Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

Here we are 50 weeks that shaped America, week 11. Now, last week we were in 1998, and this week we stay in the fairly recent past as well.

Let's jump ahead 10 years to the spring of 2008 and the Democratic primary between Barack Obama and

Hillary Clinton.

By the time the race reached this time of year in March, Obama had been on a role.

He was winning lots of primaries.

He was amassing a lot of super

delegates. I don't know if you remember those. But Clinton was still making it interesting,

winning a few primaries here and there. And the press was certainly very interested in a narrative

that the race was still very much a toss-up, which may be why a certain story exploded into a

full-blown scandal in the second week of March.

ABC did a report that week in which they featured clips of Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago,

clips from sermons in which he said things like, not God bless America, God damn America.

And he talked about 9-11 as being a result of America's, quote,

chickens coming home to roost. Well, it turns out Reverend Wright was Barack Obama's long-time pastor.

He had married Barack and Michelle Obama. So for a week, this festered as a huge scandal.

Obama was kind of on his back foot, having to respond to it on the campaign trail and in the

news. And then on the following Tuesday, Obama scheduled an event in Philadelphia and delivered a

long speech called A More Perfect Union. In it, he denounced rights remarks, yes, but he also

took a big step back and talked about the history of

slavery, racism, and racial resentment in the United States. Now, the tidy narrative is that with

this speech, Obama put the right controversy behind him and went on to become the first black

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