A year after then-candidate Barack Obama distanced himself from his controversial longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright thrilled hundreds of churchgoers this morning in Washington, giving a sermon holding up Obama as a spiritual symbol of possibility. People waited two hours to hear Wright preach the Sunday service at Howard University's Crampton Auditorium, a high-profile platform for clergy, black clergy in particular. Wright has preached the service, run by the school's Rankin Chapel, on the Sunday before Martin Luther King Day for the past five years and was booked months before the election, school officials said.
Howard students, alumnae and notables such as opera singer Jessye Norman and Morehouse College President Robert Michael Franklin Jr. attended the service, which overflowed into two other buildings. They came to see a man whose relationship with Obama became explosive, both among those who saw his words as racist and anti-American rhetoric and those livid with Obama for distancing himself from someone they saw as simply speaking truths about racism and war.