It's time for Obama to talk about Brown

In early December 1997, after eighteen months of successful damage control by the White House, the black community in Chicago finally learned of the anomalies in the death of Ron Brown.

Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce, Brown had dreamed of becoming America’s first black president from the time he was a little boy. And although he was, as Joe Biden might have put it, as “articulate and bright and clean” as Barack Obama, he never got the chance.

Brown died on April 3, 1996--twelve years ago today--when the USAF plane in which he and 34 others were flying crashed “inexplicably” into a Croatian mountainside near Dubrovnik.

As reported in the Chicago Independent Bulletin, a group of black pastors, led by Rev. Hiram Crawford of the Israel Methodist Community Church on Chicago’s south side, “blasted local black legislators for their apparent silence in this matter.”

The Bulletin article does not specify whether the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was among the pastors or whether then Illinois state senator Obama was among the blasted.

Given the proximity of Crawford’s south side church to Wright’s church and Obama’s senate district, however, the pair had to have at least known about the protest.

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