Some of the extreme things he has said is the government created the HIV virus to harm African-Americans. And while today the idea seems crazy. Given US history it isn't exactly unthinkable. Americans tend to think their government would not do anything to harm it's own people. But history tells us otherwise. Reverand Wright may be tapping into the fear that could be based on history. I refer to the 'The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment'.

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all.

By the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis.

In 1990, a survey found that 10 percent of African Americans believed that the U.S. government created AIDS as a plot to exterminate blacks, and another 20 percent could not rule out the possibility that this might be true. As preposterous and paranoid as this may sound, at one time the Tuskegee experiment must have seemed equally farfetched.

It's an ugly chapter in American history.

CDC - NCHHSTP - Tuskegee Study - Timeline