essential role in building it):

Even though he spoke measuredly, Wright's assessment of the origins of the church could raise the eyebrows of some United Church of Christ elders.

"The church was started by a mainline white denomination in 1961, the United Church of Christ, using the same methodology as the United Methodist Church, the Episcopalian church. They were starting churches for a certain kind of person, not for all kinds of people," Wright said. "They didn't want people from the ghetto. They didn't want people from Anacostia. They didn't want people from the projects. They wanted upper-middle-class Negroes because 1961 looked like integration was going to happen."

Wright said that while the United Church of Christ was successful in starting a multi-racial congregation that attracted the middle class, the style of worship took changed radically because of one event in the 1960s. "Dr. [Martin Luther] King got killed in 1968 and Negroes turned black."

"...There were many churches like Trinity around the country," Wright said. "Their decision to be a church in the vanguard of social justice is a decision they made and one that I tried my best to help them fulfill."

The video that comes with the story is extremely generic about how Obama should be president of all the people. Is that all the Post could do? Are they trying not to make Obama-disturbing news?