Let's just say he's been an associate of the Obamas for many years, because, to tell the truth, the Obamas are of the same mind as their pastor. Obama wanted a job as a community activist when he graduated Columbia, and he found that job in Chicago, rabble-rousing poor blacks in the ghetto to blame their ills on the government. When he graduated Harvard Law, he took a job as a civil rights lawyer, with the same rationale. Michelle wrote her senior thesis at Princeton on how blacks in that University weren't really socially equal, and how they had to "act white" to succeed.
Wright wasn't the major influence on these two -- he was simply the mirror of their political/social beliefs.
Obama has tried to disassociate himself from this guy to soften the outline of his past, but Wright's essentially a red herring for what a man who wants to be POTUS actually believes -- can't have the public actually focusing on that though, of course, so Wright was disinvited off the stage when Obama announced his run for the presidency, and now we find that Wright is "retiring" from his pastorship.
How very convenient.
Obama is running the scam of the century -- reframing his history and beliefs on the fly to fit any situation-- and millions of airheads who can't even conceive the meaning of the term "reverse racism" are falling for the scam.