Black ministers yesterday lauded Sen. Barack Obama for confronting race in America and distancing himself from his former minister's incendiary comments, which have hurt his campaign.

Snippets of sermons from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the retired minister from Mr. Obama's church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, have been widely circulated on YouTube and cable news shows, and have caused some to question whether Mr. Obama shared Mr. Wright's beliefs.

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Among the most controversial were a sermon given after Sept. 11, 2001, in which Mr. Wright suggested that the United States brought the terrorist attacks on itself, and another in which he said blacks should damn America for continuing to mistreat them.

In his speech yesterday, Mr. Obama rejected Mr. Wright's divisive statements but still embraced the man who brought him to Christianity, officiated at his wedding, baptized his two daughters and inspired the title of his book "The Audacity of Hope."

The Rev. Jason A. Barr Jr., senior pastor of Macedonia Baptist Church in the Hill District, has heard Mr. Wright preach many times during the past 30 years.

"He can unsettle my sensibilities, but I understand the history of the black church," he said. "What I do discern with Jeremiah Wright is a lot of anger and he comes from a generation where there is a lot of anger."

Mr. Wright's fiery, in-your-face delivery can be off-putting to those unfamiliar with the black church tradition, Mr. Barr said.

"The people who are having the most problems with Jeremiah Wright are white people," he said. "Barack can say the same kind of things, but he's going to dress it up in different language and in a way that doesn't appear to be offensive.

"In a real sense, Obama's speech was just as indicting of white America as Jeremiah's speech [in those sermons]. It just wasn't delivered with the same passion or stridency," he said.

The Rev. Ronald Peters, the Henry Hillman associate professor of urban ministry and director of the Metro-Urban Institute at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, said the speech challenged society to move beyond division and race politics.

"If somebody can get you to ask the wrong question, the answer doesn't really matter," Dr. Peters said. In the aftermath of Mr. Wright's widely circulated remarks, people were asking the wrong questions, he said.

"The real challenges that we face are alienation in society, a war, a declining economy, people who have no jobs nor health coverage, overcrowded jails and poor schools."

The Rev. Harold Lewis, rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Shadyside, called Mr. Obama's speech the "quintessential statement about race in America today."

In the long run, he said, Mr. Wright may have done Mr. Obama and the country a favor. Throughout his campaign, he said, Mr. Obama has tried to transcend race.

"I think Bill Clinton made [race an issue] in [South Carolina] and I think Geraldine Ferraro's comments were shameless, and, ironically, someone black, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, made it a topic and it became the elephant in the living room that could no longer be ignored," Dr. Lewis said.

The speech put Mr. Wright's comments and racial strife in America in historic perspective, he said. Mr. Obama pointed out that the bitterness, bias and resentment in the black community isn't at all different from the bitterness felt by working class whites, who lost jobs that have been shipped overseas or, they believe, have been given to minorities under affirmative action, Dr. Lewis said.

The speech can't prevent Mr. Wright's rhetoric from surfacing again during the campaign, "but for reasonable people, if it continues to come up, it won't have the same effect after the speech that it had before," he said.

Dwight Hopkins, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, said "the whole generation that Rev. Wright represents is expressing what they call a righteous anger, the anger from the failed promises of America."

"The prophetic anger is toward expanding the democracy, expanding it so all citizens can walk through the door of opportunity," Dr. Hopkins said.

While the church where Mr. Wright was pastor is more Afrocentric and slightly more political than most black churches, "even conservative black churches talk about racism in a way that many whites would find wounding or offensive," said Gary Dorrien, a religion professor at Columbia University in New York.

"Most white Americans have a very limited capacity for dealing with black anger or acknowledging their own racial privileges," Dr. Dorrien said. "Wherever white people are dominant, whiteness is transparent to them. In black church communities, dealing with that problem is an every-week issue."