Wright is Wrong Again

African Americans suffered, many even horrifically, in the past. But Rev. Wright was not one of them.

How do I know? It happens that, as a Philadelphian, I attended Central High School -- the same public school Jeremiah Wright attended from 1955 to 1959. He could have gone to an integrated neighborhood school, but he chose to go to Central, a virtually all-white school that attracts the most serious academic students in the city. The school then was about 80 percent Jewish and 95 percent white. The African American students, like all the others, were there on merit. Generally speaking, we came from lower- and middle-class backgrounds. Many of our parents had not received a formal education and we tended to live in row houses. In short, economically, we were roughly on par.

I attended Central a few years after Rev. Wright, so I did not know him personally. But I knew of him and I know where he used to live -- in a tree-lined neighborhood of large stone houses in Philadelphia's Germantown section. Rev. Wright's father was a prominent pastor and his mother was a teacher and later vice principal and disciplinarian of the Philadelphia High School for Girls, also a distinguished academic high school. Two of my acquaintances remember her as an intimidating and strict disciplinarian and excellent math teacher. In short, Rev. Wright had a comfortable upper-middle class upbringing. It was hardly the scene of poverty and indignity suggested by Sen. Obama to explain what he calls Wright's anger and what I describe as his hatred.

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