On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the shooting that wounded former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, CNN hosted a town hall with President Barack Obama on the topic of guns in America. The live audience, at George Mason University, in Virginia, included people whom CNN had flown in: gun owners, gun sellers, survivors of shootings, and relatives of victims. The first three questions came from skeptics of greater gun control—the widow of a Navy SEAL, a rape survivor from Colorado, and a Republican sheriff running for Congress in Arizona. Then the Reverend Doctor Michael L. Pfleger, a Roman Catholic priest dressed in a black jacket and a white collar, took the microphone. “I happen to be from one of those cities where violence is not going down,” he said. “There’s been eleven killed in seven days in Chicago.”

For forty years, Pfleger has worked and lived at the Faith Community of St. Sabina, Chicago’s largest African-American Catholic church. His neighborhood, Auburn-Gresham, is ninety-eight per cent black. Pfleger is white. At sixty-six, he has heavy eyes and side-swept brown hair that has not changed much in color or style since the Johnson Administration. “It’s easier to get a gun in my neighborhood than it is a computer,” he told the President, adding, “For many years, nobody even cared about Chicago, because the violence is primarily black and brown.”

In Chicago, Pfleger is a showman of the first order. He usually preaches with an eight-piece band, a choir, and a troupe of dancers, all arrayed beneath a painting, twenty feet tall, of a young black Jesus wearing a white robe. His parishioners once nicknamed him Cecil B. De Pfleger. At a funeral that I attended for Vince Clark, his assistant and friend, Pfleger concluded the eulogy by putting on one of Clark’s signature fedoras and downing a shot of rum, the deceased’s favorite drink. He drew a standing ovation.

Obama greeted Pfleger warmly. “Father Mike, first of all, for those of you who don’t know him, has been working since before I moved to Chicago, and I was a twenty-three-year-old when I first met him. And somehow I aged, and he didn’t.” The President added, “Father Pfleger has done heroic work at St. Sabina Parish.”

Television viewers saw a gesture of kinship between a President and a priest, but their relationship has been fraught. Both are indebted to Saul Alinsky, the father of the Chicago school of community organizing, and when Obama was a state senator Pfleger was an important supporter. But in May, 2008, while Obama was campaigning against Hillary Clinton—and after the controversial racial statements of Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, had created an uproar—Pfleger disparaged Clinton in a raucous sermon, drawing a mock tear down his cheek and shouting, “I’m white! I’m entitled! There’s a black man stealing my show!” The clip went viral, and Obama condemned Pfleger’s “divisive, backward-looking rhetoric” and removed Pfleger’s endorsement from his site. Pfleger and Wright, who are close friends, commiserated about a shared predicament. “We were pawns in that game of trying to make sure he didn’t get elected,” Wright told me. Pfleger’s church was swamped with calls and e-mails; some called him a “white nigger.”

Recently, I asked Pfleger if he and the President have reconciled. “Yes and no,” he said. “I’ve never been to the White House while he’s been there.” They have occasional encounters, such as the town-hall event. “We see each other. We’re fine,” he said, but he suspects that, as long as Obama is in office, political aides would prefer that he kept his distance, and he does not press the point.

On CNN, Pfleger noted that most of the guns used in Chicago’s violence are bought legally but eventually get into the hands of criminals; he asked why the United States “can’t title guns just like cars,” in order to track their custody. Obama, who has tried unsuccessfully to persuade Congress to pass new gun laws, including a background check for private gun purchases, replied, “Issues like licensing, registration—that’s an area where there’s just not enough national consensus at this stage to even consider it.” He added, “We did a military exercise in Texas, and a whole bunch of folks were sure that this was the start of martial law.”

When I was a reporter on the city desk at the Chicago Tribune, in the nineteen-nineties, I often saw Pfleger leading demonstrations, and he struck me as a throwback to the sixties and seventies, a street priest of the era when the Chicago cleric Monsignor Jack Egan was marching in Selma and the Berrigan brothers—radical pacifist priests—were bringing street theatre to activism and invading draft-board offices. Later, though the Church’s reach and authority had remained unrivalled in Chicago, its left wing withdrew, as it did in much of America, from overt confrontations over social justice. Not Pfleger. He has a long rap sheet, including dozens of arrests for trespassing and disorderly conduct, resulting from protests against apartheid in South Africa, against the sale of drug paraphernalia, and, most recently, against guns. In 1991, he faced five years on felony charges. A study had found that Chicago’s minority communities contained five times the number of alcohol advertisements as white neighborhoods, and three times the number of tobacco ads. In a series of midnight raids, Pfleger and members of his church splattered red paint on billboards. He went to trial and was acquitted.

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In the past two years, the anger that ignited around issues of race, guns, and power—the moral drama that swept out of Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, New York, Cincinnati, and beyond—has expanded into something approaching a national renegotiation over fairness and wealth, over the legacies of racism and the true meaning of security. In this new American moment, Father Pfleger has turned out to be less a relic than a man ahead of his time. David Axelrod, the President’s former chief strategist, told me, “When Obama was running for the Senate, we polled a bunch of leaders in the black community to see who would be the most credible testimonials for radio ads. I was stunned to see that Mike Pfleger was the most popular figure in the African-American community.” Haki Madhubuti, a poet and book publisher on the South Side, said, “I’ve been involved with the black struggle for over fifty years. Mike Pfleger loves black people. He is a man of moral authority, and he is my brother—in many cases, even more than some of the so-called Negroes out here who call me their brother.” He went on, “This is important, because the Catholic Church has basically lost its moral authority, really. But he has been able to take St. Sabina and bring credibility back to that church.”

In recent months, Chicago has been consumed by a crisis around race and justice that imperils the political future of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who was Obama’s chief of staff during his first years in the White House. A dash-cam video released in November showed a white Chicago police officer killing a black teen-ager named Laquan McDonald. Police, responding to suspected car break-ins, had approached McDonald, and he was walking away, with a knife in his hand, when the officer, Jason Van Dyke, fired sixteen shots. The video contradicts police reports, suggesting an orchestrated coverup. The Justice Department is investigating the incident and the conduct of the Chicago police. The furor over the case exposed deep problems in the police department’s response to citizen complaints, its rare punishment of problematic officers, and City Hall’s tacit coöperation.