Documents: Despite Obama’s 2008 claims, political relationship with Rev. Wright began as early as 1987

12:31 AM 10/16/2012
The Daily Caller

Letters signed by Barack Obama 25 years ago and obtained by The Daily Caller, show the future president approaching Chicago’s then-mayor Harold Washington in 1987 about a community organizing project whose advisory board would include his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright; the controversial leftist Catholic priest Father Michael Pfleger; and the brother of Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

When Obama later ran for president, he sought to distance himself from Rev. Wright, although the letters obtained by TheDC indicate a working relationship between the two men on a political level when the future president was just 26 years old.

They hint at a young Obama, before he entered Harvard Law School, growing in stature as a power broker among Chicago’s radical left and building an early example of a coalition that would grow in political power across the city.

(RELATED: Read the documents)

Obama, then the executive director of the Developing Communities Project, pushed Washington — Chicago’s first black mayor — for a meeting with his informal advisory group to discuss an endorsement of the community organizing project.

That advisory council included Illinois State Sen. Emil Jones, who would later become president of the Illinois Senate and allegedly accuse Hillary Clinton of being an “Uncle Tom,” during Obama’s 2008 presidential primary campaign against her.

Also on the list was the Commercial Club of Chicago’s John Ayers, brother to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

Left-wing Catholic priest Father Michael Pfleger, who would later attract attention for his associations with Louis Farrakhan and other anti-Semitic Palestinian partisans, was included as well. Pfleger took Wright under his wing in March 2008 after Obama, amid campaign controversy, publicly tried to distance himself from his pastor.

“Developing Communities Project (DCP) has brought together churches, blocks clubs and civic organizations to address some of the most pressing issues of the Far South Side – unemployment and low educational achievement among our youth,” Obama wrote to Mayor Washington on May 4, 1987.