Kamala Harris’s Reverend Wright

Following Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascension to the top of the Democrat presidential ticket, her past record as District Attorney of San Francisco, Attorney General of California, and U.S. Senator has come under intense scrutiny for her support of far-left policies. However, there are other aspects of Harris’s background besides her radical past (and possibly future) political positions that may also call her qualifications for the presidency into question.

As the Washington Free Beacon recently reported, as soon as she was named her party’s presidential nominee, Harris hastened to thank the man she called her “spiritual leader,” the Reverend Amos C. Brown, the pastor of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church. Harris has been associated with the church for over two decades, and she professed to have frequently turned to Brown over the years for “guidance and support.”

Despite Brown’s reported past history of association with prominent civil rights leaders, and his holding the title of leader of the San Francisco NAACP, it would appear that he made a curious spiritual guide for a potential national leader.

Prime evidence of this is the speech Brown gave at a memorial service for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks just six days after they happened.

In his remarks, Brown, instead of denouncing the attacks, effectively blamed the United States for causing them, citing the facts that “bombs were still blasting” in Central America and Africa (without demonstrating any U.S. connection to such bombings), that the U.S. failed to “embrace the smaller nations” at a conference on global warming, and that America neglected even to “show up” at the world conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, two weeks earlier, in which he had participated. (The U.S. notably withdrew from the conference because its focus was on denouncing Israel as the chief cause of “racism.”)

Following Brown’s remarks, Nancy Pelosi, representing San Francisco in Congress as she still does, condemned the minister’s apologetics for ISIS, remarking that the 9/11 attacks put their perpetrators “outside the order of civilized behavior,” for which America was in no way to be held responsible.

More recently, in December 2023, rapper and small business owner Xiao Chuan reported that Brown demanded that he repudiate a song blaming San Francisco Mayor London Breed for the city’s high crime rates, lest Brown organize the local black community against Xiao. While denying that he’d made the threat, Brown subsequently apologized to Xiao.

But Harris is not the only recent potential president to have chosen such a curious spiritual adviser. Back in March 2008, when Barack Obama was in the midst of his first presidential campaign, ABC News investigated the sermons of Chicago minister Jeremiah Wright, whose association with Obama and his wife stretched back to the 1980s. (Wright had officiated at their wedding and the baptism of their daughters.)

On September 16, 2001 – beating his San Francisco counterpart by a day – Wright, the minister of Trinity Church, delivered a sermon titled “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall,” in which, rather than denouncing the 9/11 attacks, he inveighed against the United States for a multitude of sins, including taking land from the Indians, invading Grenada and Panama, supporting (Israeli) “state terrorism” against the Palestinians, and even bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hence Wright concluded (quoting Malcolm X) that the September 11 attacks were really a case of “America’s chickens… coming home to roost.” In other words, we finally got what we deserved.

In a subsequent 2003 sermon on “Confusing God and Government,” Wright added to his bill of particulars against his country accusing the United States government of a long series of “lies.” Those alleged lies included the statement in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal (which its authors didn’t really believe, he contended), the government’s supposed advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attacks, the CIA being responsible for the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the government “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color,” and so on.

Along the way, Wright tossed in a line about “Uncle Clarence [Thomas]” (an allusion to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, implying that Justice Thomas was just a compliant “Uncle Tom”), and the “closeted Klan court” on which he served. After stressing the manner in which American authorities had gone out of their way to oppress black people in just about every conceivable manner, Wright concluded that people should not say “God Bless America,” but rather “God damn America.”

“That’s in the Bible,” he maintained.

Of course, as soon as word got out nationwide about Wright’s past remarks thanks to the ABC investigation, presidential aspirant Obama hastened to distance himself from them – but without explaining why he’d remained in the reverend’s church for years after the sermons. Initially, he affirmed to ABC reporter Charles Gibson that “words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it’s on the campaign stump or in the pulpit,” leading him to “reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue.”

At the same time, however, Obama downplayed Wright’s offense by adding, “It’s as if we took the five dumbest things that I’ve ever said or you’ve ever said in our lives and compressed them and put them out there,” which would “understandably” upset people – as if Wright, even in just the two publicized sermons, hadn’t said many more than five outrageous things, surely with knowledge, or rather malice, aforethought.

While Obama acknowledged being aware of Wright’s controversial comments and having personally heard “remarks that could be considered controversial” in Wright’s church, he denied having heard the particular inflammatory statementsthat were publicized during the campaign. When asked by Bill O’Reilly of Fox News whether Wright had said white people were bad, Obama denied it – even though in his own first book Dreams from my Father, Obama had quoted Wright as saying in a sermon, “It’s this world, where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where White folks’ greed runs a world in need.”

Finally, Obama added that if Wright’s remarks had come to his attention at the beginning of his presidential campaign, he would have resigned from Trinity Church, but since Wright was on the verge of retirement, and given his own strong ties to the church, he’d chosen to remain. Obama had actually begun distancing himself from Wright a year earlier, when he canceled his request that Wright deliver an invocation at the announcement of his campaign, fearing – according to the subsequent words of a spokesman – that the pastor’s remarks might be “used out of context” and force the church to defend itself.

Indeed, in December 2007, Obama named Wright to the African American Religious Leadership Committee of his campaign – only to release him when the controversy went public.

Subsequently, Obama sought to end the Wright controversy by delivering a speech on March 18, 2008, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia titled “A More Perfect Union.” During the 37-minute oration, Obama spoke of the divisions formed over generations by slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws, and the supposed reasons for the kinds of discussions and rhetoric used among blacks and whites in their own communities. While condemning Wright’s remarks, he sought to contextualize them by alluding to America’s “tragic history when it comes to race.” Obama did not disown Wright, whom he had labeled “anold uncle,”since doing so (he claimed) would amount to disowning the black community.

But let’s be honest. Neither Obama, his wife, nor Harris, being intelligent, educated individuals, can have believed any of the nonsensical claims of their ostensible spiritual advisers. Nor, for that matter, is it likely that the ministers believed those demagogic claims themselves. Despite his previously expressed contempt for white people, Wright retired to the largely white Chicago suburb of Tinsley Park, a town with a median family income of $103,902.

Why, then, did Obama and Harris remain attached to their respective congregations long after the ministers’ appalling claims came to national notice, distancing themselves only when they chose to run for the White House? Why not join a congregation headed by a more respectable man of the cloth?

I learned the answer to this conundrum years ago from someone well-schooled in the black political scene. Outrageous though Brown’s and Wright’s assertions were, they appealed to a certain less-informed segment of the black population, people more prone – just like other low-information voters of every race – to accept and even applaud irrational conspiracy theories. (The Trinity Church reportedly mushroomed in membership during Wright’s long tenure there.)

For Obama and Harris, much like many other Democrats today, stoking racial grievances and aligning themselves with self-interested community leaders who do so has become a convenient way to consolidate political support among the black community without pursuing or advocating policies that would genuinely benefit them. (By contrast, as journalist Jason Riley demonstrates in his book The Black Boom, black unemployment fell to a historic low during the Trump presidency, doubtless due in large measure to his pro-growth tax and regulatory policies.)

The only credible way to understand the continued attachment of Obama (until his election) and Harris to their respective “spiritual advisers” is as a matter of sheer political calculation, starting well before their runs for public office: they felt the need to prove to their core supporters that they were “really black.”

Black churches have played an enormously valuable role in American life ever since Reconstruction. Their clergy typically elevated their congregants’ souls, promoted the virtues of hard work, fidelity to family, and good citizenship, offered needed social services, and became honored leaders in the civil rights movement.

Had the Obamas and Harris wished to do so, they could easily have found respectable black churches, headed by ministers of intelligence and integrity, to attend. Their choice instead to patronize demagogic clergymen, whose sermons and public remarks would serve only to fortify rather than tamp down racial hatred and division, can be explained only as acts of pure political cynicism. In Harris’s case, this fact must be added to other reasons for doubting the good faith of her purported renunciation of the radical schemes she had devoutly advocated and pursued until her nomination to the vice-presidency.

Encouragingly, however, a recent New York Times story, after quoting Harris as claiming to have “long resisted attempts by others to categorize her identity,” observed, on the basis of interviews with “dozens of voters across the country – Black, White, Hispanic, Asian,” that they share her professedly “unburdened” racial attitude. Democratic supporters of Harris’s candidacy described the fact of her prospective election as the first “woman of color” to become the nation’s chief executive as just a “cherry on top” or “bonus” compared with their “most pressing concerns” regarding national policymaking and presidential competence.

Indeed, as the Times reports, voters’ focus on how the country’s next president would “make their lives better” rather than the office holder’s race or sex “may help explain why Black Americans are supporting” Donald Trump’s candidacy over Harris’s “in rising, if still small, numbers.”

Judging from these reports, it would appear that many Americans of all skin colors and ethnic backgrounds are ahead of their ostensible leaders when it comes to matters of race.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.