I don’t know if Jeremiah Wright ever met Martin Luther King Jr., but it seems to me he never really knew him.

Wright is the United Church of Christ minister whose fiery sermons have become a troubling matter for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, a longtime member of the congregation Wright led until recently. Snippets of the sermon in which the Chicago pastor shouts “God damn America” to condemn this nation’s treatment of blacks has gotten more airtime on national television than Britney Spears’ meltdown.

Obama denounced what he called Wright’s “profoundly distorted view of this country,” but that hasn’t put the matter to rest. Obama’s political enemies are trying to derail his White House campaign using guilt-by-association charges that so far haven’t found wide support among Americans.

And that’s as it should be.

Obama made his rejection of Wright’s words — and his own views on race — clear in a powerful address to the nation shortly after the controversy erupted. And he tried to put into perspective the anger that Wright and other blacks harbor.

“They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted,” Obama said in his March 18 speech. “What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination but rather how many men and women overcame the odds, how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.”

What’s even more remarkable to me is that a man of faith like Wright would come of age at a time when King was at the forefront of this nation’s most important civil rights and social consciousness movement and take so little away from his teachings.

King had far more reason to view this nation through hate-filled eyes — and to use his pulpit like Klansmen use their klavern, as an outlet for rage. His home and his brother’s home were bombed. He was harassed by the FBI, arrested and mistreated by Southern police, and stoned by anti-civil rights activists in Chicago.

Despite all of this, King sought reconciliation with whites, not revenge. He preached racial tolerance, not hatred.

When he was jailed while leading demonstrations in Birmingham, Ala., against that city’s Jim Crow practices, King wrote his now-famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which he tried to reason with the city’s white clergymen. By doing so, he hoped to build a broad biracial coalition for change.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

King, who was assassinated 40 years ago, wanted not only to rescue blacks from the brutal grip of racism that permeated this country in the 1960s, he tried mightily to build a bridge of understanding across this nation’s great racial divide. Wright’s anger — though understandable, given the lingering racism that afflicts the lives of far too many blacks — is not well channeled.

“The profound mistake of Rev. Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society,” Obama said. “It’s that he spoke as if our society was static, as if no progress has been made, as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”

In one of the darkest moments of his leadership of the civil rights struggle, King envisioned the kind of progress that has put Obama so close to the presidency.

“I like to believe that Birmingham will one day become a model in Southern race relations ... that the sins of a dark yesterday will be redeemed in the achievements of a bright tomorrow,” he wrote in his 1963 book, “Why We Can’t Wait.”