This article is a must-read: USA Today interview with Michael Eric Dyson on MLK, Obama

Dyson, a respected Georgetown professor, Baptist minister and TV commentator, makes some really good points about MLK and Obama in an interview with USA Today:

Q: You are a preacher yourself. Do you agree with the controversial comments the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has made about America?

A: Jeremiah Wright is one of the greatest prophetic preachers that black America has produced. What I find striking is that many white brothers and sisters miss the fact that there would be no black church if the white church wasn't political and racist in refusing to worship with us.

If YouTube were around when Martin Luther King Jr. preached to black churches, I'm afraid he would be as viciously condemned as Jeremiah Wright, for he said the following to black congregations: "America was founded on genocide, and a nation that is founded on genocide is destructive."

If you take a sermon out of context and extract those words, as people have unfortunately done with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, they end up with a caricature of a profoundly brilliant preacher whose nearly 40 years of ministry have now been unfortunately and unfairly reduced to a sound bite and a blip on the YouTube screen.

Q: Barack Obama's speech about race in Philadelphia was heralded by many as the most important on the subject since MLK. Do you agree?

A: I would say that that speech, along with Jesse Jackson's convention speech (in 1984), are two of the greatest. Throughout a long and vastly eloquent career, the Rev. Jesse Jackson has offered some of the most prophetic statements on race, but there's no question that Barack Obama's race speech was one of the great landmarks in American rhetoric and in African-American eloquence in the last half-century.

Q: You are an Obama supporter. What would his election mean to black Americans? To the rest of the country?

A: It would mean to America an extraordinarily vibrant and vital young man at the height of his powers able to conjure the best tradition of freedom, democracy and liberty. For African-American people, how amazing it would be to see a member of our race rise to the heights of power, to become the most powerful figure on the planet Earth.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-04-02-dyso...