Trinity United Church of Christ

Trinity United Church of Christ was founded in nineteen sixty-one on Chicago's South Side by twelve Black families in the United Church of Christ, an overwhelmingly white Protestant denomination. The church was small and conventional until nineteen seventy-two, when Jeremiah Wright became pastor. Wright embraced the motto Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian, rooted the church in Black liberation theology, and built the congregation from about two hundred sixty members to roughly eight thousand, making Trinity the largest UCC congregation in the country.

A twenty-six-year-old community organizer named Barack Obama walked the aisle here in the mid-nineteen eighties and stayed for twenty years. During the two thousand eight presidential campaign, excerpts of Wright's sermons drew intense national scrutiny, and Obama eventually resigned his membership. The church returned to its work on the South Side, where it remains one of the most influential Black congregations in Chicago.