Jeremiah Wright

About Jeremiah Wright

Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, Jr. (born September 22, 1941) is the former Senior Pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), a megachurch in Chicago with around 10,000 members. In early 2008, Wright retired after 36 years as the pastor of his congregation and no longer has daily responsibilities at the church. Following retirement, Wright's beliefs and manner of preaching were scrutinized when short segments from his sermons were publicized in connection with presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Obama addressed the issues raised by the Wright controversy in his speech entitled "A More Perfect Union" . To explain more fully his actual positions on these issues, Wright gave a speech before the NAACP on April 27, 2008, in which he stressed that he was not "divisive", but "descriptive", and that the black church experience, like black culture, was "different" but not "deficient".

His wife is Ramah Reed Wright, and he has four daughters, Janet Marie Moore, Jeri Lynne Wright, Nikol D. Reed and Jamila Nandi Wright, and one son, Nathan D. Reed.

Wright was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a racially mixed section called Germantown. His parents are Jeremiah Wright, Sr. (1909-2001), a Baptist minister who pastored Grace Baptist Church in Germantown, Philadelphia from 1938 to 1980, and Mary Elizabeth Henderson Wright, a school teacher who was the first black person to teach an academic subject at Roosevelt Junior High. She went on to be the first black person to teach at Germantown High and Girl's High, where she became the school's first black vice principal.