he told Love, “but I haven’t made the commitment I have to make as far as accepting Jesus Christ as my savior.”
Love would have liked to have Obama as a parishioner but wasn’t surprised to see him join Trinity United Church of Christ. Trinity was east of the Calumet Expressway, outside DCP territory. Joining a DCP church might have caused resentment among the other pastors. Also, Trinity’s pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., was more cosmopolitan and intellectual than the Baptist and Church of God in Christ preachers Obama dealt with in his daily work. Their roots were in Southern gospel services. Wright was from Philadelphia, read Greek and Latin, and had studied at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His mother held a Ph.D. in mathematics. He planted a FREE SOUTH AFRICA sign on his lawn and welcomed gays and lesbians. That was common among white churches on the North Side, but most black churches were so traditional they still preached the epistle lesson “Wives, submit to your husbands.”
Trinity’s programs—it offered classes in financial management and counseled parishioners who were drinking too much or going through divorces—were a model of how a church could serve its community. The congregation appealed to both Obama’s background and his aspirations. It was a magnet for well-educated strivers—the crowd W. E. B. DuBois had called the black community’s “Talented Tenth.” An offshoot of Congregationalism, the United Church of Christ had always occupied a high position on the social ladder. Trinity’s members were seen as “very middle-class, stable” by other Chicago blacks. Obama was too cool and cerebral to feel at home in a storefront church with a name like True Vine of Holiness Church of God in Christ or Greater True Love Missionary Baptist. An Afrocentric minister, Wright dressed in a kente-trimmed robe and flattered his flock by preaching that Jesus was African. He appealed to its nostalgia for the down-home with such vernacular sermons as “Ain’t Nobody Right but Us.” But he also published a brochure called “A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.” As so many pastors do, he preached against his flock’s greatest weakness.
Wright’s sermon “The Audacity to Hope” would inspire the title of Obama’s second book. The biblical passage that was the sermon’s subject, from 1 Samuel, was about Hannah, the barren wife of Elkanah, who continued to pray although God refused to bless her with children. But the message was about black America, which only advanced out of slavery, poverty, and ignorance because its people had hope.
“In order for a race despised because of its color to turn out a Martin Luther King and a Malcolm X, a Paul Giddings and a Pauli Murray, a James Baldwin and a Toni Morrison, and a preacher named Jesse, and in order to claim its lineage from a preacher named Jesus, somebody had to have the audacity to hope,” Wright growled. “In order for Martin to hang in there when God gave him a vision of America that one day would take its people as seriously as it had taken its politics and its military power; in order for him to hang in and keep working and keep on preaching even when all the black leaders turned against him because he had the courage to call the sin of Vietnam exactly what it was—an abomination before God—he had to have the audacity to hope.”
On the Sunday morning Wright delivered that sermon, Obama listened with tears streaming down his cheeks, never imagining that one day his name would have a place in that list of African-American pioneers.
By Obama’s third year in Chicago, the DCP was thriving. With more than a dozen churches paying dues, Obama was earning $27,500 a year and employing Owens as a full-time assistant. So he decided to pursue a project that reached beyond Altgeld and Roseland: school reform. It fit perfectly into his mission of community empowerment. There was a move afoot in Springfield to establish local school councils—boards composed of parents who would have a say in hiring and firing the principals at their children’s schools. The plan was adamantly opposed by Machine Democrats, who feared the councils would become training grounds for amateur politicians who might get the big idea of running for alderman. Obama organized a bus trip to the state capitol—another time-honored lobbying tactic—and conducted a teach-in on the three-hour ride down Interstate 55. The parents, who had grown up in Richard J. Daley’s segregated Chicago, were skeptical that any politician would hear them out.
“They’re