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Chapter Four

TRANSFORMATION AND IDENTITY

ROSELAND, HYDE PARK, AND KENYA

AUGUST 1985–AUGUST 1988

West of South Bend, the Indiana Toll Road slides southward as the shoreline of Lake Michigan draws near. The Indiana Dunes give way to Burns Harbor and its huge steel mill, which marks the eastern edge of the Calumet region’s industrial lakeshore. Gary and East Chicago offer a gritty industrial visage before the highway turns sharply north as the Illinois state line approaches. There the interstate becomes the Chicago Skyway, with the East Side, the Calumet River, and then South Chicago flashing by underneath the elevated roadway.

On Saturday afternoon, July 27, Barack Hussein Obama took the next exit heading for Hyde Park, turning northward on the broad boulevard of Stony Island Avenue. At 67th Street, Jackson Park appeared on the east side of the road, offering sunlit greenery all the way to 56th Street. Beenu Mahmood’s summer apartment at 5500 South Shore Drive was just a few blocks away.

Obama stopped at a pay phone but discovered he had miswritten Beenu’s number, and he called Sohale to get it right. Then Beenu met Barack in front of the tall luxury building, whose tenants had access to a heated swimming pool plus an on-site deli—“not exactly the setting I had envisioned for launching my career as selfless organizer of the people,” Barack wrote Genevieve a few days later. “The discordance only increased when we went to a fancy outdoor café downtown to feast on barbecued ribs.”

Beenu’s fiancée, Samia Ahad, was in Chicago too, and after a restful Sunday Barack drove south to Roseland on Monday morning, while Beenu headed to Sidley & Austin’s downtown office. At Holy Rosary’s rectory, on 113th Street across from the sprawling Palmer Park, Barack met his Calumet Community Religious Conference and Developing Communities Project coworkers. Mike Kruglik, he wrote Genevieve, “reminds me of the grumpy dwarf in Snow White” with “a thick beard and mustache. He speaks with the blunt, succinct clip of working class Chicago.” That first day “he barely acknowledged my presence” but as the week went on it became clear that Mike is “both competent and warm.” Adrienne Jackson was “prim,” “helpful and committed,” with “polished administrative skills,” and Obama quickly determined that she, like himself, had been “hired as much to give the staff a racial balance as she was for her abilities.” Of Jerry Kellman, Barack told Genevieve, “In his rumpled, messy way, he exhibits a real passion for justice and the concept of grassroots organizing. He speaks softly and is chronically late, but is real sharp in his analysis of power and politics, and is also disarmingly blunt and at times manipulative. A complicated man … but someone from whom I expect I can learn a few things.”

Obama also wrote that he “made full use of the amenities” that Beenu’s building offered “without guilt.” Samia was on her way to becoming a professionally acclaimed chef, and one evening she cooked a Pakistani dinner; Beenu’s friend Asif Agha joined them, even though the apartment had no dining table or chairs. Asif, like Beenu, had graduated from the famous Karachi Grammar School before receiving his undergraduate degree from Princeton University. He was the same age as Barack, and he had arrived in Hyde Park two years earlier to begin graduate study in languages reaching from Greek to Tibetan, under the auspices of the University of Chicago’s interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought. With Beenu about to return to Manhattan for his third year at Columbia Law School, Asif was another smart and outgoing member of the Pakistani diaspora that had provided Barack’s closest male friends for the past six years.

Tuesday morning Barack discovered that he had left his car lights on all night, and he needed a jump start so he could meet his day’s schedule. Wednesday morning the car again failed to start, and Beenu, Samia, and Asif all helped push it to get it going. A deeply embarrassed Barack confessed to Genevieve that “I appeared to have left my brains back in N.Y.” because “similar lapses have repeated themselves.” By the next weekend, he had signed a lease for a small $300-a-month studio apartment, #22-I, at 1440 East 52nd Street, in the heart of Hyde Park. He also told Genevieve about the “pang of envy and resentment” he felt toward Beenu’s “prestigious, well-paying and basically straightforward work as a corporate lawyer” and how it contrasted with his far more precarious existence.

Down in Roseland, Kellman’s first goal was to teach Obama community organizing’s defining centerpiece, the one-on-one interview, or what IAF traditionalists called “the relational meeting.” All Alinsky-style organizing recognized the cardinal principle that first “an organizer has to … listen—a lot.” According to Industrial Areas Foundation veteran and United Neighborhood Organization adviser Peter Martinez, the ability to listen is the “critical skill,” for it enables an organizer “to synergize all of the things that they’re experiencing so that they can incorporate that into their thinking in a way that when they talk with people, people can hear themselves coming back within the structure of what it is you’re suggesting might be done.” This, Martinez said, would keep people from feeling like the organizer is putting something “on top of them.”

Kellman knew the first month was “very crucial” with any new recruit, and particularly with someone who “had never encountered blue-collar and lower-class African Americans.” During Obama’s first few days, Jerry took him along so that Barack could watch a veteran organizer ask people to talk about their lives and to say what they thought were the community’s problems, listening especially for how that person’s own self-interest could motivate them to take an active part in DCP. Obama “struggled with this in the beginning,” Kellman recalled, as his connections with people “could be superficial,” and “I would challenge Barack to go deeper, to connect with their strongest longings.” But Jerry was too busy to do this full-time, and so “very quickly he was out on his own, just talking to people, day after day,” with the expectation that each week Barack could conduct between twenty and thirty such one-on-ones with pastors and parishioners from DCP’s Roman Catholic churches. Among the first pastors Obama called upon were Father Joe Bennett at St. John de la Salle, the church that Adrienne Jackson attended, Father Tom Kaminski at St. Helena of the Cross, and Father John Calicott at Holy Name of Mary—who had been so responsible for Jerry’s ad in Community Jobs. Bennett remembered Barack asking him “all kinds of questions,” and when he left Bennett thought “what a sharp, brilliant young man.”

Kellman also took Obama on a driving tour of the neighborhoods DCP and CCRC serviced. More than two decades later, Barack could spontaneously describe what he saw when Jerry drove east on 103rd Street past Trumbull Park before turning south on Torrence Avenue. “I can still remember the first time I saw a shuttered steel mill. It was late in the afternoon, and I took a drive with another organizer over to the old Wisconsin Steel plant on the southeast side of Chicago…. As we drove up … I saw a plant that was empty and rusty. And behind a chain-link fence, I saw weeds sprouting up through the concrete, and an old mangy cat running around. And I thought about all the good jobs it used to provide.” As Kellman had told him, “when a plant shuts down, it’s not just the workers who pay a price, it’s the whole community.”

The people of South Deering had been living for more than five years with what Obama saw that afternoon. “The mill is just like a ghost hanging over the whole community like a cloud,” one St. Kevin parishioner explained, indeed “the ghost of the Industrial Revolution,” another resident realized. “It just sat there and rotted before everyone’s eyes,” Father George Schopp explained, and a beautifully written article in the August issue of Chicago Magazine—one that would have made a memorable impression on any aspiring young writer who read it—described South Deering in the summer of 1985 as “the essence of the Rust Belt … along Torrence near Wisconsin Steel, the stores are empty; only a few taverns remain.”

Kellman also took Obama southward from Roseland, to show him the brick expanse of Altgeld Gardens, which was so distant from all the rest of Chicago apart from the huge Calumet Industrial Development (CID) landfill just to the east where all of the city’s garbage was dumped, and the Metropolitan Sanitary District’s 127 acres of “drying beds” for sewerage sludge just north across 130th Street. Neither the dump nor the sewer plant ever drew much attention, yet just to the northeast, near the older Paxton Landfill, as Chicago Magazine’s Jerry Sullivan wrote, “the greatest concentration of rare birds in Illinois” was spending the summer “squeezed between a garbage dump and a shit farm.”

Obscure scientific journals with names like Chemosphere occasionally published studies that detailed how the presence of airborne PCBs was “significantly higher” around “the Gardens” than anywhere else in Chicago, but just a week after Obama’s introductory tour of the area, an underground fire at an abandoned landfill abutting Paxton—a weird and unprecedented event—drew camera crews, reporters, and city officials to the Far South Side’s toxic wasteland. The chemical conflagration took more than twelve days to finally burn itself out, and region-wide press coverage featured UNO’s Mary Ellen Montes criticizing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for its lack of interest. City officials suggested blowing up the remaining metal drums with unknown contents, and UNO filed suit in federal court against the EPA in hopes of jarring federal officials into action.¹

In Roseland, more than a mile northwest of the underground fire, the only newsworthy event in the eyes of Chicago newspapers during Barack’s first weeks was the arrest of an initial suspect in a cold-blooded killing that was all too reminiscent of Ronald Nelson’s murder just five months earlier. One Saturday evening, shortly before Barack’s arrival, forty-nine-year-old factory foreman Enos Conard and his twenty-three-year-old son were manning an ice cream truck on 105th Street, hardly five blocks from Father Tom Kaminski’s St. Helena Church. Two men in their early thirties approached and ordered ice cream before one suddenly drew a gun. As Conard reached for his own weapon, the lead assailant fired a single fatal shot into Conard’s chest. Conard left behind a widow and four children, and a fellow vendor complained to reporters that “so many people have guns.”

A mortician from nearby Cedar Park Cemetery had drawn press attention by publicizing his offer of free funerals and burials to victims of Far South Side gun violence, and Conard’s family became the seventh to accept. In late August, police arrested L. C. Riley of Roseland as one of the assailants, and two years later both Riley and triggerman Willie Dixon, also from Roseland, were convicted of Conard’s murder. Dixon was sentenced to life in prison, and three decades later, Dixon remained in the same cellblock at Stateville Correctional Center as Nelson’s killer, Clarence Hayes.

Also in Roseland, although invisible to Kellman and Obama, ACORN’s Madeline Talbott had hired a new organizer, Ted Aranda, who had worked previously for a year under Greg Galluzzo at UNO, to revitalize ACORN’s Far South Side presence after months of inactivity following Steuart Pittman’s departure in mid-March 1985. Unlike CCRC’s and DCP’s church-based organizing, ACORN went block by block knocking on doors to get residents together to tackle community problems. Aranda explained years later that “most of the people that I got involved in the organization were always women.” The goal was to attract enough recruits to hold a community meeting, and Aranda’s Central American heritage was a significant asset, because his dark complexion led most Roseland residents to assume he was African American. “That’s not my identity” once “you look beyond my skin color,” Ted said, but he also had an advantage in Latino neighborhoods, where “they took me for a Hispanic.”

Aranda learned that Roseland residents were angry that the city had not provided them with garbage cans, and Pullman people were upset about a disco patronized by gang members. By early September, the Roseland group, COAR—Community Organized for Action & Reform—had drawn enough interest that Talbott convened a meeting at King Drive and 113th Street—i.e., Holy Rosary. In late October, the Pullman group, ERPCCO—East Roseland Pullman Concerned Citizens’ Organization—succeeded in closing the disco. But by the winter, Ted Aranda “became disenchanted with community organizing as a viable model for radical change,” and he resigned. By the standards of Alinsky-style organizing, Aranda’s months in Roseland had been successful, but as he explained years later, he “was more convinced than ever by the end of my short organizing stint that the political system itself was the problem.” And even though COAR and DCP were working in the very same neighborhood, “Barack Obama I never met at all.”²

DCP’s board met on the second Tuesday evening of each month, and at the August meeting in St. Helena’s basement, Kellman introduced Obama so the members could formally ratify his hiring. Virtually everyone was taken aback by how youthful he seemed. “My first thought was ‘Gee, he is really young,’ ” Loretta Augustine recalled years later, and she whispered that to Yvonne Lloyd sitting next to her. Yvonne’s first reaction was just like Loretta’s: “We had children older than he was.” The always outspoken Dan Lee said aloud what they all were thinking: “Whoa, this is a baby right here.” Obama smiled and acknowledged that he looked young, but once he spoke to them about himself and responded to their questions, he quickly won them over.

“He was very candid in his answers—straightforward,” Loretta remembered. “The impressive part was that he seemed to really understand what we were saying to him,” which she considered a marked change from both Mike and Jerry. “When we talked about certain things that he didn’t know about, he didn’t lie. He basically said, ‘You know what, I’m not really familiar with that. However, these are things that we can learn together.’ ” In short order, “we knew he was the right person for us,” Loretta recalled, and though “his honesty has a lot to do with it,” so did Barack’s appearance. “His color did make a difference to us, because it’s important for us and our children and everybody else to understand that people who look like us can do the job.”

The day after that meeting, Barack wrote the letter to Genevieve that described his trip from New York—and his unforgettable conversation with Bob Elia at the Fairway Inn—as well as his first weeks in Chicago. Genevieve had called Barack several days earlier, and he began by apologizing for “my phone manner. You know I dislike the telephone…. Combined with the lingering pain of separation, I’m sure I sounded guarded and stand-offish. I’m better with letters … (yes, more control).” Barack said that Jerry “has thrown me into” several neighborhoods, including Altgeld Gardens and Roseland, “without much … guidance” at all. “There are some established leaders with whom I can work, but I must say that for now, I’m pretty confused and feel my inexperience acutely.” He realized that having “a trustworthy face” worked to his advantage, as did “the dearth of educated young men in the area who haven’t gone into the corporate world.” Barack was pleased with the job, but questions remained. “For all the kindness and helpfulness the communities have offered me so far, I can see the thoughts running through their heads—‘another young do-gooder.’ I know it runs through mine.” So “doubts of my effectiveness in such a setting remain, but at least I feel like I’m in one of the best settings to really test my values that I could hope to find right now.”

Overall, “the work offers neither more nor less than I had anticipated,” which he found reassuring. He characterized Hyde Park as “a poor man’s Greenwich Village,” but he was pleased with his apartment and “the cheap prices in restaurants” though not “the disappointing newspapers.” But another contrast from New York was more striking. “Blacks seem more plentiful, and more importantly, seem to exude a sense of ownership, of comfortable dignity about who they are and where they live than do blacks” in New York. Chicago offered “a much more visible well-to-do and middle class black population who still live in a cohering black community,” and “black culture here is more closely rooted to the South; the neighborhoods have a down home feel…. Even the poorest black neighborhoods seem to have a stronger social fabric on which to rely than in NY” and “as a result, the young bucks, though no less surly and pained than their NY counterparts, appear to feel less need to constantly assert themselves against the respectable, and in particular, the white, world.” Obama wondered whether “these strands of self-confidence” were due to Mayor Harold Washington, whose “grizzled, handsome face shines out from many store front windows in the areas I work.”

Barack wrote that he already had swum in Lake Michigan, but confessed “the almost daily thump in my chest, pain and longing when I think of Manhattan, and the Pakistanis, and when I think of you.” He wrote out his address and phone number and told Genevieve, “I expect you to make use of this information frequently.” He enclosed a $130 check for money he owed her, and closed by telling her about his African sister who had canceled her trip to New York ten months earlier at the last minute: “Auma did get in touch with me and will be coming through Chicago in two weeks. Very excited.”³

By late summer 1985, Auma Obama was still in university at Heidelberg, but her closest German friend was now studying at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, a small town southeast of St. Louis, Missouri, which was far from Chicago. Auma traveled to Carbondale for two weeks, calling Barack once to update him on her plans, and then took a long train trip to Chicago, where he met her at the station and then cooked a South Asian dinner for them in his small apartment, where Auma would bunk on the living room couch. Obama was eager to have his sister tell him about their late father, and for the next ten days—interrupted only by his work—the siblings spoke for long hours about Barack Hussein Obama Sr. One day Auma went with him to work at Holy Rosary, where she met Jerry and several parish volunteers. Back in Hyde Park, one evening Auma went beyond her somewhat-edited comments about Obama Sr. and told her brother that he had been fortunate not to have grown up in his father’s household, particularly after Obama Sr. married Ruth. Auma showed family photos to Barack, but she also spoke about Obama Sr.’s drinking problem and the suffering his older children endured as a result of his financial irresponsibility, Roy Abon’go even more than her. Auma also mentioned “the old man’s” auto accidents and job-loss experiences, and told Barack, “I think he was basically a very lonely man.” Barack generally said little in response, but he took time to show Auma Chicago’s downtown sights and museums before the Carbondale friend and her boyfriend arrived in Chicago to take Auma with them to Wisconsin. Before she left, Auma urged Barack to visit her once she returned to Kenya.

Auma later remarked that the visit was “a very intense ten days together” and that “I was very conscious of trying to give him a full picture of who his father was.” In the immediate aftermath of her visit, Barack said little about the new and sad portrait Auma had painted of Obama Sr. to his coworkers or to his only regular outside-work acquaintance, Asif Agha. Barack and Asif had drinks and dinner almost every Thursday night at a restaurant on 55th Street in Hyde Park. “We hit it off … and we saw each other extremely regularly,” Agha recalled years later. “He didn’t know anyone” beyond DCP, and it was obvious that “the work was stressful, and he was discovering himself.” Barack did not talk much about DCP to Asif. “The only person he ever told me much about” was fellow Princeton graduate Mike Kruglik, whom Obama clearly liked. “He came up frequently.” Mostly the two twenty-four-year-olds talked about writing. “I used to write poetry, and he used to write short stories,” and each Thursday “we would share whatever we had been writing.” According to Asif, Barack “was very serious about writing” and regularly turned out short sketches of six to ten double-spaced typed pages, but there was no real suggestion that he would pursue writing as a career. These dinners were sometimes leavened with shots of tequila, giving Obama at least one regular outlet from the stresses and strains of being a real organizer.

A decade later, Obama offered a sketch of Auma’s visit that had her arriving at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, not Union Station, but that did describe her telling him about their father’s tragic latter years. “Where once I’d felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all of his mistakes.” Another decade later, during the first six months of his emergence as a nationally known figure, Obama several times opened up about his recollections of Auma’s visit. “Every man is either trying to live up to his father’s expectations or making up for his mistakes,” he told one questioner. “In some ways, I still chase after his ghost a little bit.”

In a long interview with radio journalist Dave Davies, Obama spoke more extensively about his father than at any other time in his life, stating that during Auma’s visit, he learned that his father had had “a very troubled life.” He understood that some of Obama Sr.’s employment problems had occurred “in part because he was somebody who was willing to speak out against corruption and nepotism” within the Kenyan government, but the portrait his mother had so insistently painted “of this very strong, powerful, imposing figure was suddenly balanced by this picture of a very tragic figure who had never been able to really pull all the pieces of his life together.” What Auma had told him was “a very disquieting revelation” that really “shook me up” and “forced me to grow up a little bit.” While “in some ways it was liberating” relative to the implicit expectations Ann’s glowing comments plus Obama Sr.’s own self-presentation to his ten-year-old son back in December 1971 had created, “it also made me question myself in all sorts of ways” because “you worry that there are elements of their character that have seeped into you … and you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to cope with those things,” particularly how Obama Sr. had behaved toward women and the offspring he sired.

Asked on camera by Oprah Winfrey about his father, Obama said, “he ended up having an alcoholism problem and ended up leading a fairly tragic life.” When a friend asked Barack to quickly compose some uplifting advice for young black men, Obama e-mailed that “none of us have control of the circumstances into which we are born” and that some will have to “confront the failings of our own parents.” But “your life is what you make it.” A few years later, Barack admitted that “part of my life has been a deliberate attempt to not repeat mistakes of my father,” whom he acknowledged “was an alcoholic” and “a womanizer.” Obama acknowledged that Auma had revealed how their father had “treated his family shabbily” and had lived “a very tragic life.” Even though Barack did not speak about this disquieting news to Asif, Mike, or Jerry, the long-term impact of Auma’s truth telling would be profound. “This was someone who made an awful lot of mistakes in his life, but at least I understand why.”⁴

In early September 1985, Chicago’s public school teachers went on a citywide strike. It was the third straight fall, and the eighth in eighteen years, that school days were lost to a labor dispute. The Chicago Teachers Union was demanding a 9 percent pay raise and the city had offered 3.5 percent; only 14 percent of union members had actually participated in the strike vote. Independent observers, such as education researcher Fred Hess, told reporters that both sides were being unreasonable, and a Chicago Sun-Times editorial described the union’s behavior as “unconscionable.” Quick intervention by Illinois governor James R. Thompson led to a 6 percent settlement and the loss of only two school days.

That fall, Jerry Kellman was still savoring the triumph he had experienced in early July when the Illinois legislature appropriated $500,000 to fund a computerized CCRC jobs bank that would assess unemployed workers’ skills and market their résumés to potential employers. The big pot of money had been obtained by Calumet City state representative Frank Giglio, a close friend of Fred Simari, the St. Victor parishioner who had been volunteering virtually full-time for Kellman, as well as Hazel Crest state senator Richard Kelly.

The half-million dollars would allow Governors State University (GSU) to hire twenty job-skill-assessment interviewers for ten months to create résumés for unemployed individuals. In news articles about this, Kellman said the program’s success was dependent upon “hundreds” of volunteers stepping forward and pressing employers to hire those workers. Once the funding was confirmed, Jerry made plans to shift Adrienne Jackson to help oversee the new program and began aiming for a massive public rally to kick off the enterprise. Before the end of August, he hired Sister Mary Bernstein, a forty-year-old Catholic nun and experienced organizer, and assigned her to St. Victor to handle CCRC’s Catholic parishes in the south suburbs. In tandem with Mike Kruglik and DCP, the immediate goal was to mobilize as large a crowd as possible for the kickoff rally Kellman scheduled for Monday evening, September 30, a day before the program office at GSU would open officially.

Kellman arranged for the two most powerful individuals in Illinois—Governor “Big Jim” Thompson and Archbishop Joseph Cardinal Bernardin—to speak at the event. Choirs from Joe Bennett’s St. John de la Salle and John Calicott’s Holy Name of Mary would perform, and the invaluable Fred Simari would preside as master of ceremonies. Also featured on the podium would be Lutheran bishop Paul E. Erickson, Methodist bishop Jesse DeWitt, Presbyterian executive Gary Skinner, and the towering young Maury Richards from United Steelworkers Local 1033, whom advance press reports described as “president of the state’s largest”—they might have added “remaining”—steel workers local.

Five days before the rally, the food processor Libby, McNeill & Libby announced that within the next year, it would close its Far South Side Chicago plant on 119th Street; that meant a loss of 450 good jobs. The Sunday before the rally, Leo Mahon praised his St. Victor parishioners like Fred Simari and Gloria Boyda for the time they gave to CCRC’s employment efforts and reminded his congregation that scripture teaches that “the desire for money is the root of all evil.”

On Monday evening, CCRC vice president Rev. Thomas Knutson hosted a pre-rally dinner for the almost two hundred program participants at his First Lutheran Church of Harvey before the 8:00 P.M. rally kicked off at nearby Thornton High School. A racially diverse crowd of more than a thousand, including a watchful Barack Obama and dozens of people from DCP’s Chicago parishes, filled the gymnasium as Fred introduced the speakers, including Loretta Augustine on behalf of DCP. After Maury Richards told the audience, “we’ve lost forty thousand jobs in the past few years,” the governor came forward and began by saying, “My name is Jim Thompson. My job is jobs.” He went on to declare that “jobs are more important than mental health or law enforcement, because unless people are working and paying taxes, there won’t be any resources to pay for those services.”

But the evening’s real star was Cardinal Joe Bernardin, who denounced racism and called for “cultural and ethnic unity in the Calumet region.” He noted how unemployment “cuts across racial and ethnic lines,” and he promised that “the church is here to help you” while stressing that “the real leadership must come from the laity.” Sounding at times like Leo Mahon, Bernardin declared that “every person has a right to a decent home” and vowed that “the cycle of poverty can be broken and community decline can be turned around.” The archbishop pledged further church support for CCRC, and the rally ended with a white female parishioner from Hazel Crest asking the crowd: “Do you want to be part of a community that controls its future?” The audience responded with lengthy applause.

For Obama, the rally and the bus ride back to Holy Rosary provided an opportunity to make some new acquaintances, such as Cathy Askew, who had sat quietly through their introductory meeting at St. Helena. He was also able to talk more with the dynamic Dan Lee, DCP’s board president, and with Dan’s fellow deacon at St. Catherine, the vigorous Tommy West. For Jerry, Fred, Gloria, and most of all Leo Mahon, the rally was a wonderful culmination of their efforts that reached back over five years. Harvey Lutheran pastor Tom Knutson described the rally as “a tremendous experience for the local community.”

Now CCRC’s challenge was to get the new “Regional Employment Network” (REN) up and running. GSU planned to have some skills assessors ready to begin interviewing unemployed individuals by early November, but in early October news broke that an Allis-Chalmers engine plant and an Atlantic-Richfield facility would soon be closing, costing up to nine hundred more good jobs.

Kellman privately had been told a few days before Bernardin’s appearance that the national Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CHD) would be awarding CCRC an additional $40,000 to support the REN program, with an event on Saturday, October 26, marking the public announcement. Obama joined Kellman at the ceremony, and a story in Monday’s Chicago Tribune marked his first appearance in the Chicago press: “Barack Obama, who works with the Calumet Community Religious Conference, said its grant will be used to assess skills of unemployed workers and to aid them in finding jobs.” The first actual assessment sessions kicked off at St. Victor in Calumet City on November 14 and 15, attracting eighty-six applicants ranging in age from nineteen to sixty-seven years old. Six skills assessors prepared a fourteen-page information sheet on each applicant, and Adrienne Jackson wishfully told a local reporter, “There are hundreds of employers out there who need people.” She predicted that REN would interview more than thirteen thousand job seekers during the next eight months.⁵

Looming most dauntingly was the future of LTV’s East Side Republic Steel plant, where the thirty-three-hundred-person workforce included twenty-four hundred members of Maury Richards’s United Steelworkers Local 1033. Since midsummer, LTV executives had been demanding tax abatements from Governor Thompson and Mayor Harold Washington; the city had responded with proposed investment incentives, as the East Side plant, just like Wisconsin and South Works before it, desperately needed significant modernization if there was any chance of long-term survival. LTV had more than $2 billion in debt, had lost more than $64 million in 1984, and its losses for 1985 could be triple that figure. Richards told reporters the only way to save aging U.S steel plants was a commitment from the federal government.

Frank Lumpkin told a congressional subcommittee that the underlying issue was more fundamental: “jobs or income is the basic human right, the right to survive.” Throughout the late summer of 1985, Frank had been writing to Chicago’s daily papers, saying that unemployed workers “are fed up with programs for training and retraining when jobs don’t exist and with job search programs that only provide employment for those who run them.” His bottom-line demand was clear: “the federal government must take over and run these mills—nationalize them—for the good of our country and our community.”

In the Chicago Tribune, Mary Schmich profiled former Local 65 president Don Stazak, who now worked as toll collector on a nearby interstate rather than for U.S. Steel. “I thought of the company as a father,” he told Schmich. In early November, Maury Richards and his 1033 colleagues decided that their situation was so dire that previously full-time officers like the local’s president would return to work in the mill rather than draw union paychecks.⁶

In late September, Obama got news that was almost as disquieting as Auma’s revelations about their father: Genevieve wrote to confess that she had become sexually involved with Sohale Siddiqi. Soon after Barack’s late July departure for Chicago, Genevieve had flown to San Francisco to visit a friend before returning to New York on August 14. That evening she and Sohale “went to a Bonnie Raitt concert together and did ecstasy, that’s what did it,” she later recounted. Her own struggles with alcohol had not improved in the wake of Barack leaving and with the beginning of another school year at PS 133, yet Barack thanked her for “your sweet letter” when he wrote back to her. “The news of Sohale and you did hurt … in part because I was the last to know—the Pakis were sounding awfully stiff the last time I spoke to them. But mainly the hurt was a final tremor of all the mixed-up pain I had been feeling before we parted—watching something I valued more than you may know pass from what is, what might still be, to what was.”

But Barack’s first two months in Chicago leavened his heartache. “It seems that we have both ended up where we need to be at this stage in our lives,” so while “the pain of your absence is real, and won’t lessen without more time, I feel no regrets about the way things have turned out.” He ended by saying he hoped to get back to New York sometime in the months ahead. “All my love—Barack.” Reflecting back years later on what had transpired, Genevieve mused that Barack was probably “very disappointed with me,” for given Siddiqi’s dismissive attitude toward life, Barack no doubt “thought Sohale was an empty shell for a man.”

In Chicago, Barack’s work environs offered him better opportunities for self-reflection than his once-a-week reimmersion in the easy camaraderie of the Pakistani diaspora when he met up with Asif Agha. Jerry Kellman’s invaluable sidekick Fred Simari saw Barack at Holy Rosary almost every weekday that fall. Simari recalled Obama as “quiet, laid back,” “extremely bright,” and as someone who “seemed like he really studied everything.” Father George Schopp had the same impression: Barack was in “learning mode,” just “watching and reflecting.” In addition to his daily work discussions with Jerry, Mike, and Mary Bernstein, Barack also interacted with Holy Rosary secretary Bonnie Nitsche and the parish’s most committed volunteer, Betty Garrett. “We took him as our son from jump street,” Betty said of herself and Bonnie. The two regularly pestered Barack and Holy Rosary’s forty-one-year-old pastor, Bill Stenzel, about their cigarette smoking, which was allowed indoors only in the rectory’s kitchen. This addiction brought Barack and Bill together more than would otherwise have been the case, but that fall Obama also visited every week with St. Helena’s forty-five-year-old Father Tom Kaminski. Like Leo Mahon and George Schopp, Bill and Tom were both progressive and challenging priests, men whose religious faith accorded far more closely with Joe Bernardin’s Catholicism than with the hierarchical, top-down archdiocese that John Patrick Cody had ruled. Bonnie Nitsche and her husband Wally thought that Bill’s strong but gentle spirit made Holy Rosary’s small multiethnic congregation into “a microcosm” of what a community would be if you “got rid of prejudices.” The rectory “was like one big office,” Bill remembered, with the organizers on one side of the first floor, and Bill and Bonnie on the other.

From the beginning, Bonnie thought Barack “was more together, more poised” than his older coworkers, and Bill recalled that Barack became “very curious” about religious faith while suddenly being surrounded by so many committed Catholics. “He had a curiosity about what’s this phenomenon” and a “very respectful” attitude toward faith. Obama asked if he could attend Sunday mass, and Bill can recall him sitting with the congregation. Jerry Kellman was about to convert to Catholicism, and he understood how “the churches we dealt with were extended families,” ones that exposed Obama to “a broad sense of religion.” For Barack “his sense of church and his sense of God became very much a community experience,” and “it was a very formative period” for him, Jerry explained. Obama often drank coffee with Tom Kaminski, and they talked “about all sorts of things,” including family, but Fred Simari believes that Obama’s time in the kitchen at Holy Rosary had the most impact. “Bill Stenzel spent a tremendous amount of time with Barack,” and “some of that spiritual-type formation” that Bill exuded “wore off on Barack, there’s no doubt.”

That fall, Barack continued his one-on-one conversations with pastors like Bob Klonowski of Lebanon Lutheran in Hegewisch and Catholic parishioners like Loretta Augustine at her home west of Altgeld Gardens. “It was surprising how receptive people were to talking with him,” Loretta remembered. Tom Kaminski noted “what a terrific listener he was” and watched as Barack’s acceptance spread. At the three-month mark, Obama’s $10,000 trainee salary was doubled to $20,000, the apprentice director salary that Kellman had advertised five months earlier.⁷

Meanwhile the warfare between Harold Washington and the city council majority opposed to him, led by South Chicago’s 10th Ward Alderman Ed Vrdolyak, was constantly in the headlines. Washington had accepted UNO’s invitation to speak at its annual fund-raising banquet on October 30, where the mayor would present a thank-you award to the archdiocesan Campaign for Human Development (CHD). Attendees were greeted outside by picketers led by South Deering Improvement Association president Foster Milhouse, who told reporters, “We want UNO out of our neighborhood, and we want Father Schopp and UNO out of St. Kevin’s.” The far right’s complaints continued with a letter to the editor of the Daily Calumet denouncing CCRC and UNO and calling for concerned citizens to “rid their communities of these revolutionaries.” An anti-UNO rally at the Calumet City American Legion hall featured Foster Milhouse and attracted a crowd of about a hundred, and another letter to the Daily Cal thanking the paper for its coverage warned of the philosophy of the “anti-God idolizer of Lucifer” Saul Alinsky.

With UNO adding affiliates in other Hispanic neighborhoods, Mary Ellen Montes chaired an evening meeting that drew a crowd of two thousand. Mayor Washington, Governor Thompson, and powerful Illinois House speaker Michael J. Madigan all joined Lena on stage, but afterward she denounced Thompson’s refusal to commit $6 million for a new West Side technical institute. UNO and other Southeast Side groups continued to fight against any expansion of the area’s overflowing landfills, but with city officials all too aware of Chicago’s looming garbage crisis, Washington’s aides maintained an ominous silence on the issue. City officials had finally acknowledged that the well water samples from the isolated Maryland Manor neighborhood south of Altgeld Gardens “definitely contain cyanide,” but the projected cost of $460,000 to extend water and sewer lines to those taxpayers’ homes postponed any remedial action, even though the Tribune and the Chicago Defender ran prominent news stories about the problem. More than a year would pass before the work was carried out.⁸

In mid-November Obama was finally able to write a long letter to Phil Boerner. “My humblest apologies for the lack of communication these past months. Work has taken up much of my time,” but now “things have begun to settle into coherence of late.” Barack described Chicago for Phil, calling it “a handsome town” with “wide streets, lush parks,” and “Lake Michigan forming its whole east side.” Although “it’s a big city with big city problems, the scale and impact of the place is nothing like NY, mainly because of its dispersion, lack of congestion.” Chicagoans are “not as uptight, neurotic, as Manhattanites,” and “you still see country in a lot of folks’ ways,” but “to a much greater degree than NY, the various tribes remain discrete…. Of course, the most pertinent division here is that between the black tribe and the white tribe. The friction doesn’t appear to be any greater than in NY, but it’s more manifest since there’s a black mayor in power and a white City Council. And the races are spatially very separate; where I work, in the South Side, you go ten miles in any direction and will not see a single white face” excepting in Hyde Park, a considerable exaggeration on Obama’s part. “But generally the dictum holds fast—separate and unequal.”

Obama said his work took him to differing neighborhoods, with residents’ concerns ranging from sanitation complaints to job-training programs. “In either situation, I walk into a room and make promises I hope they can help me keep. They generally trust me, despite the fact that they’ve seen earnest young men pass through here before, expecting to change the world and eventually succumbing to the lure of a corporate office. And in a short time, I’ve learned to care for them very much and want to do everything I can for them. It’s tough though. Lots of driving, lots of hours on the phone trying to break through lethargy, lots of dull meetings. Lots of frustration when you see a 43% drop out rate in the public schools and don’t know where to begin denting that figure. But about 5% of the time, you see something happen—a shy housewife standing up to a bumbling official, or the sudden sound of hope in the voice of a grizzled old man that gives a hint of the possibilities, of people taking hold of their lives, working together to bring about a small justice. And it’s that possibility that keeps you going through all the trenchwork.”

But Obama’s most vivid image was the one Kellman had shown him three months earlier in South Deering: “closed down mills lie blanched and still as dinosaur fossils. We’ve been talking to some key unions about the possibility of working with them to keep the last major mill open, but it’s owned by LTV,” which “wants to close as soon as possible to garner the tax loss,” Barack told Phil. He ended the letter by saying his apartment was “a comfortable studio near the lake” and that “since I often work at night, I usually reserve the morning to myself for running, reading and writing.” He enclosed a draft of a short story dealing with the black church and asked Phil to mark it up and return it. “I live in mortal fear of Chicago winters,” and “I miss NY and the people in it … Love, Barack.”

The letter documented several significant turning points in Barack’s new life. Most important of all was the emotional attachment Barack had already developed toward the people on whose behalf he was working: I “care for them very much and want to do everything I can for them.” The second was that now, more than three months in, Obama was much more comfortable with his weekday work. As his close friend Asif Agha remembered, “in the beginning, he was enormously frustrated because the whole scene was completely chaotic,” but in “struggling with those frustrations,” Asif witnessed Barack “coming together around them as a purposeful person.” Kellman was focused on the jobs bank and his initial contacts with Maury Richards’s Local 1033 at LTV Republic Steel, but Obama’s workday involved interactions with DCP’s core participants—Loretta Augustine and Yvonne Lloyd from Golden Gate and Eden Green, down near Altgeld Gardens, Dan Lee and Cathy Askew from St. Catherine of Genoa in struggling West Pullman, Betty Garrett and Tom Kaminski from central Roseland, and Marlene Dillard from the solidly working-class London Towne Homes well to the east—which presented daily challenges that were mundane as well as relentlessly unceasing.

Yet as close as Obama became with Loretta and Dan, as well as to white priests like Bill Stenzel and Tom Kaminski, he had no closer a bond with anyone than Cathy Askew, the white single mother of two “hapa” daughters—half black, half white. Askew was a small-town Indiana native whose family had shunned her after she married an African American who fathered her two daughters, then disappeared entirely from their lives. Cathy taught school at St. Catherine’s, and one of her daughters, Stephanie, had a congenital heart condition that left her less than fully robust. Early on Obama told Cathy about his own father and mother. As a result, “I don’t think of him as really like African American. He’s African, and he’s American,” she said. As he later wrote, Barack also recognized “the easy parallels between my own mother and Cathy, and between myself and Cathy’s daughters, such sweet and pretty girls whose lives were so much more difficult than mine had ever been.”

Having lived with a black man, Cathy saw Barack as something else: “he didn’t look African American to me. I was really glad to find out he was a hybrid, because my kids are hybrids.” From the beginning, she thought Barack “was gawky … very quiet … very thoughtful,” she remembered. In those early months, he “was at a loss for a long time, I think, over where to focus…. I saw him doing a lot of listening to people and trying to pull things out of people. There was no focus. Everybody seemed like they wanted something different and nobody had anything in common.”

Early that winter, Obama organized a meeting at St. Catherine for area residents to voice their unhappiness about police responsiveness to the district commander. Hardly a dozen people showed up, and the commander was a no-show too. Years later, Obama would repeatedly recall that evening. Loretta had been there, as well as Cathy. “He got frustrated. I think he almost quit once,” Cathy said. Obama would recount even his core members saying they were tired and ready to give up, and “I was pretty depressed.” As he remembered, across from the church, in an empty lot, two boys were tossing stones at an abandoned building. “Those boys reminded me of me…. What’s going to happen to those boys if we quit?”⁹

At the beginning of December, Chicago’s steel industry was back in the news. Eighteen months earlier, Mayor Washington had appointed a Task Force on Steel to study the industry’s future, and its report demonstrated that the entire effort had been a waste of time and energy. Early on Frank Lumpkin and his Save Our Jobs Committee colleagues had hoped the task force would show that their ideas about government investment could revive one or more Southeast Side mills. Washington sympathized with these hopes, but the task force brushed aside Lumpkin and his sympathizers. Its primary academic consultant, Ann R. Markusen, asserted that “Reaganomics and industrial leadership (or lack of it) deserve the major blame” for the plant closings and added that Chicago was “a city in deep, long-term trouble.” She also acknowledged that “national and international forces beyond the grasp of local governments are important determinants of steel job loss.” Task force member David Ranney stressed that in retrospect the “idea that the steel industry in Chicago might recover appeared absurd” and that what the Far South Side experienced during the 1980s “highlights the limits of local electoral politics.”¹⁰

During November and December, Maury Richards from USW Local 1033 and Jerry Kellman from CCRC met four times with Chicago’s economic development commissioner, Rob Mier, one of Washington’s most influential aides, to determine how they should react to the loss of a thousand or more jobs if there were even a partial shutdown of LTV’s East Side mill. Mier knew that this would be “a severe blow” to the city because a majority of the steelworkers lived in Chicago, and the mill paid $18 million a year in city and state taxes while contributing $300 million to the city’s economy. The union, CCRC, and Mier agreed that everything possible had to be done to convince LTV to invest $250 million to rebuild a blast furnace and acquire a continuous caster, or alternatively to sell the aging plant to a company that would. “Most of the discussants seem to realize that neither of these outcomes may be possible,” Mier told the mayor. Noting that LTV held defense contracts worth $1.3 billion, Mier reported that “both CCRC and Local 1033 are committed to coordinating a corporate campaign against LTV if LTV refuses” to invest or sell.

Obama, Loretta Augustine, and Marlene Dillard went with Jerry to one or more of his meetings with 1033’s officers and city officials, though no one except Jerry spoke on CCRC’s behalf. On December 19 Kellman and Richards sent a formal letter to the mayor, copied to Mier, asking Washington to “provide the leadership,” in coordination with local congressmen, that would pull together a package of city, state, and federal financial incentives for LTV. The Christmas holidays stalled these actions, but in the press, LTV called its Chicago mill “more vulnerable” than its remaining ones in Ohio and cited its massive $2.6 billion debt burden, intimating that bankruptcy was far likelier than any investment of capital in the East Side plant.¹¹

Over the holidays, Barack took off almost two weeks, flying first to Washington, D.C., to meet his—and Auma’s—older brother Roy Abon’go, who had married an African American Peace Corps volunteer named Mary. Before leaving Chicago, Barack told Tom Kaminski how apprehensive he was about seeing Roy, and the visit got off to a bad start when Roy failed to meet him at the airport. When Barack telephoned, Roy said a marital argument meant that Barack should find a hotel room rather than stay with Roy. The two brothers did have a long dinner that night, plus breakfast in the morning, before Barack headed to New York, where he would rendezvous with his mother and sister and where Beenu Mahmood and Hasan Chandoo were happy to offer free lodging and renew their close acquaintances.

Maya was now a tenth grader at Punahou, and Ann was still living in Honolulu, trying to finish her Ph.D. dissertation. Two months earlier, the Internal Revenue Service had levied a $17,600 assessment against her for unpaid taxes on her 1979 and 1980 income from USAID contractor DAI, but Ann would leave the levy unpaid for years to come. Barack ended up spending more time with Hasan, Beenu, and Wahid Hamid than with his mother and sister, and though he did not see Genevieve in person, a letter he wrote to her soon after New Year’s recounted an emotional phone conversation they had had, albeit one she would be unable to recall in any detail years later.

Hard guy that I am, I’ve managed to stay embittered and sullen towards you for a whole week and a half. But that’s about it. I won’t try to analyze whether what I did was correct or incorrect, right or wrong, for you or for me. I do know that I had to vent my feelings fully; otherwise I would have choked off something important inside me, permanently. Had to get my head and heart in better communication with each other, in better balance. The consensus seems to be that the whole episode was good for me. My mother and Maya enjoyed comforting me for a change. Asif, my linguist friend in Chicago, says I need the humility.

Whatever had transpired, Barack wrote, “reminded me of the rare, fleeting nature of things. My own dispensability,” and “perhaps I’m more apt to believe now something you seem to have understood better than I—when happiness presents itself … grab it with both hands.” But “I still feel some frustration at the fact that you seemed to have wrapped me up in a neat package in our conversations. Stiff, routinized, controlled. The man in the grey flannel suit. A stock figure. It felt like you had forgotten who I was.”

Friends, Barack wrote, “recognize who you are … even when you’re acting out of character,” as Barack apparently had. “I hope I haven’t lost that with you. I hope I remain as complicated and confusing and various and surprising in your mind as you are in mine.” He closed by saying that “phone calls will still be tough on me for the time being, but cards or letters are welcome.” He hoped to get back to New York in the summer to see the child whom Wahid and his wife Filly were expecting, and “hopefully we can spend some time more productively than this last time out. Some fun, maybe. Laughter. Ambivalently yours. But w/ unconditional love—Barack.”

More than six months since they had parted, the depth of Barack’s emotional tie to Genevieve remained powerful indeed.¹²

While Obama was away, two major developments upended Chicago politics. The Chicago Sun-Times gave Harold Washington a stinker of a Christmas morning gift by revealing that an undercover FBI informant, working at the behest of the local U.S. attorney, had made cash payoffs to several city officials and aldermen. As the story played out over the coming weeks, Michael Burnett, aka Michael Raymond, had been introduced to his targets by a “friendly, easy-going” young lobbyist, Raymond Akers, whose car sported a personalized license tag: LNDFLL. Akers was the city council lobbyist for Waste Management Incorporated (WMI), which had 1985 revenues totaling $1.63 billion.

Four months earlier two administration appointees had accepted as much as $10,000 in cash from Burnett, and on December 20, FBI agents had confronted 9th Ward alderman Perry Hutchinson at his Roseland home. On two occasions in early October, Hutchinson had accepted a total of $17,200 from Akers in a lakefront apartment near Chicago’s Navy Pier. Unbeknownst to Hutchinson, FBI agents in the apartment next door filmed the encounters with a camera inserted through the common wall. A week later Hutchinson accepted another $5,000 from Akers in Roseland. All told, Hutchinson had received $28,500, and he told journalists, “I figured as long as the guy was dumb enough to give me all of that money, I’d be smart enough to take it.” Hutchinson claimed he used $8,500 to hire an additional staffer and had distributed the remaining $20,000 to schools and community groups in Roseland. Reporters were unable to identify any recipients.

Soon it was revealed that a second black alderman and mayoral supporter, Clifford Kelley, who had led a city council effort to discredit a top WMI competitor, had accepted cash bribes too. Then news broke that city corporation counsel James Montgomery allegedly had been aware of at least one of these payoffs months before Washington first learned of the bribes on Christmas morning. The Chicago Tribune described this as “a widening scandal that some believe could cost [Washington] re-election” a year later. Montgomery quickly resigned, but several weeks later a Tribune story headlined “Lobbyist Paid for City Aide’s Vacation” showed that a year earlier, Akers had given a travel agent $4,200 in cash to cover a weeklong trip to Acapulco for Montgomery and his family. No charges ensued.

Independent white voters who loathed Chicago’s long history of public corruption had been essential to Washington’s 1983 triumph, and they would be needed for his reelection in 1987. Ironically, as the controversy built, mayoral opponents like Ed Vrdolyak remained largely silent. One opposing alderman explained to the Tribune: “If we do nothing, the mayor might ultimately bury himself.”

Despite Washington’s huge popularity among African Americans, his first three years in office had been anything but successful. Some months earlier, Chicago Magazine—not a bastion of Vrdolyak supporters—had published a thoroughly negative report on Washington’s record to date. He “has been miserably inept at communicating his ideas to the city” and “his administration is plagued by excessive disorganization,” Chicago reported. Washington had “gained 30 pounds” and looked “physically run-down.” One black activist who had championed his election back in 1983, Lu Palmer, complained that Washington was relying upon “apolitical technocrats” who were “barricaded on the fifth floor of City Hall. The people aren’t part of it.” The magazine also said Washington “may be the least powerful Chicago mayor in recent history” and singled out the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) as a “full-fledged disaster.” Politically, Washington’s agenda was “to a great extent, stalled,” primarily because Vrdolyak’s city council majority kept the mayor largely “on the defensive.”

When the bribery scandal broke, Washington’s administration was already besieged. Yet a federal appeals court ruling in August 1984 that black and Hispanic voters were so underrepresented by the city’s existing ward map that the Voting Rights Act was being violated seemed to provide an opening for Washington, because new elections could overturn Vrdolyak’s 29–21 council majority. In June 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the appellate finding, and the case was sent to a district judge who instructed the opposing lawyers to redraw seven wards, all of which were represented by Washington opponents. On December 30, the court ordered new elections in those wards to be held on March 18. In the interim, Washington announced that Judson H. Miner, the forty-four-year-old civil rights lawyer who had litigated the redistricting challenge, would be his new corporation counsel.¹³

But on the Far South Side, the fate of LTV Republic’s East Side steel mill was still in question. In early January, a front-page Wall Street Journal story described the company’s prospects as “dim at best,” and a week later Crain’s Chicago Business published a long report that the Daily Calumet said “sent shock waves through the Southeast Side.” Jerry Kellman told the local paper that LTV should put the mill up for sale, but Maury Richards said that the 1033 union understood that the East Side facility was “losing between $5 million and $8 million every month.”

In mid-January Obama attended a three-day training event in Milwaukee for minority organizers sponsored by the Campaign for Human Development and the Industrial Areas Foundation. Soon after he returned, Chicago headlines confirmed Jerry and Maury’s fears: “LTV Announces 775 Layoffs” plus the closing of the East Side mill’s most modern blast furnace. Kellman told reporters that Illinois officials had “written off the steel industry” and GSU’s Regional Employment Network immediately scheduled four days of skills-assessment interviews at Local 1033’s office in an effort to find new jobs for laid-off workers. Yet everything Frank Lumpkin and his colleagues had experienced in the years since Wisconsin Steel’s sudden closure told them how scarce jobs were on the Far South Side and in the south suburbs.

Loretta Augustine and Yvonne Lloyd encouraged Barack to focus on the sprawling Altgeld Gardens public housing project, just east of where they lived. They introduced him to their pastor at Our Lady of the Gardens, Father Dominic Carmon, and Obama also met with parents whose children attended Our Lady’s small Catholic grade school. He was introduced to Dr. Alma Jones, the feisty principal of Carver Primary School and its adjoining Wheatley Child-Parent Center, virtually all of whose students came from within Altgeld. Jones was immediately impressed with Barack. “Talking to him, he was so much older than he was. It was like talking to your peers rather than somebody the age of your children.” In a community where few people could imagine meaningful change, Jones stood out as an important voice of encouragement for a young organizer venturing into unfamiliar territory.

Despite Altgeld residents’ letters to Mayor Washington complaining about “heavy drug traffic” seven days a week, no city residents were more completely ignored and forgotten than the tenants of Altgeld Gardens. Dr. Gloria Jackson Bacon, who almost single-handedly provided medical care to Altgeld residents for decades, explained that by the 1980s “many of them did not venture outside. Many of them lived almost like insular lives inside of Altgeld.” Bacon recalled others speaking pejoratively of “ ‘those people out there, those people out there,’ and I’d say, ‘These are your people.’ ” Loretta Augustine remembered once taking some Altgeld schoolchildren to the zoo and realizing that “one or two of the kids had never been downtown before.” Loretta referred to Lake Michigan, and “the kid responded, ‘Chicago has a lake?’ ” As Alma Jones told one reporter who visited her school, “Altgeld Gardens is an isolated, enclosed island. We have no stores, no jobs and one traffic signal.”¹⁴

Barack continued his weekly get-togethers with Asif Agha, but his social life was so meager that Kellman and Mary Bernstein discussed ways to help him meet more people his own age. “He felt to me like a nephew,” Mary remembered, with Barack calling her “Sistah,” and she calling him simply “Obama.” In her eyes, Barack “was always serious,” indeed “driven,” but above all “he was very solitary.” Bernstein recalled that Barack once asked her, “How am I going to get a date?” working in Roseland and spending his evenings at meetings or visiting DCP parishioners. “You don’t want to date any of the women I know,” Mary humorously replied. “They’re all old, and they’re all nuns.”

Loretta Augustine, Yvonne Lloyd, and Nadyne Griffin were all looking out for the young man’s welfare. “I felt very protective, very motherly towards him,” Loretta later told journalist Sasha Abramsky. “We were worried that he wasn’t eating enough,” Yvonne Lloyd recalled. “We were always trying to make him eat more.” Loretta could see that Barack was “very focused” and “very serious,” and more than once she suggested he lighten up. “You shouldn’t be so somber and uptight and serious all the time.” Obama later said he was indeed “very serious about the work that I was trying to do.” Marlene Dillard’s strong interest in jobs had her spending as much time with Barack as anyone, and though she found him “very dynamic” and “very sincere,” his maturity meant she “never looked at him as a son.” But Nadyne Griffin felt just like Loretta did: “He was just like a son to me,” and Tom Kaminski found the church ladies’ solicitude heartwarming: “Everyone wanted to be his mother, everyone thought she was his mother,” and “I felt like an uncle.”

Barack stayed in touch through regular long-distance phone calls with old friends like Hasan Chandoo, Wahid Hamid, and Andy Roth, and in late February, he sent Andy a long letter that was similar to the one he had written Phil Boerner three months earlier:

As I may have told you on the phone, when you’re alone in a new city, the fullness or emptiness of the mailbox can set the tone for the entire day.

Work continues to kick my ass. A lot of responsibility has been dumped on me: I’m to organize an area of about 70,000–100,000 folks and bring the local churches and unions into the action. I confront the standard stuff: the turpitude of established leaders (i.e. aldermen, preachers); the lassitude of the masses; the “we’ve seen middle class folks come in here before and make promises and ain’t nothin’ happened” attitude, which is true; my own inhibitions about playing for power and manipulating folks, even when it’s for what I perceive to be their own good. At least once a day I think about what I’m doing out here, and think about the pleasures of the upwardly mobile (though still liberal Democratic) lifestyle, and consider chucking all this. Fortunately, one of two things invariably snap me out of my brooding: 1) I see such squalor or degradation or corruption going on that I get damned angry and pour the energy into work; or 2) I see a sign of progress—one of my leaders, a shy housewife, dressing down some evasive bureaucrat, or a young man who’s unemployed volunteering to help distribute some flyers—and the small spark will keep me rolling for a whole day or two.

Who would have ever believed that I’d be the sucker who’d believed all that crap we talked about in the Oxy cooler and keep on believing despite all the evidence to the contrary. Speaking of contrary, I’m in such a state for lack of female companionship, but that will require a whole separate exegesis.

A few weeks later, Barack sent a postcard to his brother Roy and his wife Mary, and a longer message to Phil Boerner. He thanked Phil for his encouraging comments about the short story Barack had sent him, but he emphasized what a “discouraging time” he was having:

Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time for writing (stories or letters) lately, what with this work continuing to kick my ass. Experienced some serious discouragement these past three weeks, mainly because of the incredible amount of time to get even the smallest concrete gain. Still, I’m putting my head down and plan to work through my frustrations for at least another year. By that time I should have a fairly good perspective on both the possibilities and limitations of the work.¹⁵

No one in mid-1980s Chicagoland had anywhere near the degree of success Jerry Kellman did in winning major grants from the Campaign for Human Development, the Woods Fund, the Joyce Foundation, and Tom Joyce’s small but always-pioneering Claretian Social Development Fund. Grant makers regularly visited the organizations they supported, and by early 1986, Jerry had been introducing Barack as a new mainstay in DCP’s Far South Side organizing work. Archdiocesan CHD staffers Ken Brucks and Mary Yu met Barack through Kellman, but the two most influential funders Barack got to know that winter were Woods Fund director Jean Rudd and program officer Ken Rolling. Jean had become Woods’s first staffer five years earlier. Ken, like Greg Galluzzo, was a former Catholic priest who had spent more than half a dozen years in organizing before joining Jean at Woods in 1985. Woods’s commitment to organizing was reaching full flower just as Jerry and then Barack arrived on the scene. As Jean deeply believed, “community organizing is intended to be transformational for ‘ordinary’ people. Through its training and actions, people recognize their worthiness, their legitimacy, their place in a democracy, their power, their voice.” That was the work, and the teaching, that she and Ken wanted to support and champion.

Decades later Jean remembered when Jerry first brought Barack to meet them. “In that first meeting, I was very, very impressed…. He was very, very reflective, very candid … very winningly … humble about what he had to catch up on” about organizing and about Chicago. “I believe I said to my husband, ‘I’ve really met the most amazing person today.’ ” But most of Woods’s actual contact with DCP, CCRC, and other grantees like Madeline Talbott’s ACORN was handled by Ken Rolling, who was even more impressed upon first meeting Barack. “I’ve just met the first African American president,” he told his wife Rochelle Davis that evening. Ken said much the same thing to CHD staffer Sharon Jacobson, who a quarter century later remembered it just as Ken and Rochelle had: “I want you to watch this guy, Sharon. He’s going to be president of the United States one day.”

Jacobson played a leading role in CHD’s grant making in Chicago, and Renee Brereton, based in Washington, was the crucial staffer for allocating national funds. She had directed $42,000 to CCRC in 1984, $40,000 in 1985, and by early 1986, Brereton and Jacobson were overseeing that year’s grant to DCP. She gave DCP’s application 90 out of a possible 100 points, citing as the only shortcoming the confusing organizational overlap between CCRC and DCP. Brereton believed that “DCP is expanding its power base through coalition work with unions, and public housing projects,” and she was impressed with the leadership training Kellman had done with parishioners from DCP’s Catholic churches. “The staff is strong with a commitment to hiring minority staff,” and she recommended at least another $30,000.

Sharon Jacobson oversaw the local Chicago committee that ratified Brereton’s recommendations, and she noted DCP’s intent to develop an employment training and placement program for residents of Altgeld Gardens as well as its desire to improve Far South Side public schools. She wrote that “the large geographical area” DCP sought to cover “is too broad” and threatened to dissipate DCP’s efforts rather than focus them, but DCP was Chicagoland’s “strongest organizing project. In the past year, we have witnessed thorough leadership training, successful multi-issue campaigns, and widespread grassroots community support,” and $33,000 was committed to DCP.

Jacobson also wrote to Brereton that Obama’s attendance at the CHD-IAF minority organizer training in Milwaukee had proven notable; out of twenty attendees, he and one other “had demonstrated the most potential,” leading Jacobson and Mary Yu to recommend that Barack be invited to attend IAF’s premier training event, a ten-day course that took place each July at Mount St. Mary’s College in the Santa Monica Mountains above Los Angeles. CHD would pay Barack’s $500 tuition, $400 room and board, and also cover his travel expenses.¹⁶

On March 18, special elections were held in the seven redrawn city council wards. Washington’s backers captured two seats from Vrdolyak’s 29–21 majority, but two other pro-Washington candidates fell short of the necessary 50 percent plus 1 and were forced into runoff contests to be held on April 29. Victory was assured for the Washington supporter in the black-majority 15th Ward, but in the 26th Ward, two Puerto Rican candidates, one of whom was sponsored by powerful Vrdolyak ally Richard Mell, faced off amid a cascade of election-misconduct allegations. The Chicago Tribune labeled the 26th Ward contest “the most closely watched election in Chicago history,” with both Washington and Vrdolyak campaigning there two days before the rematch, and Washington’s young election lawyer, Tom Johnson, a 1975 graduate of Harvard Law School, keeping a close eye on the proceedings. When Washington’s ally, Luis Gutierrez, prevailed by a surprisingly comfortable margin of more than 850 votes, the mayor attained a 25–25 city council split, putting him in position to cast a decisive tie-breaking vote—at least until the next regularly scheduled city elections just one year later.

While most of Chicago focused on the Washington vs. Vrdolyak contest, another vote—by United Steelworkers members on a dramatically concessionary new contract with LTV—was building to its own climax on April 4. One week earlier, on March 28—the sixth anniversary of Wisconsin Steel’s closure—Harold Washington met with Frank Lumpkin’s Save Our Jobs Committee. At LTV Republic’s East Side mill, Maury Richards campaigned against the proposed 9 percent reduction in workers’ hourly wage rates and benefits. But even though 1033’s members voted against the new contract 1,254 to 750, well over 60 percent of LTV’s nineteen thousand steelworkers in other states approved it.¹⁷

As winter turned to spring, DCP began to focus on the forlorn state of the Far South Side’s public parks, a visible example of basic city services being denied to black and Hispanic neighborhoods but not white ones. The city’s parks were overseen by a quasi-independent entity, the Chicago Park District (CPD), which remained a notorious nesting ground for white Democratic ward organization loyalists, even after Washington’s three years in office. Two energetic DCP members—Nadyne Griffin, who had a special interest in Robichaux Park, up at 95th Street, and Eva Sturgies, who lived across the street from Smith Park, at 99th and Princeton—had brought this issue to Obama’s attention. DCP began distributing leaflets in the solidly middle-class blocks around Smith Park, encouraging the community to attend a meeting to address the problem. Aletha Strong Gibson, a college graduate homemaker in her early thirties who lived one block south on Princeton, knew that Smith Park “really wasn’t very safe or conducive for young children” like her six- and four-year-olds. Gibson went to the meeting and spoke up. Afterward Barack “said he’d like to come meet with me about doing some more work on the parks issue,” and following that one-on-one Aletha became a key recruit.

One day early that spring, when Barack was visiting the handsome old Monadnock Building in the downtown Loop, which housed many small progressive organizations, he stopped into the offices of the ten-year-old Friends of the Parks (FOP) and introduced himself to John Owens, a twenty-nine-year-old army veteran who had become FOP’s community planning director a year earlier after finishing a degree in urban geography at Chicago State University. Owens was immediately impressed with Obama. “This guy sounds like he’s president of the country already,” Owens recounted just four years later. “He had an air of authority and a presence that made you want to listen.” Barack talked about the discriminatory treatment accorded Far South Side parks, and Owens explained some of what he knew about “the ins and outs of the Chicago Park District.” Barack had “all kinds of personality,” and “we sort of clicked,” Owens explained.

Barack invited John down to Roseland, and they worked together to start compiling a list of parks the CPD was ignoring: Abbott Park, east of the Dan Ryan Expressway; West Pullman Park, on Princeton Avenue; Carver Park, down in Altgeld Gardens; and the huge Palmer Park, just north of Holy Rosary. One afternoon in Palmer Park, gunshots sounded nearby, and they both ducked behind parked cars. Owen recalled Obama saying, “ ‘You hear that? Whoa!’ ” and remembers thinking, “ ‘Well, he hasn’t been around here very long.’ ”

John and Barack hit it off. Some evenings they went to music clubs together. “I could see he was somebody that I could learn a lot from,” said Owens, and Obama also could learn from Owens, a native of the South Side’s middle-class Chatham neighborhood, about his life experiences as a black man who had grown up in Chicago. Johnnie—as he was often called—quickly became Barack’s first truly close black male friend, at least since the cosmopolitan Eric Moore at Oxy. Before the end of April, Barack asked Johnnie to attend the upcoming July IAF training in Los Angeles, and Owens readily agreed.¹⁸

In early May, Jerry Kellman’s CCRC got another major grant: $30,000 from the Joyce Foundation to support Mike Kruglik’s organizing work in Chicago’s south suburbs. But Kellman also used his connections within Chicago’s Catholic archdiocese to re-create, in somewhat different form, Tom Joyce and Leo Mahon’s original vision of CCRC as an organization straddling the Illinois–Indiana state line to encompass the entire Calumet industrial region. Jerry had been thinking about restarting work in Indiana even when Barack first arrived, but underlying that was a fundamental truth that Leo and Tom had experienced and that Greg Galluzzo best articulated in explaining that “what was joined together industrially and geographically is not together politically.”

Chicagoans, especially black Chicagoans, who were deeply proud of their first black mayor, identified with their city. Residents of the south suburbs, many of whom had fled Chicago in earlier years, focused on their own townships and the larger overlay of Cook County, not the city’s government. Indiana residents paid little attention to Chicago politics and even less to Illinois. These regional identities were more significant than Leo and Tom’s belief in a “Calumet community.” Also the diocese of Gary, in northwest Indiana, was organizationally separate from the Chicago archdiocese, with independent financial access to local and national CHD resources.

By early May, Kellman had successfully attained funding from Father Tom Joyce’s Claretian Social Development Fund for what he called the “Northwest Indiana Organizing Project,” and thanks to Bishop Wilton Gregory, one of Cardinal Bernardin’s deputies, Bernardin requested that Norbert F. Gaughan, who had become bishop of Gary in October 1984, meet with Gregory and Kellman so that CCRC’s work could be reborn east of the Illinois state line. Gaughan agreed to commit his own diocesan funds to the effort, and sent a letter to the pastors of all his parishes, encouraging them to work with Kellman, who began establishing ties with existing groups such as East Chicago’s United Citizens Organization. But neither UCO nor the larger Calumet Project for Industrial Jobs, with a predominant union focus, used the church-based organizing model Kellman had deployed so successfully in creating DCP. Kellman’s and Kruglik’s Illinois efforts outside Chicago would be given a new, regionally distinct identity as the South Suburban Action Conference (SSAC), with Jerry as its executive director until his shift to Gary was complete. Everyone agreed that all three pieces—Barack’s, Mike’s, and Jerry’s—would flourish better on their own than under the old “Calumet Community” rubric.

By late spring 1986, it was clear that Frank Lumpkin’s cynical complaint that CCRC’s Regional Employment Network only created employment opportunities for its own employees was true. One headline announced that “Regional Employment Network Reports Initial Success,” but, as the article made clear, the organization’s definition of “success” was its data bank of 1,350 job seekers, not actual job offers. Governors State University appealed to state officials for an additional $375,000 to extend the program past the summer of 1986, but the request received no support. Obama would later remember REN as “a bust” that failed to find work for even one applicant. The savvy Fred Simari recalled how “there was an elaborate system to assess their needs,” but it “was all smoke and mirrors, the whole thing.”¹⁹

By mid-April, Barack had been working for several months to broaden DCP’s outreach with Altgeld Gardens residents, but with only modest success. Then one lady, Callie Smith, handed him an ad she had seen in April 14’s Chicago Sun-Times. “Specification No. 8632” sought bids for the “Removal of Ceiling and Pipe Insulation Containing Asbestos at the Management Office Building of Altgeld Gardens, 940 E. 132nd Street.” The bids were due April 30, and specifics could be obtained at Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) headquarters in the Loop. Potentially cancer-causing asbestos had been discovered in December 1985, but Altgeld was not the only CHA property with such a problem: asbestos had just been uncovered in two apartments at the Ida B. Wells Extension Homes in the Bronzeville neighborhood. Linda Randle, an organizer at the nearby Centers for New Horizons and who lived in another part of Wells, told her friend Martha Allen, who wrote for the Community Renewal Society’s (CRS) monthly Chicago Reporter, about the asbestos. Allen arranged for laboratory testing of a sample from Wells, and the results were shocking: “to find that much amosite [a type of asbestos] there is astounding,” one scientist stated.

Obama met Randle at a CRS-hosted meeting of organizers, and when Linda mentioned the discovery at Wells, Barack pulled out the Sun-Times ad and said, “the same thing is happening in Altgeld.” Linda and Barack agreed to be in touch, and back in Altgeld, Callie Smith called CHA manager Walter Williams to ask if the CHA had determined whether or not asbestos was present throughout the hundreds of homes as well as in the management office. In his own later telling, Obama accompanied Callie to a meeting where Williams said the CHA had checked and none had been found. Smith and Obama understandably doubted that assertion and sought documentation to back up Williams’s claim.

On May 9, several residents met with Gaylene Domer, executive assistant to CHA executive director Zirl Smith, to request immediate, independent testing of Altgeld residential buildings and public release of the results. They also asked that Smith appear at an Altgeld community meeting to respond to residents’ concerns. After a week with no response, Callie Smith, Loretta Augustine, and two other members of the Altgeld Developing Communities Project sent a Western Union Mailgram to Smith, with a copy to Mayor Washington. Citing the May 9 meeting, followed by CHA’s silence, their message repeated the two requests and asked for a written response within five days. On May 20 they wrote to Washington on CCRC letterhead and asked his staff to intervene.

Coincidentally or not, that same day CHA contacted a testing firm, and within twenty-four hours two vacant apartments and two boiler rooms were surveyed, with asbestos readily apparent in three of the four locations. Although most of the asbestos pipe insulation was in good condition, the inspectors warned that in residences it “is highly subject to damage” and should be removed whenever apartments become vacant.

That same day a Developing Communites Project press release noted the Altgeld complaints and said residents would visit CHA’s downtown headquarters the next morning. The Chicago Defender quoted liberally from Callie Smith’s statements in the release: “Basically we feel like we’ve been lied to and given the run-around,” she said. “We think it’s typical of the arrogance of the CHA to remove hazardous materials from its own offices without even checking to see if residents have the same problems.” WBBM Newsradio 780 began covering the story from daybreak onward.

Obama had booked a yellow school bus to take his community members to CHA headquarters downtown, and he had multiple copies of an outline of the residents’ demands. But only a modest number of people, including Callie Smith and Hazel Johnson of PCR, plus several children, showed up for the trip. When they arrived, they were brusquely told that Zirl Smith was unavailable, but the presence of one or more TV crews motivated officials to promise that testing would move ahead and that Smith would attend a community meeting in Altgeld on June 9.

Obama, in his own account nine years later, gave the CHA visit an oddly outsized importance, writing that “I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way,” since it had suggested “what might be possible and therefore spurs you on. That bus ride kept me going, I think. Maybe it still does.” He also wrote that only eight people, rather than “about 20 Altgeld residents” as reported in the press, made up his group.

On the next night’s 10:00 P.M. WBBM Channel 2 newscast, reporter Walter Jacobson recounted his inability to get anyone from CHA to respond to residents’ complaints about what “literally may be a question of life or death.” Instead, “the public affairs director of the CHA is getting her lunch while the people who live in the CHA continue getting poisoned by asbestos.” It was powerful television.

A CHA press release the next day said the issue was “resolved” and that test results demonstrated “no asbestos exposure danger.” Zirl Smith appeared on WBBM’s 10:00 P.M. newscast and insisted that “residents know we’re here to serve them” and that “we are good managers: we feel a responsibility to our residents.” Three days later, WBBM revealed on its 6:00 P.M. show that it had paid for testing at both Altgeld and Wells and had gotten dire results. “This is definitely a threat to human health, a threat to the health of the people who live there,” a medical expert told viewers. “It’s a situation that should be corrected as soon as possible.”

Within an hour, CHA ordered emergency inspections, and on WBBM’s 10:00 P.M. news, 2nd Ward alderman Bobby Rush called CHA’s behavior “criminal.” When the CHA’s inspectors finally began work at Altgeld on June 4, they found “many samples of exposed asbestos,” Walter Jacobson told WBBM viewers. While that was taking place, Obama and three Altgeld residents—Hazel Johnson, Evangeline “Vangie” Irving, and Cleonia Graham—were at City Hall trying to invite Washington to attend the Altgeld community meeting. With TV cameras rolling, the four were sent to an impromptu meeting in a tiny room with Washington’s city council floor leader, 4th Ward alderman Tim Evans. “We are sincere about having this taken care of,” Vangie Irving explained. Hazel Johnson added, as journalists looked on: “We’re asking the mayor to save our children and ourselves. We don’t have faith in promises from CHA management. With the mayor’s support, I think we’ll get some action.”

Evans promised to take their concerns to the mayor, and Obama was mentioned in the next day’s Sun-Times and Defender. The former identified him as a “community organizer,” but Evans would remember having the impression Barack was “related to someone who actually resides in CHA because that was the way he was relating to these people, like a member of their family. It was clear they had talked before that meeting about who would deal with what aspect of the plight” and when one participant got nervous, “this young man got up and sat next to the person who was supposed to speak…. ‘Let Alderman Evans know what concerns you have.’ He was not there to impose himself on them, he was there to facilitate their discussions with the so-called powers that be.”²⁰

The next day Zirl Smith made a bad situation worse by admitting to a city council committee that CHA had discovered the asbestos six months earlier and then blaming residents “for disturbing the asbestos-covered pipes, creating a crisis themselves.” Bobby Rush responded that it was “very irresponsible” to allege that tenants were purposely “exposing themselves and their children to possible cancer,” and after the session, Smith hid in a men’s room to avoid WBBM reporter Jim Avila and his camera crew.

On Monday night, Avila as well as crews from two other TV stations were waiting at Our Lady of the Gardens school gymnasium for Smith’s 6:30 P.M. appearance. Callie Smith and others had gone door to door in Altgeld, encouraging residents to turn out, and approximately seven hundred people jammed into the “hot, steamy” gym. But by 7:30 P.M. there was no sign of Smith, and the crowd was “boiling over” when he finally arrived, seventy-five minutes late. Once he was at the podium, moderator Callie Smith asked him, “Do you have a plan to remove the asbestos that’s in our homes?” and handed him the microphone. In the Tribune’s description of the scene, “Smith shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know. We have not completed all the tests on the apartments. As soon as this is complete, we will start the abatement process.’ ”

That response infuriated the crowd, and shouts of “No” drowned him out. Obama had told Callie and her colleague Vangie Irving, “Try not to let the director hog the microphone,” but Smith resumed his answer—“We’ve started in Altgeld and we’re going from apartment to apartment to determine the severity of the asbestos.” Callie, standing to Smith’s left, reached her right hand to take the microphone from Smith, who parried her with his left hand—“We will install an abatement plan that you’ll be—excuse me, excuse me” and sought to retain the mike as the crowd began chanting, “Take it away, right away.”

Then Vangie Irving reached in, grasped it, and handed it to Callie. As she did so, Smith stood up and slowly walked out. The uproar grew, an older man in the crowd collapsed, and the meeting was over. Outside, Smith had his driver call for an ambulance as some residents chanted, “No more rent.” Smith told reporters, “I’m perfectly willing to meet with them, but I can’t under these circumstances.” Tuesday’s Sun-Times reported Smith saying “that ‘people who do not live in Altgeld’ were behind the meeting.”

As Smith’s black Ford LTD pulled away, Obama called his volunteers together and told Callie that he had messed up and should have coached her on how to deal with Smith and the microphone. Dan Lee told Barack not to blame himself, that they had prepared for every possibility except Smith physically commandeering the mike. Adrienne Jackson believed the crowd had felt empowered by what had happened, that “they had stood up to somebody,” and she viewed the evening “as a success.” The 10:00 P.M. newscasts offered a different verdict on the meeting. WBBM’s coverage said the residents had kept Smith from speaking; WMAQ’s Carol Marin said the moderators had not allowed Smith to use the microphone, and so “Smith walked out.”

Barack was more disconsolate than he should have been, and when he got back to his Hyde Park apartment, he called Johnnie Owens, who had turned down Barack’s invitation to attend. “He was certainly very clearly upset over what had happened,” Owens recalled. “He sounded angry at himself … and felt there was more that he could have done to prepare the leadership and sort of anticipate the problems that occurred.” To everyone else, the Altgeld meeting was a blip in the daily news cycle, and coverage of CHA’s testing and abatement work—the asbestos was far worse at Ida B. Wells than at Altgeld—continued throughout the summer as CHA sought federal funding to help cover the costs.²¹

In the midst of the asbestos campaign, Obama bought his airplane ticket to Los Angeles for the IAF training in mid-July, with the Chicago archdiocese’s CHD staff reimbursing its $196 cost. He also sent a late May postcard to Phil Boerner, writing, “Work continues to be rough, but I’m learning at a steady clip and am starting to see some results. We were on the tube and made the papers this week” and “I took a busload of public housing tenants downtown to protest living conditions. Still following up on this.” A few days later, he sent a lengthier greeting card to Genevieve, whose birthday was on June 7:

The pace of my life has quickened these past few months; feel like I’ve broken through the lengthy “Buddhist” phase—acting more forcefully, letting myself make mistakes. I’ve stopped eating peanuts, I’m working like a bitch, still writing when I have the time.

Made some good new friends; still miss my old ones. And trying to develop a new kind of discipline in myself—not the stiff martial discipline I’d let myself get locked into, but more the discipline to decide what feels right, to dig deep, take risks and make sure that I’m enjoying myself. A good time, a hungry time, and I give much credit to you for it (your pokes and prods had a subtle but sure effect).

Barack closed by asking, “Still going to stop teaching next year?” and offering “Regards to Sohale, the family, etc. Love—Barack.”

A week or so after the Altgeld meeting, Barack went to dinner with Asif Agha, his girlfriend Tammy Hamlish, an anthropology graduate student, and a mutual friend and classmate whom they wanted to introduce to Barack. Almost a year had passed since twenty-four-year-old Barack had last enjoyed any “female companionship,” as he put it in a note three months earlier to Andy Roth. But Asif and Tammy’s initiative would have momentous consequences, almost as great as Barack’s decision a year earlier to leave New York and find an entirely new life in Chicago.²²

Sheila Miyoshi Jager was two years younger than Barack and a 1984 graduate of Bennington College in Vermont. She had attended two years of middle school in France and had spent 1984–85 in Paris, writing a thesis in French on Claude Lévi-Strauss toward an M.A. from Middlebury College. Lévi-Strauss suggested she pursue anthropology and recommended she study Korea, a country he had just visited, and he recommended her highly to his friend Marshall Sahlins, a well-known anthropologist at the University of Chicago. In September 1985 Sheila arrived there to begin the doctoral program in anthropology.

Sheila grew up in Northern California, where her father, Bernd, a polymath psychologist whose Ph.D. dissertation at Duquesne University had dealt with Freudian psychoanalysis, worked as a clinical psychologist at two state hospitals and taught psychology at California State University’s Sonoma County campus. Born in Groningen, the Netherlands, in 1931, Bernd was not yet nine when the Nazis occupied Holland in May 1940. Three years later he watched “hundreds of our Jewish neighbors being herded like cattle to the train station” in the middle of the night, and he would always “vividly remember the German soldiers as they loudly goose-stepped” through town. Bernd’s father, Hendrik, played a major role in an underground network that sheltered dozens of Jewish children from the Nazis. One young girl, Greetje de Haas, lived with Hendrik, his wife Geesje, and their two sons for three years. The Jagers’ courageous involvement was posthumously recognized when Israel’s Yad Vashem honored them with inclusion on the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem.

After World War II, Bernd studied at the Royal Institute for Tropical Agriculture outside Amsterdam before spending two years working under Albert Schweitzer at Lambaréné, in what was then French Equatorial Africa. He fell in love with an African woman whom he sought to marry, but that came to naught. From there Bernd came to the U.S., and during a year’s study at Berea College in Kentucky, he met and married Shinko Sakata, a Japanese woman six years his junior. Together they moved to Groningen, where Bernd earned an M.A. before they returned to the U.S., eventually settling into a handsomely situated three-bedroom home in Santa Rosa, ten miles north of Cal State’s Rohnert Park campus. Five years after Sheila’s birth, a younger brother named David joined the family, and in time Shinko Jager became a well-known Sonoma County potter. Bernd’s closest friend, Michael Dees, who also worked at one of the hospitals, witnessed all of Sheila’s childhood. “I’ve known her since she was one,” he recounted years later. Bernd and Shinko “had strict parameters with her,” he recalled, and “did a very good job raising Sheila.” Mike would remain close to her even half a century later: “She’s like a daughter to me.”

Barack quickly became deeply taken with the bright, beautiful, and intense half-Dutch, half-Japanese Sheila. She wore her dark hair in a short pageboy-style cut, and as Barack would later write, she had “specks of green in her eyes.” Three or four times in June and early July, they went on double dates with Asif and Tammy. Hanging out with a trio of anthropologists was no problem for the son of Ann Dunham, Asif recalled, because Barack “knew the idiom, he knew the concerns, and he was right at home.” Asif encouraged Barack’s interest in Sheila, joshingly telling him from recent experience that asking “Can I kiss you now?” was a surefire way to pose the question. As Asif remembered it, Barack soon let him know it had worked. Barack and Sheila—“two mixed-race kids,” she would later say—were together almost every day in the two or three weeks before he left for Los Angeles on July 8.

In the aftermath of the asbestos campaign, Barack finally had time to turn his attention to two other DCP efforts. Prior to asbestos, Barack had thought that DCP’s best chance to organize within Altgeld was to focus on residents’ lack of employment opportunities and on how the city’s primary jobs-referral agency, the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training (MOET), offered no services on the Far South Side below 95th Street. DCP had made contact with MOET officials, and finally a visit to Our Lady of the Gardens in Altgeld by MOET director Maria B. Cerda was scheduled for August.

By early July, the DCP women interested in tackling the discriminatory behavior of the Chicago Park District (CPD) were also ready to move. Harold Washington, after his late April city council victory, was now able to win approval of two new CPD board members. Washington’s appointees, architect Walter Netsch and African American arts figure Margaret Burroughs—Frank Marshall Davis’s old friend “Flo” in Sex Rebel: Black—would give him a board majority that could sideline CPD superintendent Ed Kelly and transfer his authority to Washington aide Jesse Madison. This would effectively undermine the core of Chicago’s traditional Democratic machine, for journalists believed that a thousand of the CPD’s thirty-four hundred full-time employees were precinct captains and political operatives, particularly from Kelly’s own 47th Ward. When, on June 16, the new board majority did just that, Kelly filed suit challenging the action’s legitimacy. In the meantime, on July 2, DCP gave Netsch and Burroughs a tour of disheveled Far South Side parks before they spoke at a DCP community meeting at St. Helena of the Cross. The two new members told DCP to bring a list of needed repairs that CPD staffers had failed to make to the next CPD board meeting on July 10.

The next day a judge upheld the board’s removal of Ed Kelly, who lashed out angrily at the mayor. “Washington’s ruined this city,” Kelly told reporters. “He’s going to be gone. We’ve got to get him out.” On July 10, after Obama was already in Los Angeles, St. Helena parishioner Eva Sturgies took charge of DCP’s presentation. She had carefully prepared a list of forty-one requests regarding eight different parks that DCP had given to CPD employees two months earlier—and only ten had been completed. At the meeting, Sturgies summarized the disappointing inaction: “The summer is already half over, and we have only seen work done on the most cosmetic aspects” of DCP’s list. She indicated that DCP knew, thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests it had submitted, that CPD staffers had not even prepared work orders for the other items. Sturgies said that Far South Side citizens want “the same kind of service that other neighborhoods in the city get.”

Four days later, a court ruling reaffirmed the authority of Harold Washington’s new appointees, and the next week Ed Kelly surrendered his post, promising, “I don’t get angry. I get even.” Washington quickly named George Galland, corporation counsel Judson Miner’s former law partner, as the Park District’s new attorney. Galland announced that thousands of supposed jobs on the CPD’s payroll were “blatantly illegal,” and vowed to clean house. “It has been one of the most valuable havens for employment by the Democratic organization,” Galland tartly commented.

Before Obama left for Los Angeles, he and Jerry Kellman attended a ceremony where Joseph Cardinal Bernardin publicly presented the CHD grants, including the latest $33,000 to DCP for organizing in Altgeld Gardens and for Barack’s prospective plan “to improve high school and college opportunities for minority students,” a CHD press release noted. Then, following the holiday weekend, Barack left for Los Angeles on Tuesday, July 8.²³

In the fourteen years following Saul Alinsky’s 1972 death, IAF had abandoned its Chicago roots, but attending an IAF training was still a rite of passage even for experienced organizers. Three years earlier Greg Galluzzo, Mary Gonzales, and their younger UNO colleague Danny Solis had taken it thanks to Peter Martinez, and in 1985 UNO’s Phil Mullins attended as well. Mount St. Mary’s College was IAF’s long-standing summer location, with trainees arriving on a Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday was devoted to two basic staples of IAF teaching: “World As Is/World As Should Be ‘Power’ Session” and “Power and Self-Interest.” The 125 or so attendees were divided into groups of about 25, with the IAF’s five senior “cabinet members”—Ed Chambers, Ernie Cortes, Mike Gecan, Arnie Graf, and Larry McNeil—rotating among them.

Obama was already familiar with Alinsky’s major themes and principles, thanks to Kellman, Kruglik, and the three-day Milwaukee event six months earlier. Ed Chambers, Alinsky’s lead inheritor, had articulated them in a small 1978 volume titled Organizing for Family and Congregation. Alinsky’s best-known principle was that “power tends to come in two forms: organized people and organized money.” But Alinsky had never fully grasped a second point that was now emphasized by Kellman, Galluzzo, and Chambers: “one of the largest reservoirs of untapped power is the institution of the parish and congregation,” because “they have the people, the values, and the money.”

Mike Gecan acknowledged that Alinsky had failed to “create organizations that endured,” and by 1986 IAF was striving for permanency through growth: “as the number of local churches in the organization increases, the organization becomes increasingly self-sufficient” thanks to each congregation’s financial support. Obama already knew that the number of organizers a group could hire was dependent on its funding. Barack understood how organizers had to prioritize “the finding and developing of a strong collective leadership,” and thanks to the many one-on-ones Kellman had had him conduct, he appreciated how “the single most important element in the interview is the interviewer’s capacity to listen.”

As Jerry and Mike had made clear, it was crucial to “select and engage in battles that can be won,” instead of larger problems—like the closure of Wisconsin Steel—that were obviously insoluble. Resolving small issues would “season people in victory.” Failures sapped morale and enthusiasm, whereas with small victories “a sense of competence and confidence grows.”

For individuals already working as organizers, the ten-day IAF training was “designed to force reflection on what you have done, what you didn’t do, and ways and means of approaching reality and institutions based on a clear understanding of the tension between self-interest and self-sacrifice. The first week is spent in getting people to look at who they are, what their visions are, are they willing to reorganize themselves and their visions.” The first day’s sessions would “force people to reflect and open up to the world as it is against the world as it should be,” and participants read a portion of Viktor Frankl’s famous 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning. From there, the training explored “the difference between issues and problems” before sessions on “how to spot and develop leaders” and “how to do a power analysis of a particular community.” Next were the more confrontational elements of the Alinsky model: choosing “enemies” and “creating crises.”

The fourth day was devoted to individual meetings between attendees and the IAF trainers. Mike Gecan, who remembered Obama from their brief meeting eighteen months earlier at NYPIRG, was struck by how Barack now seemed “very intellectual, very abstractly intense. He’d be very intense about an idea,” such as identity, but “very detached about the people.” Instead of personalizing a subject, “he’d be lost in the idea,” exhibiting “very little connection” and seemingly “abstracted from relationships and others,” Gecan recalled.

Early in the training, before a session with Arnie Graf, Obama learned from either Gecan or Ernie Cortes that Graf was married to an African American woman and had several interracial children. Graf remembers that Barack sought him out, and from Friday onward, the two had “a series of conversations … that were not related to the training. He had lots of questions … he’s very curious about interracial relationships and children and how you raise a child.” Graf remembers Obama wanting to know how Arnie felt “as a white person, raising interracial children and being in a solidified marriage.” Barack did not say much about his own childhood, but he wanted to hear about Arnie’s experience: “How do my children see themselves, how do they identify themselves and how do I feel about that and how does my wife feel about it?”

Arnie and his wife Martha had met in graduate school, and by 1986 they had been married for thirteen years and had three children: two boys and a girl, ages ten, seven, and three. Barack wondered how they raised them “to understand who they are?” Arnie replied that given his children’s ages, “I’m not sure how they see themselves quite yet,” but that they knew their racially distinct grandparents well. Barack explained, “People look at me and approach me as an African American, but I don’t have that history” and “I have to develop a way of understanding because that isn’t my experience.” Individuals who did not know Obama viewed him as black, but until he arrived in Chicago, the only African Americans he had really known were Frank Marshall Davis, Keith Kakugawa, and Eric Moore.

Obama and Graf’s initial conversation about race and identity ran close to two hours. Barack’s friend Johnnie Owens was at the training too, and on Saturday afternoon, they went to Will Rogers State Beach to try out the Pacific Ocean. Johnnie was already impressed by Barack’s insistence on some form of exercise “every single day,” and one evening, Obama reproached Owens for eating dessert. Once in the water, Johnnie was astounded by Barack’s self-confidence as a swimmer: “he goes way out there,” Owens remembered. “He’s used to being in that ocean,” as all his Punahou friends could attest. Owens also went along when Obama asked for a tour of some of South Central L.A.’s most gang-infested neighborhoods. “It was a real experience. I was freaked out,” Owens recalls.

In the second week, Obama had another long conversation with Arnie Graf, again focused on “family and race.” But Barack also asked Arnie to talk about his experiences helping build a chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, as a college student in Buffalo in the early 1960s. The IAF wanted to add minority organizers to its staff, and Arnie suggested that Barack come work with him in Baltimore. Barack said he had moved around a lot in life and wanted to stay in Chicago: “I have to have some place where I want to be that feels like home.” Graf asked whether Barack envisioned a career as an organizer, and Obama said no. “I’d like to organize for another couple of years, because I think I need to get that under my belt. I need to understand on the ground how to relate.” Then, according to Graf, Obama said he thought he would go to a top law school and become a civil rights lawyer and perhaps a judge, a career his grandmother and mother had repeatedly mentioned to him.

Monday was devoted to analyzing how an Alinsky organization chose an “enemy” and how it could use a confrontation in a way that leads to a relationship with someone who had been ignoring you. “It’s a relational tool, not a tactic,” Mike Gecan explained. “The purpose of polarizing is to get into a relationship and then depolarize it.” Tuesday focused on values and congregations, Wednesday on IAF as an organization. Before the training ended at midday Thursday, Obama spoke again with Arnie Graf and said he had most enjoyed the theoretical basis that underlay the world-as-it-is-versus-the-world-as-it-should-be dialectic, but that he was uncomfortable with how IAF conceptualized enemies and confrontation. Both Graf and Gecan wanted to recruit Barack to IAF, even though they worried that he seemed to grasp everything “more in the intellect than in the gut,” as Graf put it. “There’s something missing here,” Graf thought, because Barack “always seemed one step removed from himself.”²⁴

Thursday afternoon Obama flew back to Chicago. It had been an edifying ten days, an experience that underscored how “the key to Alinskyism is a kind of pragmatic rationality” and that an organizer “must be pragmatic and nonideological.” In Chicago, Barack was met by a Tribune front page that announced: “LTV Files for Bankruptcy.” Financial analysts said this “virtually assures” the closure or sale of the mill, and on Saturday, the news turned worse when LTV terminated the medical benefits and life insurance of its more than sixty thousand retired workers nationwide, an action that Local 1033 president Maury Richards denounced as “outrageous and inhuman.” On Tuesday, when reports circulated that U.S. Steel would soon lay off up to two-thirds of the 757 men still employed at South Works, the USW threatened to strike. In quick succession, the USW then struck LTV’s profitable Indiana Harbor mill in East Chicago, but not the East Side plant, where several retired managers who also had lost their health benefits joined Richards and hundreds of 1033 pickets while other colleagues kept the mill running. When a federal bankruptcy judge ordered LTV to restore the retirees’ benefits, the USW terminated its strike, but then two days later struck U.S. Steel, and South Works shut down. The next week LTV announced that it would lay off 1,650 of the 2,300 remaining workers at the East Side mill before the end of the year.

This meant the end for Chicago’s last integrated steel plant. Richards told reporters that many 1033 members “feel helpless and without hope,” a familiar refrain to everyone who had witnessed Wisconsin’s closure six years earlier. Jerry Kellman said LTV’s East Side mill had no future “unless the governor takes action,” but Thompson gave no sign of doing so and Kellman’s outreach to Local 1033 lessened. “It didn’t lead to any lasting working relationship there,” Richards remembered.

The ripple effects were everywhere. A small-business owner in south suburban Dolton who had lost $1,000 when Wisconsin closed in 1980 told the Daily Cal that LTV owed him $8,000 he was unlikely to recoup. At a 1033 meeting, with members anxious that the local would lose its union hall for nonpayment of rent, the official minutes recorded an incident in which one agitated officer “threatened M[aury] Richards with physical harm.” A Chicago Tribune feature story, referring to what had happened at Wisconsin Steel, South Works, and now LTV, described “chilling levels of alcoholism, emotional stress, and physical illness” among the unemployed and their families. There was no denying that over the past six years “the deterioration of the Southeast Side has been catastrophic.” The Daily Cal’s superb steel reporter, Larry Galica, toured the largely silent South Works and pronounced it “a modern ghost town,” and Richards blamed the steel companies’ “failure to reinvest in their facilities to modernize them” as the reason why tens of thousands of people had suffered so traumatically since March 28, 1980.²⁵

Amid this latest steel crisis, Harold Washington formally kicked off his reelection campaign before a crowd of four thousand supporters at a Loop hotel. Weeks earlier, in late April, Washington had reiterated his opposition to any new landfills, even though he knew there was no solution to Chicago’s garbage crisis other than finding additional landfill capacity somewhere. In late May he quietly approved what the city insisted was a “reconfiguration,” and not “an expansion,” of the huge CID landfill just east of Altgeld Gardens. Environmental purists like Hazel Johnson were understandably not happy, but a heavy majority of his administration’s Task Force on Solid Waste Management endorsed his action, including IACT’s Mary Ellen Montes.

An even more imminent threat to what remained of the Southeast Side was the disappearance of gainful employment. Washington’s aides reported, “Stores and local businesses are closing down because the only purchases are for bare necessities. The area is becoming blighted and people’s attitudes are of hopelessness.” Additionally, “there is a great need for more police coverage,” since “there are not enough police officers on the street patrolling the neighborhoods.”²⁶

In August, Maria Cerda, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training (MOET), finally appeared at a community meeting in Altgeld Gardens to respond to DCP’s request that MOET open an office within reasonable travel distance of the Gardens. Obama had prepared Loretta Augustine to chair the meeting, but almost immediately, Cerda became “very aggressive and domineering,” according to Loretta. “I was supposed to introduce the issue, and she tried to take over,” and became openly patronizing, asking Loretta, “Do you even know what we do?” Then, from the back of the room, came Barack’s voice: “Let Loretta speak! We want to hear what Loretta has to say!”

Obama was determined to avoid another breakdown like the Zirl Smith session, so he put aside his own rule about remaining quietly in the background, and this time intervened forcefully if anonymously. Loretta remembered that “people kind of picked it up,” chanting “Let Loretta speak!” In the end, Cerda agreed that MOET would open an office on South Michigan Avenue in central Roseland, a ten-minute bus ride from the Gardens, before the end of November.

By midsummer, Greg Galluzzo and Mary Gonzales were expanding UNO’s reach by linking up with and reactivating the Gamaliel Foundation, founded in the 1960s but long dormant. Greg had been seeking funding for this new vision since early 1986, and he believed that Gamaliel could serve as a training institute that would “generate a flow of leadership for the city’s future.” Mary and Greg saw community organizing as “the way people can move from a sense of helplessness and isolation to active participation in the decisions affecting their lives.” Greg felt that Chicago’s vibrant “movement” activity in earlier years had “distracted people” from pursuing long-lasting change. “Compared to the work of real community organizations, movement activity is much less grounded in communities,” he wrote. By September Greg had raised almost $100,000 for Gamaliel, with the two largest grants—$40,000 and $30,000—coming from the Joyce Foundation and the Woods Fund.

Within UNO, Danny Solis and Phil Mullins wanted to train the parents of Chicago public school students: “Improving the quality of education in Chicago is the city’s greatest challenge and clearest need.” Citing the research of Fred Hess on Chicago dropout rates, Gamaliel noted how “students are simply not prepared to handle high school classes.” By 1986, that represented a bigger problem than ever before. “Ten years ago in S.E. Chicago, a student at Bowen High School could drop out of school and get a job in the steel mills making more money than their teachers.” That world was gone, and “the major obstacle” to improving outcomes for current students “is the ineptness and mismanagement at the Board of Education level.”

Like IAF, Gamaliel would do trainings, and in early August, a one-week course for sixty community group members took place at Techny Towers, a suburban retreat center owned by the Society of the Divine Word. Obama, having the full IAF training to his credit, delivered a presentation there one day, and among those in attendance was Mary Ellen Montes. “Everyone was awed by Barack,” Lena remembered. “I was getting divorced,” and as a single mother with three children, she now had a full-time job at Fiesta Educativa, an advocacy group for disabled Hispanic students. She was immediately taken with the young man three years her junior. “Barack was extremely charismatic,” and she wanted to see more of him. “We talked quite a bit after I met him at Techny Towers,” and with Sheila Jager in California visiting her family, Barack and Lena spent a number of late-summer evenings together in Hyde Park.

“We went out to eat a few times” and “we just enjoyed talking to each other,” Lena recounted. “He was a lot of fun to talk to and we really enjoyed each other’s company.” Obama would remember some intense making-out, while Lena explained, “I’m a passionate person.” What she termed “the relationship/friendship that we had” became a close one as Barack became part of the UNO–Gamaliel network. Greg Galluzzo believed that “the continuing development of community organizing as a profession is mandatory,” and with Gamaliel often bringing its organizers together, Barack and Lena were now professional colleagues as well as intimate friends.²⁷

Obama had been in Chicago for more than a year, and it had been a more challenging and instructive period than any other of his life. He had learned a great deal about others and himself. He had bonded with Mike Kruglik, Bill Stenzel, and Tom Kaminski, as well as with DCP leaders, such as Loretta Augustine, Dan Lee, and Cathy Askew. He had also made two good friends around his age: Asif Agha and Johnnie Owens. But more changes were coming.

Jerry was shifting his focus to Gary, after being bruised by the failure of his Regional Employment Network, which could not claim to have placed even one unemployed worker in a meaningful new job. Given what was now transpiring at LTV’s East Side mill and at South Works, jobless workers on Chicago’s Far South Side faced even dimmer prospects for employment in the immediate future. Obama later wrote that Kellman had told him that CCRC’s region-wide aspirations, like DCP’s highly disparate neighborhood composition, were fundamentally ungainly and that he “should have known better.” Jerry asked Barack to come with him to Gary, but Barack said no: “I can’t just leave, Jerry. I just got here.” Kellman warned him, “Stay here and you’re bound to fail. You’ll give up organizing before you give it a real shot,” but Barack stood firm. He saw a fundamental human difference between them. Barack in twelve months had established meaningful emotional bonds with half a dozen or more colleagues, while Jerry, as Obama later wrote, had “made no particular attachments to people or place during his three years in the area.”

Obama also made a personal decision that was unlike anything he ever suggested to Genevieve: he asked Sheila Jager to move in with him. “It all seemed to happen so fast,” she later explained. Earlier in the summer, Barack had renewed his one-year lease on his studio, but it was too small for two people. Johnnie Owens was living with his parents and looking for a place, so Barack suggested he sublet the studio. Sheila had no support apart from her graduate fellowship, but Barack offered to cover the $450-a-month cost of apartment 1-N at 5429 South Harper Avenue, a quiet, tree-lined block of three-story brick buildings.

Sheila thought it was “really spacious,” with a living room, an open study, “a good-sized bedroom,” and a large, eat-in kitchen. “I thought it was a bit plush for a struggling couple,” but with Barack’s $20,000 salary and $100 a month from Sheila toward food and shopping, by early October the young couple had set up house. Barack continued to see both Asif and Johnnie regularly, with Barack taking Johnnie to see a fall exhibit featuring the work of French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Soon after moving in with Sheila, Barack tardily responded to a letter and short story Phil Boerner had sent him. Barack confessed to feeling older, or at least overextended. “Where once I could party, read and write, with a whole day’s worth of activity to spare, I now feel as if I have barely enough time to read the newspaper.” He counseled Phil about writing fiction, recommending that he focus on “the key moment(s) in the story, and build tension leading to those key moments.” He also suggested that Phil “write outside your own experience,” because “I find that this works the fictive imagination harder.” Barack spoke of thinking about and missing Manhattan, “but I doubt I’ll be going back.”

Then he introduced Sheila. “The biggest news on my end is that I have a new girlfriend, with whom I now share an apartment. She’s half-Japanese, half-Dutch, and is a Ph.D. candidate” at the University of Chicago. “Very sweet lady, as busy as I am, and so temperamentally well-suited. Not that there are no strains; I’m not really accustomed to having another person underfoot all the time, and there are moments when I miss the solitude of a bachelor’s life. On the other hand, winter’s fast approaching, and it is nice to have someone to come home to after a late night’s work. Compromises, compromises.”

Obama’s pose that fear of cold temperatures underlay his desire that Sheila and he live together downplayed his own decision and initiative. Then he updated Phil on how DCP was now becoming a freestanding organization, “which gives me no one to directly answer to and control over my own schedule. But the downside is that I shoulder the responsibility of making something work that may not be able to work. The scope of the problems here—25 percent unemployment; 40 percent high school drop out rate; infant mortality on a par with Haiti—is daunting; and I often feel impotent to initiate anything with major impact. Nevertheless, I plan to plug away at it at least until the end of 1987. After that, I’ll have to make a judgment as to whether I’ve got the patience and determination necessary for this line of work.”²⁸

The breakup of CCRC, with DCP and the South Suburban Action Conference (SSAC) taking its place, coincided with Leo Mahon leaving St. Victor. He had announced seven months earlier his September departure, and he had felt his energy flagging before that. In one of his last pastoral letters, Leo addressed the LTV and South Works news in words that echoed across the previous six years. “Catholic social teaching insists that the workers have first right to the fruits of their labor,” in line with “the Christian principle that workers, not money, come first.” Corporations should put “human concerns ahead of profit and dividends,” but LTV and U.S. Steel had made “clear that power and profit are both more important than people and jobs.” Leo’s advice was the same as in 1980: “let us translate our concern and our outrage into protest and into political action.”²⁹

Following Kellman’s shift to Gary, Greg Galluzzo took on a formal mentoring role to Obama by becoming DCP’s “consultant.” He introduced Barack to a young tax attorney, Mary-Ann Wilson, who at no charge—“pro bono”—would handle the state and federal paperwork necessary to establish DCP, like UNO before it, as an independent, nonprofit corporation.

Illinois, like the Internal Revenue Service, required a bevy of forms and submissions that Barack and DCP members would spend a good portion of that fall completing and signing. A set of bylaws was copied and updated from an earlier version Kellman had drafted in 1984. Illinois articles of incorporation required three directors—Dan Lee, Loretta Augustine, and Tom Kaminski were named—as well as a registered agent. Barack, as “project director,” left blank the space asking for his middle name. A separate, full-fledged board of directors listed Dan as president, Loretta as vice president, and Marlene Dillard as treasurer, along with everyone who was active in DCP: Cathy Askew, Yvonne Lloyd, Nadyne Griffin, Eva Sturgies, and Aletha Gibson, plus several women who had signed in at a meeting or two but not reappeared.

Simultaneous to his work with Mary-Ann Wilson, Barack was conducting one-evening-a-week training for DCP members at Holy Rosary, while also drafting his own initial grant applications. The trainings, informed by what he had learned during his ten days with IAF, involved DCP veterans such as Dan Lee and Betty Garrett plus relative newcomers such as Aletha Strong Gibson. They also attracted new faces such as Loretta’s neighbor Margaret Bagby and Aletha’s close friend Ann West, a white Australian whose husband was black and president of the PTA at Turner-Drew Elementary School. Another important PTA figure, Isabella Waller, president of the regional Southwest Council, brought along her best friend, Deloris Burnam. Ernest Powell Jr., the politically savvy president of the Euclid Park neighborhood association and someone Barack had recruited over the summer, came as well. Close to twenty people attended the weekly sessions, at which Barack always took off his watch and put it on the table so he could see it during the training.

For Obama, the grant applications were a major concern. The first would go to Ken Rolling and Jean Rudd at the Woods Fund, which he hoped would renew the $30,000 given to CCRC for DCP in 1986. The ten-page, single-spaced document offered a retrospective account of the past fourteen months, and made clear, as he had stressed previously, that the Far South Side’s “two most pressing problems” were a “lack of jobs, and lack of educational opportunity.” Obama had one especially audacious goal for 1987: a “Career Education Network to serve the entire Far South Side area—a comprehensive and coordinated system of career guidance and counseling for high school age youth” with “a centralized counseling office” augmenting in-school counselors so as to reduce the dropout rate and channel more black high school graduates into higher education. “Youth in the area,” he warned, “are slipping behind their parents in educational achievement.”

Obama already knew that to build DCP two types of expansion were necessary: an outreach to congregations beyond the Roman Catholic base that Kellman had developed and the recruitment of more block club and PTA members like Eva Sturgies, Aletha Strong Gibson, Ann West, and Ernie Powell. DCP’s neighborhoods, from Altgeld northward to Roseland, West Pullman, and even solidly middle-class Washington Heights, were ill served by their elected officials, who “have generally poured their efforts into conventional political campaigns, with almost no concrete results for area residents.” Obama spoke of the need to “dramatize problems through the media and through direct action,” but DCP’s most pressing need was funds to hire another African American organizer. He realized a $10,000 entry-level salary would not attract experienced candidates, so DCP’s proposed 1987 budget called for $20,000 for that position and an increase in Barack’s salary to $25,000.

Ken and Jean at the Woods Fund told Barack to introduce himself to Anne Hallett, the new director of the small Wieboldt Foundation, whose interests closely paralleled those of Woods, and also to consider applying to the larger MacArthur Foundation. Obama visited and spoke with Hallett in November, and soon thereafter a front-page story in the Chicago Defender highlighted MacArthur’s announcement of $2.4 million in grants to community organizations, including $16,000 to Frank Lumpkin’s Save Our Jobs Committee. Before the year’s end, Obama submitted to Wieboldt a formal request for $10,000 that was virtually identical to the one he had sent Woods. Boasting that DCP was “an organization equal to any grass-roots effort going on in Chicago’s Black community right now,” Obama admitted that his employment and educational opportunities agenda represented “an ambitious program.” He said DCP needed “about two years” to recruit enough churches to be self-sustaining, and he told Hallett that DCP would soon reach out to MacArthur too.³⁰

The Far South Side’s two most notable developments in fall 1986 were both environmental. In late September, Waste Management Incorporated withdrew its long-pending application to open a new landfill west of South Torrence Avenue and would instead target the 140-acre O’Brien Locks site on the west bank of the Little Calumet River, surrounded on three sides by WMI’s huge CID landfill. UNO treated this news as a huge victory, infuriating environmental activists Hazel Johnson and Vi Czachorski, whose Altgeld Gardens and Hegewisch neighborhoods were just west and east of the O’Brien site. Johnson and Czachorski’s organizations, along with Marian Byrnes, formed a new antidumping alliance, Citizens United to Reclaim the Environment (CURE). Together with Sierra Club members, CURE organized a well-covered protest outside City Hall. As officials continued to seek the least bad solution to Chicago’s looming landfill crisis, UNO and CURE would be on opposite sides wherever the battle line was drawn. A few weeks later, 10th Ward alderman Ed Vrdolyak, a nemesis of Harold Washington as well as UNO, threw his support behind CURE.

That dispute seemed mild compared to a front-page headline in the October 25 Chicago Tribune: “South Side Facility Burning ‘Superwaste.’ ” The incinerator at 117th Street and Stony Island Avenue, little more than a mile from South Deering’s Bright Elementary School to the north and Altgeld Gardens to the southwest, was one of just five nationwide that was licensed to burn highly toxic PCBs. Although a front-page 1985 Wall Street Journal story ominously headlined “Plants That Incinerate Poisonous Wastes Run Into a Host of Problems” had cited the plant’s location, neither UNO nor most anyone else in Chicago had taken note that it was operating close to capacity, burning more than twenty thousand gallons of PCBs seven days a week. Experts agreed that incineration was much better than burial, but neither Illinois EPA nor Chicago officials had objected to this facility’s location.

In early November, United Neighborhood Organization held its annual dinner at an East Side banquet hall. Frank Lumpkin was one of two honorees, and the guest speaker was George Munoz, the new young president of the Chicago Board of Education. Newspaper photographs showed two of Chicago’s most promising Hispanic political stars—Munoz and Maria Elena Montes, as Lena’s name now sometimes appeared—seated on the dais. UNO and Gamaliel’s expansion had elevated Danny Solis to UNO’s executive director and Southeast Side organizer Phil Mullins to a supervisory role, and in Mullins’s stead, Bruce Orenstein, a young IAF veteran who knew Greg Galluzzo, took charge of UNO’s Southeast Side work.³¹

As Barack was drawn into Greg Galluzzo’s UNO and Gamaliel network, one Gamaliel board member, John McKnight, stood out as the most intellectually intriguing voice at the regular gatherings, where most participants adopted a macho tone. Throughout the mid-1980s, McKnight had continued the same powerful themes he had voiced in earlier years. “Through the propagation of belief in authoritative expertise, professionals cut through the social fabric of community and sow clienthood where citizenship once grew,” he told one audience while warning of the danger that “a nation of clients” posed to a democratic state. In an article entitled “Community Organizing in the ’80s: Toward a Post-Alinsky Agenda,” McKnight and his younger colleague Jody Kretzmann declared that “a number of the classic Alinsky strategies and tactics are in need of critical revision.” Rather than confronting some “enemy,” the emphasis should be on “developing a neighborhood’s own capacities to do for itself what outsiders will or can no longer do.” The focus should shift public dollars away from salaries for service providers to investment in “local productive capacities” that will strengthen rather than weaken communities.

A year earlier, in November 1985, Chicago Magazine—a monthly not easily mistaken for a social policy journal—had devoted six glossy pages to a lengthy interview with McKnight. In the article, he said Chicagoans needed to recognize that “the industrial sector of America has abandoned us,” and that a new future loomed. “We’re turning out young people from universities right and left who really are looking for something to do. In the elite universities what do we offer them? We offer them the chance to become lawyers.” On the other hand, a sizable population of heavily dependent poor people was necessary to support the “glut” of professional servicers “who ride on their backs.” Public funds should be used to employ low-income people rather than pay servicers to patronize them. “To the degree that the War on Poverty attempted to provide services in lieu of power or income, it failed,” McKnight argued. “Poor people are poor in power.” For poor Chicagoans to become citizens rather than clients, “shifting income out of the service sector into economic opportunity for poor people is absolutely essential.”

In early 1986 McKnight wrote in the Tribune that instead of subsidizing medical behemoths, local health dollars should be directed toward “creating neighborhood jobs that provide decent incomes for local people.” In a subsequent interview, he decried “a society focused on building on people’s weaknesses,” one that emphasized “deficiency rather than capacity.” Service professionals’ control over the lives of the poor magnified rather than alleviated their poverty, for “if you are nothing but a client, you have the most degraded status our society will provide.”

Health services were the most dire problem, and publicly funded “medical insurance systematically misdirects public wealth from income to the poor to income to medical professionals.” Yet change would be difficult because “many institutional leaders” had come to see communities as nothing more than “collections of parochial, inexpert, uninformed, and biased people” who understood their own needs far less well than did service professionals. “Institutionalized systems grow at the expense of communities,” and America’s “essential problem is weak communities.”

John McKnight’s influence on people exposed to his social vision was profound even if unobtrusive. Ellen Schumer, a fellow Gamaliel board member and UNO veteran, said that within the world of Chicago organizing, McKnight “really challenged the old model.” His impact was also felt throughout Chicago’s progressive foundations, with Wieboldt acknowledging that it was “fortunate to have John McKnight join us” at the board’s annual retreat “to talk about the substantive changes in Chicago neighborhoods today that require new strategies for organizers.”³²

If McKnight was Chicago’s most significant social critic, the front pages of the December 3, 1986, editions of all three Chicago daily newspapers announced another: G. Alfred “Fred” Hess, a little-known policy analyst, education researcher, and former Methodist minister. After completing a Ph.D. in educational anthropology at Northwestern University in 1980, with a dissertation on a village development project in western India, Hess had joined the foundation-funded Chicago Panel on Public School Finances, and in 1983 he succeeded Anne Hallett as executive director.

Hess had made the front pages of Chicago’s daily papers nineteen months earlier thanks to a lengthy study entitled “Dropouts from the Chicago Public Schools: An Analysis of the Classes of 1982–1983–1984.” The Chicago Sun-Times had summarized Hess’s findings in a boldface banner headline: “School Dropout Rate Nearly 50 Percent!” His discovery that 43 percent of students who had entered Chicago high schools in September 1978 dropped out prior to graduation was a percentage that Obama had accurately cited a year earlier when he had written to Phil Boerner about the worst ills plaguing the neighborhoods where he worked. Hess’s data readily showed that high schools with predominantly minority populations had a dropout rate as high as 63 percent.

One Tribune story highlighted how at one Roseland high school, remaining in school did not mean students were studying. “We were sitting at a lunch table in the cafeteria rolling joints one morning,” a seventeen-year-old girl told reporter Jean Latz Griffin. “There was a security guard right next to us, but he didn’t say anything. People smoke it anywhere. Some teachers say ‘Put it out,’ but no one really does anything. You can’t snort coke inside school though. That would be too obvious.” Out of Corliss High School’s eighteen hundred students, only forty-eight were taking physics, only seventeen had qualified for the school’s first-ever calculus class, and almost 50 percent were enrolled in remedial English. A report similar to Hess’s, from a parallel research enterprise, Donald Moore’s Designs for Change, revealed that only three hundred out of the sixty-seven hundred students who had entered Chicago’s eighteen most disadvantaged high schools in 1980 had been able to read at a twelfth-grade level if they graduated in 1984.

In a prominent Tribune feature four weeks before Obama arrived in Chicago, Hess had warned that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) were damaging the city’s future. “We are in danger of creating a permanent underclass that is uneducated and unable to advance. It means a set of neighborhoods in which the majority of people are constantly unemployed and a strain on the social system in welfare and the high cost of crime. If we don’t take strong action now, we’ll pay for it later.” Don Moore emphasized how job losses were magnifying the consequences of CPS’s failures. “Parents are feeling a real desperation now because they are seeing unskilled jobs disappearing … 20 years ago the manufacturing industries in Chicago didn’t depend on employees being terribly literate. The economy has changed.” Former Illinois state education superintendent Michael Bakalis wondered to the Tribune why “the general community of Chicago, particularly the business community, has not been absolutely outraged by the performance of the Chicago Public Schools.” In July 1986, Hess told Crain’s Chicago Business that the way to reform public schools was to develop “real power for local citizens to control their local schools. Let local citizens hold local school officials accountable for the effectiveness of their schools. This would be real and significant decentralization of power that could make a difference.”

Illinois state law mandated that high school students receive at least three hundred minutes of daily instruction. Beginning in spring 1986, Hess’s Chicago Panel discovered that many Chicago high schools had fictional “study hall” classes in their students’ otherwise skimpy schedules that created a false paper trail to meet that requirement. The resulting report, “Where’s Room 185?,” released on December 2, created an immediate uproar. The Tribune editorialized that CPS “administrators are deliberately and illegally cheating students of part of the education to which they are entitled.” It also showed that in an overwhelming majority of actual classes, teachers actively taught for less than half of the class period. Noting how recently promoted CPS superintendent Manford Byrd’s response was to “hunker down and criticize the design of the study,” the Tribune declared that it was “inexcusable that it took an outside research panel” to uncover CPS’s “fundamental failure.”

The Chicago Defender ran a prominent page-three story, “Dropout Rate Irks Parents,” publicizing DCP’s desire to meet with board of education president George Munoz to discuss the problem. “We have a lot of dropouts,” DCP project director Barack Obama told the Defender. “We acknowledge that the dropout question is complicated, and there are no quick fixes to keep kids in school. We are urging Munoz to study the counseling system, recommend changes, and expand the numbers. This will have a direct effect on kids in the schools now.” Obama also said that students’ preparation prior to their high school years should be examined, “because there are a lot of possibilities out there.”³³

In addition, two public controversies highlighted Altgeld Gardens residents’ problems with both the CPS and the CHA. On December 4, one day after “Where’s Room 185?” debuted in Chicago newspapers, the Defender’s Chinta Strausberg reported on six teachers at the Wheatley Child-Parent Center who had transferred to other schools because they feared that Wheatley was permeated with asbestos. Superintendent Byrd insisted that tests had shown the air at Wheatley was “safe,” but Wheatley parents threatened to boycott the school and demanded an immediate inspection. On December 15 just 37 of Wheatley’s 377 young children attended school, and for the next two days that number dropped to 17 and then 11. One parent told the Tribune, “We can’t help but notice that the kids go to school all week and come home with rashes and wheezes. When they are home for the weekend, it all clears up.”

The boycott continued until the Christmas–New Year’s break, but being “home” at Altgeld was no picnic either, as a Tribune series detailing what it called the CHA’s “national reputation for mismanagement” documented. “If I had a job, I wouldn’t be here. This is not a good place to raise kids,” one young Altgeld mother told the newspaper while complaining about the prevalence of youth gangs. Two days later the Tribune reported that Zirl Smith was resigning as CHA executive director, and the next day’s paper emphasized how “Chicago has used the CHA as a way to isolate blacks.”

When news broke that administrative ineptitude had cost CHA $7 million in federal aid, CHA’s board chairman resigned as well. Fifteen months would pass before asbestos removal finally began in some 575 Altgeld homes, almost two years after Smith’s tumultuous visit to the Gardens. Harold Washington’s press secretary, Al Miller, later recounted the mayor remarking that “he didn’t believe there was a solution” to the CHA’s profound problems.³⁴

Shortly before Christmas, Barack Obama and Sheila Jager flew to San Francisco to spend a holiday week at her parents’ home in Santa Rosa. Although they had been living together for hardly four months, their relationship had quickly become one of deep commitment—indeed, so deep that for several weeks they had been discussing getting married during the trip to California.

Asif Agha had watched their relationship grow. Over the previous sixteen months, Asif had seen “Barry”—as he alone called Obama—acclimate to Chicago. “We were kind of an anchor point for each other,” and “Barry” spoke frankly to Asif about his acculturation. “I am the kind of well-spoken black man that white organization leaders love to give money to,” Asif remembered Obama remarking. Asif saw Obama with the eyes, and ears, of a linguistic anthropologist. “In terms of his performed demeanor, diction, speech style, he was white, not black,” Asif observed. Obama was open enough with Asif for him to know that Barack’s significant girlfriends prior to Sheila had been white, and Asif appreciated the underlying duality of Obama’s Chicago experience. His weekday work in Altgeld and Greater Roseland immersed him in African American life in a way that no prior experiences ever had, but in Hyde Park, his home life with Sheila and their occasional socializing with other anthropology graduate students was entirely multiethnic and international, just like his Punahou and Pakistani diaspora life had been in Honolulu, Eagle Rock, and New York.

Asif Agha. Eunhee Kim Yi. Arjun Guneratne. Their names alone, just like Sheila Miyoshi Jager, highlighted their international and ethnic diversity. Tania Forte was Egyptian, Jewish, and had grown up in France. Chin See Ming was born and raised in Malaysia before graduating with honors from Rice University in Houston. It was a “very, very cosmopolitan” group, Ming recalled, and when Sheila one day introduced Ming to Barack, I “just assumed he was a graduate student.”

For Sheila and her classmates, the first two years of the graduate anthropology program were “like boot camp,” Ming explained. Everyone had to take a double-credit introductory course called Sociocultural Systems, taught by Marshall Sahlins, a prominent anthropologist but “not a warm and cuddly person” and indeed “a very, very scary man” to some. Sheila coped far better with Sahlins than most of her classmates, and in her dissertation she wrote that “my greatest intellectual debt” was to Sahlins. “There was a very strong esprit de corps among the grad students” and “people worked very hard,” Ming recalled. “You were never off,” and everyone knew that student attrition would reach 50 percent.

Asif knew Sheila as “a very wonderful, wonderful person,” someone who was “passionate” about her work as well as her relationship with Barack. One evening the three of them accompanied Asif’s girlfriend Tammy Hamlish to a talk that her aunt Florence Hamlish Levinsohn, an outspoken local writer, was giving. Three years earlier Levinsohn had published a “patchy, parochial, frankly admiring” biography of her university classmate Harold Washington just after his election as mayor. Tammy had wanted Asif to meet Aunt Florence, but the evening quickly devolved into an unmitigated disaster. Asif remembered that he “started giggling at what the lady was saying, and Barry and I made eye contact, and that was fatal, because then for the next ten minutes we kept uncontrollably giggling and couldn’t control it and almost falling off our chairs because what the lady was saying was just absurd. And neither of us could control it, and because we were sitting next to each other and kept making eye contact, we’re triggering each other over and over and over. Tammy meanwhile is turning red,” and Levinsohn took note of their behavior too. She “was most upset” and “Tammy was mortified,” Asif recalled.

Apart from that embarrassing scene, Barack and Sheila were familiar faces at anthropology graduate students’ occasional parties. Sheila Quinlan, a Reed College graduate who was a year ahead of Sheila, remembered how “everyone thought they were a very sincere couple.” Barack was “quiet,” “friendly,” and “a sweet boy.” Indeed, as Chin See Ming put it, Barack “fit into the scene,” just as he likewise had learned to do in Roseland and even down in the Gardens. Jerry Kellman watched as Obama comfortably embraced his dual lives. “He found a way to be part of the black community and live beyond the black community,” Kellman explained. “He discovered he could live in both worlds.”³⁵

But in December 1986, and for almost two years thereafter, the looming and overarching question was whether Barack Obama could live in both worlds with Sheila Miyoshi Jager as his wife. Five months earlier, before asking Sheila to live with him, he had inquisitively questioned Arnie Graf about the long-term dynamics of interracial marriage and raising half-black, half-white children. And although most passersby and even most anthropology students would not see them in such a way, Sheila knew that “Barack is as much white as I am.” With her half-Japanese ancestry paralleling his half-Kenyan, she and Barack were equally white—one half apiece.

“Marriage was THE vital issue between us and we talked about it all the time,” Sheila explained more than two decades later. Barack “kept work matters and his private life separate,” so their marriage conversations, while known to Asif, were not something Kellman, Kruglik, Tom Kaminski, or Cathy Askew ever heard about from someone so “very private” as Obama. In their time alone together, Sheila saw someone whom no one in DCP ever did, someone with a “deep seated need to be loved and admired.” In their evenings at the spacious apartment on South Harper, Barack read literature, not history, while Sheila had more than enough course readings to occupy her time. And, of course, there was another dimension as well. Barack “is a very sexual/sensual person, and sex was a big part of our relationship,” Sheila later acknowledged.

Everything had come together fast. In “the winter of ’86, when we visited my parents, he asked me to marry him,” Sheila recounted. Mike Dees, her father’s closest friend and Sheila’s virtual uncle, had been told by Bernd in advance that Barack was a prospective son-in-law. “He and Sheila … were going to get married,” Dees explained. “They were coming out, they wanted to get married, and so they called me to come up and look the guy over and see what I think.”

One day right after Christmas Mike drove up to Santa Rosa, and “I ended up with Barack for an afternoon,” he recalled. “We just visited.” Barack was clearly a “very bright guy,” and, complexion aside, came across like “a white, middle-class kid.” Then, after dinner, Bernd and Mike had “a big political thing with Barack” while Sheila and her mother Shinko were occupied elsewhere. The two older men and Barack found themselves on “completely opposite sides of the fence,” Mike explained, because “we’re both conservative Republicans.” Barack “kind of thought he was going to lecture to us” about politics and ideology, “and we kind of shot him down.” It got “really heated” and “went on for quite a while.” Barack seemed “very taken aback by it,” Mike recalled. “Barack kind of thought he was going to sit down and get anointed. He’s very self-centered, and he ended up getting beat up.”

Although Barack “didn’t do very well,” to Mike “it was just a political argument. I think to the father and Barack it was more than that,” indeed, much more. “For Barack it was a big deal, for Bernd it was a big deal,” because Barack “was going to be the chosen one that night, and it didn’t work out” that way. It was readily apparent that the older man was sitting in judgment on the younger, perhaps not so differently from the time twenty-five years earlier when Stan Dunham had first met Barack Obama Sr. But here the verdict was negative, not positive. “I don’t know whether his color entered into the picture or not,” Dees said about Bernd’s attitude toward Barack.

By the end of the evening, and again the next morning, Bernd made his view of Barack and his marriage proposal crystal clear. “Bernd was against it,” because he felt that Barack was unworthy of his daughter’s hand. Sheila remembers that “my father was concerned over his ‘lack of prospects’ and wondered whether, as a community organizer, he could even support me, something that deeply offended Barack. My mom liked Barack a lot, but simply said I was too young” to get married. “I went along with their judgment, basically saying ‘Not yet,’ ” she recalled. The unsettling holiday visit concluded, and “they ended up going back without getting married,” Mike Dees affirmed.

Barack and Sheila would revisit that decision again and again over the twenty months that lay ahead.³⁶

During the first week of January 1987, Gamaliel held a three-day retreat for its seventeen organizers, plus Ken Rolling from Woods, at a Holiday Inn in south suburban Matteson. More important, Obama was now meeting for at least an hour a week, one on one, with Greg Galluzzo to talk about his Developing Communities Project work. Greg’s monthly calendar recorded the regularity of their discussions: Thursday morning, January 15; Wednesday lunchtime, the 21st; Friday morning, the 30th. On Wednesday, February 4, they spoke for two and a half hours; on Monday, February 9, for two more. Wednesday, the 11th, Greg came to Barack’s apartment; Tuesday, the 17th, they met for another ninety minutes—ten hours of conversation in just thirty days.

As anyone who knew Galluzzo would testify, he was so intense that no discussion with him ever devolved into idle chitchat. Deeply committed to his belief that “the essence of organizing is the transformation of the person” into someone who was “serious about being a power person in the public arena,” Greg’s self-confidence and challenging interpersonal style was robust indeed. True to the Alinsky tradition, Greg’s insistence that people unapologetically seek power for themselves was completely nonideological and entirely pragmatic: “Find out what people want,” he said, “and then we’ll decide what we’re going to do about it.” He also agreed with the Alinsky tradition of avoiding insoluble “problems” while constantly searching out winnable “issues.” Greg knew it was essential to “learn politics as the art of the possible.” He believed that, properly taught, “community organizers are pragmatists” who firmly appreciate that “in 99 percent of the cases the end does justify the means.” In addition, an Alinsky organizer assumed a dual public and private life. As one veteran put it, “you compartmentalize life and then it allows your consciousness to go to the beach.”³⁷

On the Far South Side, parents in Altgeld Gardens, aided by Barack, maintained their boycott of the Wheatley Child-Parent Center until January 20, when the CPS provided documentation that no asbestos had been found in the school. The boycott energized Altgeld residents’ interest in Hazel Johnson’s People for Community Recovery, and Mayor Washington spoke at a PCR meeting that drew several hundred people. The Tribune reported a new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study that had found that “more than 20,000 tons of 38 toxic chemicals are emitted into the air each year in the Lake Calumet region on the Southeast Side.” The Daily Calumet reported that Waste Management’s 1986 quarterly earnings were up an astonishing 349 percent, and a WMI representative, Mary Ryan, had quietly begun speaking with interested parties about WMI’s desire to add the O’Brien Locks site as an adjoining landfill to its huge CID dump just east of Altgeld. Ryan spoke first with Bruce Orenstein, UNO’s new Southeast Chicago organizer, and Mary Ellen Montes. “Waste Management would be very willing to bring benefits to the community, gifts to the community, for your acquiesence, your agreement to allow us to dump there,” Orenstein remembers Ryan explaining. He and Lena were intrigued by Ryan’s offer but wanted to ponder what dollar amount would be appropriate and how such a sum should be managed and invested. Ryan also called on George Schopp at St. Kevin, Dominic Carmon at Our Lady of the Gardens, Hazel Johnson of PCR, civic activists ranging from Marian Byrnes to Foster Milhouse, and Obama on behalf of DCP. In mid-February Lena, Bruce, Hazel, and Barack met to discuss how to respond to WMI’s bold initiative.³⁸

But Obama’s top priority in early 1987 was recruiting supporters for his Career Education Network. In addition to Dan Lee, Aletha Strong Gibson, and Isabella Waller, the three DCP members most interested in the proposal, he also discussed his idea with four people he already knew: Dr. Alma Jones, the indomitable principal of Carver Primary School in Altgeld; John McKnight, whom he was getting to know well through Gamaliel; Anne Hallett of the Wieboldt Foundation, with whom he had spoken in November and who had given DCP a $7,500 grant; and John Ayers, a close friend of Ken Rolling’s who had observed DCP’s “Let Loretta speak!” meeting with Maria Cerda and worked for the prestigious Commercial Club. McKnight and/or Hallett suggested that Barack approach Fred Hess, and Hess recommended that Barack introduce himself to Gwendolyn LaRoche, the education director of the Chicago Urban League. LaRoche scheduled a thirty-minute appointment, but her conversation with the “very polite young man” lasted “about two hours.” LaRoche explained that much of the federal and state funding that was supposed to go to schools with high concentrations of poor students was instead being spent on administrative jobs at CPS headquarters. “Barack was very much interested in” how “our kids were being cheated” by CPS, Gwen LaRoche Rogers recalled years later. The Urban League was already sponsoring after-school tutoring programs in churches, an approach that would fit perfectly with DCP’s congregational base.

Obama reached out as well to Homer D. Franklin at Olive-Harvey, a fifteen-year-old community college just north of 103rd Street that was named for two African American Medal of Honor recipients, and to George Ayers at Chicago State University, on the south side of 95th Street. Olive-Harvey would be crucial to Barack’s hope of establishing a job-training program focused upon public aid recipients and especially Altgeld Gardens residents. DCP also won board of education president George Munoz’s agreement that CPS counseling specialists would cooperate with DCP’s effort.

Obama would later say that his Far South Side work was inspired by what he knew about the history of the black freedom struggle during the 1950s and 1960s, and in late January 1987, Chicago’s public television station, WTTW, joined in the nationwide PBS broadcast of the six-part landmark documentary series Eyes on the Prize on Wednesday evenings at 9:00 P.M. These first six episodes covered only the years from 1954 to 1965—a second set of eight programs three years later would include an episode focusing on Chicago’s own 1965–1967 Freedom Movement—but the Defender and the Tribune publicized and praised the early 1987 Eyes telecasts. The Defender also accorded a full-page headline to a review of a new biography of Martin Luther King Jr., calling the book “a magnificent and unvarnished study” based upon “exhaustive research.” Written by one of Eyes’ three senior advisers, the book devoted the better part of two long chapters to King’s role in the Chicago Freedom Movement. Those chapters highlighted how one particular Chicago civil rights activist, thirty-two-year-old schoolteacher Al Raby, had convinced King to come to Chicago and had been at his side throughout every day of the 1966 campaign.

In subsequent years, Raby played a significant role in the 1970 revision of Illinois’s state constitution before running unsuccessfully for 5th Ward alderman in Hyde Park. Eight years later, Harold Washington’s top political adviser, Jacky Grimshaw, persuaded Washington to name Raby his campaign manager for his successful 1983 primary campaign against incumbent mayor Jane Byrne. But as Raby’s longtime closest friend, Steve Perkins, later explained, “Al and Harold just didn’t have good chemistry” and indeed “rarely communicated.” Once Washington triumphed, Raby was “moved aside” and “totally marginalized.” Raby ran for Washington’s now-vacant congressional seat, but the new mayor backed labor veteran Charles Hayes, and Raby’s loss seemingly left him with “no future in Chicago.” He accepted the number two post at Project VOTE!, a trailblazing voter registration organization, and moved to Washington, D.C.

Eighteen months later, in early 1985, Raby returned to Chicago after Jacky Grimshaw convinced Harold Washington to name him as the new head of the city’s Commission on Human Relations. But Al Raby was no one’s bureaucrat. Instead, as Steve Perkins would emphasize, notwithstanding how Al was “an intensely private person,” he was also “a continual talent scout, always looking for new activists with special gifts.” Judy Stevens, Raby’s deputy at the commission, also watched as “he mentored people.” By early 1987 Al was living in Hyde Park with Patty Novick, who two decades earlier had introduced Al and Steve.

One morning Obama joined Patty and Al for breakfast, and soon after, Al called Steve: “he wanted me to come have breakfast with Barack, and so we had breakfast at Mellow Yellow,” a well-known Hyde Park eatery. “Barack was fabulous. He was smart, he was articulate—it was a joy to meet him,” Steve remembered. Patty recalled how “I want you to talk to” was one of Al’s favorite phrases, and one day in early 1987 Raby took Barack to City Hall and introduced him to Jacky Grimshaw, who was serving as Washington’s director of intergovernmental affairs. According to Jane Ramsey, the mayor’s director of community relations, “Al was all over the place,” and Grimshaw can picture Barack that day: “he was a kid,” although a “very serious” one. But Raby was far more influenced by his experiences with King than by city politics. “Al was determined to create a base for a long-term movement,” Steve Perkins emphasizes.³⁹

In early 1987, Harold Washington’s aides were focused on his reelection, and Jane Byrne was mounting a stiff challenge in the upcoming Democratic primary. The mayor’s employment aide Maria Cerda had made a point of renting a portion of Local 1033’s East Side union hall as a new jobs-referral site. Maury Richards said that income “was just totally instrumental in keeping us afloat” and “at a critical time.” Soon Richards was put on the city’s payroll part-time, allowing him to hold the local union together while also staffing the Dislocated Worker Program. Washington needed all the votes he could get in Southeast Side precincts, and Maury was deeply thankful to Washington, whom he described as “a great guy.” Eight days before the election, steel was poured at South Works for the first time in seven months, another small victory for South Side steelworkers.

Just before midnight on February 25, Byrne conceded defeat after mounting a “powerful challenge” to Washington, whose 53.5 to 46.3 percent victory “was much closer than the mayor’s strategists had been counting on,” the Tribune reported the next day. But the headline “Mayor’s Tight Win Just Half the Battle” pointed to the April 7 general election, when Washington would face two white Democrats running as independents: Cook County assessor Tom Hynes, a relative “Mr. Clean” by Chicago standards, and 10th Ward alderman Ed Vrdolyak, the mayor’s worst nemesis. Fewer white voters had turned out to support Byrne than had voted against Washington in 1983, though the mayor’s own white support had barely risen from four years earlier. A larger, more heavily white electorate was possible on April 7, but Washington was “a heavy favorite” as long as both Hynes and Vrdolyak remained in the race.⁴⁰

On the Far South Side, Obama was trying to generate more grassroots support for his Career Education Network idea. Five high schools drew students from major portions of DCP’s neighborhoods: Harlan at 96th Street and South Michigan Avenue, Corliss on East 103rd Street, Julian at 103rd and South Elizabeth in Washington Heights, Fenger on South Wallace Street at 112th Street, and Carver down in Altgeld Gardens. Barack and a number of DCP’s most active members, including Dan Lee and Adrienne Jackson, began staging modest street corner demonstrations near the troubled high schools to draw attention to the schools’ horrible dropout rates, especially among young black men. One morning that spring, they held a rally on busy 111th Street a block north of Fenger, where one year earlier a Defender photo of the school’s top academic achievers had pictured one dozen African American women. Among the passersby was Illinois state senator Emil Jones Jr., whose office was less than two blocks away. “I stopped to see what they were out there for,” Jones later explained. He knew Adrienne Jackson, and she introduced Jones to Obama. “Barack was part of the group,” Jones recalled. “I met him on the corner.” But Jones was not happy to see protesters just down from the 34th Ward headquarters. “You have a lot to learn,” he told Adrienne and Barack. “You’ll get more flies with honey than you will the way you all are doing this.”

Jones viewed them as an “in-your-face type of group,” but invited them to his office, where they laid out their dropout prevention goals, and particularly Obama’s hope of winning state funding for his Career Education Network. Jones thought Obama was “very bright and intelligent and very sincere” but also “very aggressive and somewhat pushy.” More seriously, Jones thought Obama “was naive as related to the political situation.” He did not know that in most any Chicago ward organization, real power was with the ward committeeman, who often doubled as alderman, and not with state legislators, even one with the grand title of senator. In addition, the Illinois legislature was made up of two very separate chambers.

“We can work together,” Jones told Obama, but “you haven’t got a deal on the House side” until a supportive state representative was recruited. But with Jones’s backing, Barack now had a significant state political figure, in addition to Al Raby’s City Hall connections.⁴¹

But still Obama’s biggest challenge was expanding DCP’s base beyond Roman Catholic parishes like Holy Rosary and St. Catherine and PTA groups from middle-class Washington Heights. His first significant recruit was Rev. Rick Williams, the Panamanian-born pastor of Pullman Christian Reformed Church (PCRC) on East 103rd Street. PCRC had been founded in 1972 as a “mission” church when Roseland’s four long-standing Christian Reformed churches left the neighborhood in the wake of its rapid racial turnover. Williams arrived at PCRC in 1981, and by early 1987 PCRC possessed the most racially integrated congregation on the Far South Side.

One day Obama and Adrienne Jackson called on Williams, who was immediately impressed by Barack’s “humility” and “his ease with people.” Williams also saw that Obama’s focus on growing DCP was rooted in an IAF-style worldview: “they wanted to work with churches because churches have values and churches have people and churches have money.” But Williams also knew that building an ecumenical base for DCP would be difficult because “these churches are of different persuasions, denominations, ways of thinking…. Creating community out of these churches” would be “a very complicated thing,” and even more difficult for some pastors because Barack himself was “not a church-going person.” But because Obama was “a principled person,” Williams readily signed on, telling Barack, “You are wise beyond your years,” when he and Adrienne departed.

Just a block west of Holy Rosary was Reformation Lutheran Church. One young woman from that congregation, Kimetha Webster, had been active in DCP for months, and sometime that spring, she took Barack and Bill Stenzel there and introduced them to the church’s new young pastor, Tyrone Partee, as well as her father, John Webster, a congregation mainstay and the church’s caretaker. If Obama’s Career Education Network became a reality, its after-school counseling and tutoring efforts would require more space than Holy Rosary alone could offer. Obama explained DCP’s aspirations before asking, “Pastor, do you think it’s possible that we could do some things here at the church?”

Partee was, like Barack, just twenty-five years old, and he came from a politically active family. His uncle Cecil Partee, the longtime committeeman of the 20th Ward, had served for two decades in the Illinois state legislature, including one term as president of the state Senate, a landmark achievement for an African American in the thoroughly white Illinois state capitol. Cecil Partee also was a crucial supporter of Harold Washington and now served as city treasurer. Tyrone immediately offered Barack Reformation’s support and space in its Fellowship Hall. “I believed in what he was doing for our community,” Partee said. But getting to know John Webster was even more valuable because he offered to show Barack around Roseland. “Everybody knew Mr. Webster,” Partee recalled. “He knew the good and the bad on everything.”

A third pastor Barack called upon was Alonzo C. Pruitt, a former Chicago Urban League community organizer and now the young vicar of St. George and St. Matthias Episcopal Church on 111th Street. St. George was known for its weekday program that each morning fed about forty hungry people, some of whom lived at the nearby Roseland YMCA and others in the neighborhood’s abandoned buildings. Pruitt was also impressed with Obama and agreed to lend his name to DCP’s efforts.⁴²

Among Roseland’s many churches, the faith most widely represented was not Catholic, Lutheran, Christian Reformed, or Episcopal; it was Baptist. Baptist churches were freestanding and independent, not tied to any denominational hierarchy or bishop, and their pastors could be as iconoclastic as they chose to be. By early 1987, central Roseland’s most immediately pressing problem, as Pruitt’s feed-the-hungry program highlighted, was the increase in the number of homeless people. That problem had its roots in the foreclosed loans and boarded-up homes that had increased dramatically in the past seven years due to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, in the steel mills and also at previously vibrant manufacturing firms, from Dutch Boy and Sherwin-Williams paints to Carl Buddig meats and the Libby, McNeill & Libby food cannery.

Late in 1986 the Daily Calumet’s superb steel reporter, Larry Galica, in an article about the human costs of unemployment, quoted Alonzo Grant, a black Roseland homeowner with a wife and three children who had lost his job at South Works and not found a new one. “I have no income whatsoever. I can’t receive public aid. I’m three months behind in my house mortgage payments, I’m two months behind in my car payments, and I’m behind in my utility bills.”

Starting in late 1985, Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS), a ten-year-old foundation-supported organization whose mission was to help homeowners in declining, heavily minority neighborhoods, began planning a Roseland program at the request of Ellen Benjamin, executive director of the Borg-Warner Foundation. Benjamin had been interested in Roseland for several years, and within six months, the Borg-Warner Foundation committed $450,000 to NHS Roseland. Chicago’s Department of Housing soon matched that with $500,000 in city funds, and the state of Illinois contributed $200,000. By late 1986, NHS had named a neighborhood director and had appointed a local board that included Salim Al Nurridin, a Roseland civic activist and native of Altgeld Gardens who had converted to Islam years earlier.⁴³

Early in 1987, with Alonzo Pruitt of St. George in the lead, six Roseland churches announced they were offering overnight shelter to any needy person on evenings when the temperature fell well below freezing. Also participating was Mission of Faith Baptist Church, whose pastor, Rev. Eugene Gibson, was president of the Roseland Clergy Association (RCA), and Fernwood United Methodist Church, whose pastor, Rev. Al Sampson, was a forty-eight-year-old veteran of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference whom King himself had ordained as a minister. Those three clergymen were taking the lead in protesting the lack of black professionals at a heavily patronized bank in Beverly, a largely white neighborhood immediately west of Washington Heights. They were also demanding youth employment opportunities at a large shopping plaza west of Beverly in Evergreen Park.

Pruitt, Gibson, and Sampson’s efforts received prominent coverage in the Defender, and sometime in early 1987 Obama got Gibson on the phone and won an invitation to the RCA’s next regular meeting. As Obama later told it, he made a brief presentation to the ten or so clergymen before someone else arrived late to the meeting. “A tall, pecan-colored man” with straightened hair “swept back in a pompadour,” wearing “a blue, double-breasted suit and a large gold cross across his scarlet tie” asked Barack whom he represented.

When Barack said DCP, the minister said that reminded him of a white man who had called on him many months before. “Funny-looking guy. Jewish name. You connected to the Catholics?” When Barack said yes, this person whom Obama called “Charles Smalls,” responded that “the last thing we need is to join up with a bunch of white money and Catholic churches and Jewish organizers to solve our problems … the archdiocese in this city is run by stone-cold racists. Always has been. White folks come in here thinking they know what’s best for us…. It’s all a political thing.” Smalls knew Obama meant well, but Barack wrote that he felt he was “roasting like a pig on a spit.”

Years later, a journalist named Al Sampson as the intolerant preacher, and Obama later confirmed that identification, explaining that he had just changed the appearance of the short, stout, and dark-skinned Sampson. Asked for the first time about the allegation, Sampson said he did not recall ever meeting Barack Obama in the late 1980s, but in a 2002 video interview Sampson had expressed his admiration for the notoriously bigoted Louis Farrakhan.

More than a quarter century later, Alonzo Pruitt still had a “vibrant memory” of that RCA meeting, with Barack wearing “an open-necked pale yellow shirt” and light brown dress shoes. Pruitt could picture Barack “carefully listening” and “responding with courtesy and restraint even when” others “did not practice courtesy and restraint. I was impressed that he was not defensive or hostile even when a reasonable person might choose the latter. At first I thought he was aloof, but as the meeting went on I realized that his getting angry would simply create a new issue with which to deal, and he was focused on what he perceived to be the heart of the matter.”⁴⁴

Obama received a dramatically warmer welcome when he visited Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) on 95th Street. Trinity was well known to every minister on the South Side because its pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., had grown his congregation from just eighty-seven members when he started there in 1972 to more than four thousand by the day Obama first visited. Almost two years earlier, Adrienne Jackson had tried unsuccessfully to interest Wright in DCP, and in Obama’s own later account, an aged “Reverend Philips” with a dying church first recommended he visit Wright. Yet among Chicago’s black preachers, an undocumented consensus would emerge that it was Rev. Lacey K. Curry, the dynamic pastor of Emmanuel Baptist, a vibrant church in the Auburn Gresham community north of DCP’s self-defined 95th Street boundary, who had told Barack to go see Wright.

But Wright would attest to much of Obama’s account of his first visit to Trinity, where Wright’s attractive secretary, Donita Powell Anderson, was at least as interested in the young gentleman caller as was her pastor. “She was smitten,” Wright smilingly remembered. In Barack’s telling, Wright’s first words to him were a humorous greeting: “Let’s see if Donita here will let me have a minute of your time.”

As of March 1987, forty-five-year-old Jerry Wright had already lived an eventful life. Raised by two well-educated parents in the Germantown neighborhood of northwest Philadelphia, Wright knew the black church from his earliest years because his father, Jeremiah Sr., was pastor of Grace Baptist Church. Years later, in a long interview, Wright would confess to misbehavior during his high school years—including an arrest for car theft—that was more serious than any of Obama’s indulgences while at Punahou. Jerry followed his father’s and mother’s footsteps and began college at Virginia Union University in Richmond before dropping out and enlisting in the marines. After two years, he changed uniforms and became a navy medical corpsman, ending up at Lyndon B. Johnson’s Bethesda bedside when the president underwent surgery in late 1966.

Upon leaving the service, Wright enrolled at Howard University to complete his undergraduate degree and also earn a master’s. Reconnecting to religious faith, Wright entered the University of Chicago Divinity School before becoming an assistant pastor at Beth Eden Baptist Church, in the Morgan Park neighborhood west of central Roseland. By late 1971, that affiliation had ended and Wright was searching for new employment when an older friend and mentor, Rev. Kenneth B. Smith, mentioned that the small congregation of Trinity UCC, where Smith had been the founding pastor in 1961, was searching for a new minister. Wright was interviewed by Vallmer Jordan, one of TUCC’s most dedicated members, and on March 1, 1972, Wright became Trinity’s pastor.

Wright inherited a small congregation and an annual budget of just $39,000, but the church had something almost equally valuable: a newly coined church slogan that declared Trinity as “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.” When the United Church of Christ created Trinity, it was aiming for a “high potential church” that would attract “the right kind of black people,” according to longtime Trinity member and staffer Julia M. Speller in her University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation. “The class discrimination exhibited by the denomination” was stark, and soon after arriving at Trinity, Wright complained publicly that his new congregation had become “a citadel for the ultra-middle-class Negro.” He later quoted one founding member as confessing that “we could out-white white people,” and he also wrote that a “ ‘white church in a black face’ is exactly what we had become!”

Just two blocks east of Trinity were the Lowden Homes, where DCP’s Nadyne Griffin lived, and Wright later remembered that when he arrived at Trinity, “we first had to stop looking at the neighbors around the church as ‘those people.’ ” Within eight months, he had introduced a new youth choir, and not long after that, he told the senior choir to expand its repertoire to embrace gospel music. Those innovations caused almost two dozen of Trinity’s existing members to leave the church, and Jerry later wrote that “eighteen months into my pastorate … I felt as if I were a failure. It seemed to me as if everyone was leaving our church.”

But these changes brought in new members, and by 1977 Trinity’s congregation had grown to four hundred. In late 1978, the church moved into a new building with a seven-hundred-seat sanctuary, and in 1980, with Wright’s powerful sermons now being broadcast on the radio, Trinity’s membership began a rapid climb, reaching sixteen hundred by early 1981. The congregation included a number of prominent black Chicagoans, such as well-known Illinois appellate judge R. Eugene Pincham and Manford Byrd, like Val Jordan a charter member since 1961. In early 1981, when Byrd was passed over for promotion from deputy to superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools in favor of a black woman from California, Trinitarians were among the many black Chicagoans who vocally protested the denial of what Trinity called Byrd’s “earned ascension” in favor of an outsider. In response, Val Jordan and several others drafted a wide-ranging statement of values, modeled in part on the Ten Commandments, as a way of honoring Byrd at an August 9, 1981, ceremony. Trinity’s twelve-point “Black Value System” was notable for its powerful “disavowal of the pursuit of middleclassness” and an attendant warning against thinking “in terms of ‘we’ and ‘they’ ”—i.e., “those people”—“instead of ‘US’!”

By fall of 1982, Trinity had reached twenty-eight hundred members and its annual budget was now $700,000. In response, Wright and a trio of academically oriented members—Sokoni Karanja, Ayana Johnson-Karanja, and Iva E. Carruthers—drafted an almost two-hundred-page “compendium text for church-wide study.” Wright wrote an eleven-page statement of Trinity’s mission, beginning with a forceful call for “a conscious cutting across class and caste lines and so-called economic levels” and “utterly abandoning or rejecting the notion of the ‘middle class’ as the proper vineyard into which God has called us to labor.”

Wright also called out the usually unspoken dangers that “Black self-hatred” posed in African American communities, and he later recalled with some embarrassment how he had been entirely ignorant of the harm that youth gangs were doing in neighborhoods like Roseland until his eldest daughter Janet and her boyfriend were robbed at gunpoint in 1982 on Halsted Avenue, less than ten blocks from the Wrights’ home, by several Gangster Disciples. But perhaps equally daunting was how his daughter got her property returned, along with an apology, in just three hours after complaining to a next-door neighbor who knew who to call.

In that 1982 essay, Wright emphasized that Trinitarians “start from the cultural strengths already in existence within the Black tradition,” a view in keeping with John McKnight’s social capital emphasis. Throughout the decade, Trinity’s outreach ministries would grow along with the church, with a food co-op and a credit union being joined by a housing ministry that addressed the problem of foreclosed, boarded-up homes plus a high school counseling project and Saturday youth programs. “Educating constituents as to all the nuances and subtleties of the racist political system operative in Chicago,” Wright wrote, “is a very definite part of our ministry at Trinity.”

In 1983, Wright took a lead role, along with eight other black churchmen including Al Sampson, in fervently endorsing Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign. Borrowing Trinity’s own “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian” slogan, the statement was supported by more than 250 members of the clergy. By 1986 Trinity had more than four thousand members, twenty-eight of whom were preparing for the ministry, and Wright was preaching at two separate Sunday services to cope with the growth. One charter member cited Wright’s “ability to call all his parishioners by their names, even as the church membership grew into the thousands,” as one more of his impressive gifts. Julia Speller wrote that by 1986 “a definite mission-consciousness began to emerge at Trinity,” and Jerry was pursuing a deepening interest in black Americans’ African cultural roots. Wright had been profoundly influenced by the pioneering black liberation theologian James H. Cone’s landmark 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power, although he strongly faulted Cone for calling African Americans “a people who were completely stripped of their African heritage.” Trinity, Wright wrote, “affirms our Africanness,” including “the premise that Christianity did not start in Europe. It started in Africa,” and “we affirm our African roots and use Africa as a starting point for understanding ourselves, understanding God, and understanding the world.” Indeed, “we understand Africa as the place where civilization began.”

By the time of Obama’s visit to Trinity in March 1987, word about Jeremiah Wright’s church had spread well beyond Chicago. A PBS Frontline television crew and well-known black journalist Roger Wilkins had just spent days at Trinity preparing an hour-long documentary on the church that would be nationally broadcast ten weeks later. “The rooms of Trinity are crammed full of its members all day, every day,” Wilkins told viewers while describing the church’s outreach ministries and Bible-study classes. “Trinity is one of the fastest growing and strongest black churches in America.”

Responding to Wilkins’s questions, Wright spoke colloquially and bluntly. For black teenagers in Roseland, Wright said, “You can’t be what you ain’t seen…. So many of our young boys haven’t seen nothing but the gangs and the pimps and the brothers on the corner,” and in their daily lives “they never have their horizons lifted.” But Wright also emphasized black Americans’ lack of self-esteem. “If I can somehow be white: a lot of black people have that feeling. If I can somehow be accepted. And Africa is a bad thing. I’m not African. I’m not African. I’m part Indian. I’m part Chinese. I’m part anything.”

That part of Wright’s worldview would resonate deeply with Barack, but his perspective on the breadth and depth of American racism matched that of Martin Luther King Jr. “How do we attack a system, get at systemic evil and realize that it’s not the individuals, it’s the system,” he told Wilkins. “You hate the sin and not the sinner.” Wilkins closed the telecast with a prophetic description of Trinity’s importance. “This church will be measured by how much of its power will reach beyond its own doors, and by how much its members will reach back, back to those left behind.” The day of the broadcast, the Sun-Times told Chicagoans not to miss “a compelling and moving portrait of one Chicago clergyman who has made a difference.” Jeremiah Wright “sets a standard of excellence that should inspire clergy of all faiths.”

“The first time I walked into Trinity, I felt at home,” Barack later told Wright’s daughter Janet. Furthermore, Obama recalled, “there was an explicitly political aspect to the mission and message of Trinity at that time that I found appealing.” In their first 1987 conversation, Barack tried to sell Wright on DCP’s program. “He came with this Saul Alinsky community organizing vision,” Wright recounted years later. “He was interested in organizing churches,” yet Barack’s depth of knowledge about the black church was woeful indeed. “He didn’t know who J. H. Jackson was,” Wright remembered, naming the conservative, dictatorial president of the National Baptist Convention who pastored Chicago’s Olivet Baptist Church and was infamous for changing Olivet’s address from 3101 South Parkway to 405 East 31st Street when Parkway was renamed Martin Luther King Drive.

Wright remembers that Obama “had this wild-eyed idealistic exciting plan” of “organizing pastors and churches” all across Roseland in support of his Career Education Network. “I looked at him and I said, ‘Do you know what Joseph’s brother said when they saw him coming across the field?” Obama, utterly unfamiliar with the Bible, said no. “They said ‘Behold the dreamer.’ You’re dreaming. This is not going to happen,” Wright told him. “You’re in a minefield you have no concept about whatsoever in terms of trying to get us all to work together, even on something as important as the educational issues in the Roseland community,” Wright explained, citing the twin evils of denominational divides and local Chicago politics.

Given Wright’s busy schedule, that first conversation ended after an hour. But Obama soon returned, talking first with Donita before sitting down with Wright, who remembers he had “questions about this unknown entity, the black church, and its theology…. I had studied Islam in West Africa, and he wanted to know about that.” In addition, “we talked about the difference between theological investigation, rabbinic study, and personal faith, personal beliefs, and how I separated those two,” Wright recalled. “Our visits became more of that nature and that level than the community organizing piece, because I said, ‘That ain’t going to happen. If you mention my name, I can tell you preachers who are not coming in the Roseland area.’ ” That surprised Obama, and Wright also spoke about the black church’s “rabid anti-Catholic” sentiment. “We would spend time talking about religious stuff like that to help him understand that brick wall he’s running up against in terms of organizing churches.” So “most of the time … we talked about how insane” religious antipathies could be, “more so than community organizing.”

Barack continued to visit Wright in the months ahead, and their conversations gave Obama a greater understanding of why almost all of the people with whom he was working held their religious faith as a source of strength that could give them courage. It not only “bolstered them against heartache and disappointment” but could be “an active, palpable agent in the world,” undergirding their involvement by offering “a source of hope.” Witnessing that, Barack remembered, “moved me deeply” and “made me recognize that many of the impulses that … were propelling me forward were the same impulses that express themselves through the church.”⁴⁵

Obama was even more warmly welcomed by Father Michael Pfleger at St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church in the Gresham neighborhood, well above DCP’s northern boundary. The thirty-eight-year-old Pfleger had been a seminary classmate of Holy Rosary’s Bill Stenzel, had first met Jerry Wright five years earlier in an Ashland Avenue barber shop, and was well acquainted with Deacon Tommy West, the energetic DCP member from St. Catherine’s who spent more time at St. Sabina than at his home church. Pfleger had grown up barely a mile west of St. Sabina on Chicago’s Southwest Side, and in 1966, at age seventeen, he had watched as an angry white mob attacked an open-housing march being led by Martin Luther King Jr. in Marquette Park, just a few blocks north. By 1987 Pfleger had been at St. Sabina for twelve years, and although his congregation was nowhere near the size of Trinity’s, no church in Chicago, and certainly not one with a white priest, offered as vibrant a Sunday service as Mike Pfleger did.

Years later, Pfleger recalled that Obama “came in and introduced himself and what he was doing.” He spoke about how churches “were the most powerful tool in the community for social justice and for equality” and how they should be actively pursuing those goals, not watching from the sidelines. “I was amazed by his brilliance,” Pfleger recalled; he was struck as well by “his aggressiveness.” Pfleger asked Barack “what was his church,” because “people that want to work with churches ought to be in a church.” Barack replied that “he was still looking, had been visiting some places, Trinity being one of them.” Pfleger had expected a twenty-minute conversation, “and it went much longer.” He offered Obama his full support, and after Barack left, Pfleger could remember “walking out of this room saying, ‘That’s somebody to be watched. He’s going places.’ ”⁴⁶

For Obama, these early months of 1987 were intense as he expanded his horizons and added to his growing set of influential acquaintances. On March 2, in faraway Jakarta, Lolo Soetoro died of liver disease at age fifty-two. If Ann called Barack with the news—“they did not talk often,” Sheila recalled—he did not mention it to her or anyone else. He also “never talked that much about his dad” or his death to Sheila, and as best she could tell, “Barack’s father played virtually no emotional role in Barack’s life.” He continued his weekly conversations with Greg Galluzzo—an hour on March 4, ninety minutes each on March 13 and 20, another hour on March 24—and he also introduced his good friend Johnnie Owens to Galluzzo.

Barack and Johnnie had begun discussing whether Johnnie would leave Friends of the Parks and join Barack at DCP, but Owens needed a salary much like Barack’s $20,000, and that meant Barack would have to add the MacArthur Foundation as a funder in addition to CHD, Woods, and Wieboldt.

By mid-March, Barack’s most pressing concern was on the jobs front, and on Monday, March 23—just two weeks before Election Day—Mayor Washington was coming to Roseland to open the much-delayed new Far South Side jobs center that his employment deputy Maria Cerda had agreed to establish more than six months earlier. In the run-up to that ceremony, Barack dealt extensively with Salim Al Nurridin, a politically sophisticated Roseland figure whose Roseland Community Development Corporation (RCDC) was relatively low profile but whose long-standing acquaintance with one of Barack’s new mentors allowed for an easy introduction to this young organizer who was “under the tutelage of Al Raby.”

As a native of Altgeld, Salim knew Hazel Johnson, and he had significantly helped 9th Ward alderman Perry Hutchinson, now well known for his star role in the FBI’s sting operation, win the seat he was now in danger of losing on April 7. Salim had become a Muslim under the influence of Roseland’s least-known figure of quiet political significance, Sheikh Muhammad Umar Faruqi, who oversaw a mosque on South Michigan Avenue, but Salim was not a Nation of Islam “Black Muslim.” The new jobs center would be located in a building that Faruqi and Roseland’s low-key Muslim community had acquired. Salim worked easily with Barack, whom he saw as “a very energetic and purposeful young man, with a passion to do things effectively.”

On that Monday morning, Washington and his two-man security detail arrived at the RCDC office at 33 East 111th Place. The mayor had been told he would be greeted by Loretta Augustine on behalf of DCP as well as Salim, and that Maria Cerda, Perry Hutchinson, DCP’s Dan Lee, and “Barac” Obama would be there as well. A city photographer snapped away as the hefty Washington, holding his own notes and with his trench coat thrown over his left arm, shook hands with local well-wishers as a beaming Loretta stood to his right clad in a handsome white coat. The mayor and Cerda listened carefully as Loretta thanked him for coming. One photograph captured Sheikh Faruqi a few paces behind Washington; three different photographs include a tall young man with a slightly bushy Afro standing in the rear of the small room, listening intensely to Washington and Loretta.

Obama would later quote the mayor as saying to Loretta: “I’ve heard excellent things about your work.” Then the entire group walked outside and turned south on South Michigan Avenue. With traffic blocked off and the sun in their faces, Washington and Loretta led the procession a little more than a block to the new office at 11220 South Michigan. Sheikh Faruqi trailed slightly to Loretta’s left; Cerda, 34th Ward aldermanic candidate Lemuel Austin, and state senator Emil Jones Jr. trailed to Washington’s right. At the front door of the new office, Washington, Cerda, Loretta, and a camera-hogging Perry Hutchinson posed with a white ribbon and a pair of scissors. The mayor spoke to the crowd, and then the ribbon was cut. The mayor climbed into his car for a short drive to 200 East 115th Street, where he broke ground for a future Roseland health center. Barack had emphasized repeatedly to Loretta that she should press Washington to attend a DCP rally for their Career Education Network program, but Loretta had not gotten a commitment.

In his own, overly dramatized retelling of the morning, Barack cursed in anger at her failing and stomped off while Dan Lee tried to calm him down. Loretta remembered no such scene, saying she had “never seen him angry” even when he must have been. “I’ve seen him drop his head,” but, beyond that, “he never showed it.” Tommy West agreed. “You could never see him angry.” Later that day, Barack had an initial appointment with a Hyde Park physician, Dr. David L. Scheiner, who would remember Obama exhibiting no emotional turmoil during his office visits.⁴⁷

On March 28, four hundred former Wisconsin Steel workers attended a seventh-anniversary rally in South Chicago, where their pro bono lawyer, Tom Geoghegan, told them he hoped their lawsuit against International Harvester—which had just renamed itself Navistar—would soon go to trial. A day earlier Frank Lumpkin and others had picketed outside Navistar’s annual meeting at the Art Institute of Chicago. Envirodyne Industries, to which Harvester had sold Wisconsin before its sudden closing, was also suing Navistar, “alleging fraud and racketeering,” the Tribune noted. The U.S. Economic Development Administration had recouped a tiny portion of its $55 million loan to Envirodyne by selling the mill as scrap to Cuyahoga Wrecking for $3 million, but Cuyahoga went bankrupt before clearing the site, leaving the rusting shell of one mill as a haunting symbol of South Deering’s past. “Frank Lumpkin deserves a spot in the organizers’ hall of fame,” the Tribune rightly observed.

On April 2, Obama joined Mary Ellen Montes and Bruce Orenstein for a joint UNO–DCP press conference in response to Mary Ryan’s private approaches on behalf of Waste Management Inc. Barack, Lena, and Bruce had decided that playing hard to get—indeed, very hard to get—would maximize the price WMI had already indicated it was willing to pay to expand its Southeast Side landfill capacity. UNO and DCP publicly embraced a no-exceptions moratorium on any new or expanded landfills, while calling for WMI to “commit to a long-term reinvestment program” for the “economic development of neighborhoods around its landfills,” the Sun-Times reported. UNO and DCP were sending a clear message they were willing to make a deal, but WMI had to be generous in purchasing their assent.

The next day, Barack again met for an hour with Greg Galluzzo—in April, as in March, they would have five hours of conversation spread over four weekly meetings. Most of Chicago was consumed by the mayoral contest that would climax on April 7. Ed Vrdolyak was running a surprisingly populist, multiethnic campaign, while Tom Hynes seemed focused on trying to take down Vrdolyak rather than targeting Washington. The Tribune heartily endorsed the mayor, saying that “Chicago is in better shape today than it was when Mr. Washington took office” in 1983. Uppermost among Washington’s “unfinished business,” the paper pointedly added, was “helping depressed neighborhoods get better housing and more jobs.”

Two days before the election, Tom Hynes dropped out, in a strategic attempt to unite white voters behind Vrdolyak. On Election Day, Washington swept through Altgeld Gardens in a voter-turnout effort, and he ultimately triumphed with almost 54 percent of the vote. One poll showed him winning 15 percent of white voters and 97 percent of blacks. In Washington’s best precinct, Marlene Dillard’s London Towne Homes, a young 8th Ward precinct captain named Donne Trotter was given credit for the mayor winning 795 out of the 798 votes cast. Citywide, Ed Vrdolyak received 42 percent, which the Tribune noted was “better than anyone had predicted.” There also was no question that “the biggest loser” was Tom Hynes, whose sullying of the family name among black Chicagoans would redound in another election two decades later. Another loser was Alderman Perry Hutchinson, who was narrowly edged out by his predecessor, Robert Shaw, in what one observer termed “a choice between two snakes.” An indictment followed just six days later, and Hutchinson was soon on his way to federal prison, where he died at age forty-eight.⁴⁸

Obama had attained such a glowing reputation among the CHD staffers at the Chicago archdiocese that Cynthia Norris, the thirty-year-old director of the Office of Black Catholic Ministries, requested that he conduct a training session for the eighteen delegates Chicago was sending to the National Black Catholic Congress in Washington in late May. Norris wanted the delegates to be well prepared to represent Chicago at the huge assembly, the first such gathering since 1894, and Obama trained them in the basement of Holy Name Cathedral, the famous diocesan seat just west of downtown’s Magnificent Mile.

At the end of April, Gamaliel hosted a second weeklong training session at Techny Towers in suburban Northbrook. DCP’s Margaret Bagby was among the forty or so community members who attended, along with Lena, Mike Kruglik, and CHD’s Renee Brereton, plus younger organizers such as Linda Randle. Augustana College senior David Kindler, a young trainee who had already gotten a taste of organizing work in the Quad Cities area where Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa, face each other across the Mississippi River, would remember Mary Gonzales as the star performer among an otherwise all-male and largely macho cast of trainers: Greg Galluzzo, Peter Martinez, and Phil Mullins. “Hard-assed” and “maternal,” Mary was just “phenomenally good.” Barack took charge of at least two sessions, and Kindler would recall him as someone who “likes everybody to love him.”

Galluzzo wanted to nurture and develop new, full-time organizers, and he was regularly petitioning every possible foundation to contribute to the first-year salaries of beginning organizers, just as Kellman had done with CHD and Woods when he hired Barack. Galluzzo knew that organizers must develop “sensitivity, patience and inventiveness” and understand that “he or she is there as a facilitator” who has to motivate community organizations composed entirely of volunteers. “Since every church is an important potential organizing base,” Greg said, “an organizer needs to know something of the theological and institutional characteristics of the churches in the community.”⁴⁹

Barack’s top priority was still his Career Education Network, and his goal was to win Washington’s support for the program. Thanks to Al Raby’s introductions at City Hall, Barack had already spoken with Luz Martinez, a relatively junior aide, about a mayoral endorsement, and in early May a seven-page document entitled “Proposal for Career Education and Intervention Services in the Far South Side of Chicago” was sent to Washington with a cover letter bearing the names of DCP president Dan Lee and now “Executive Director” Barack H. Obama. The cover letter said DCP wanted “to identify concrete ways that we can positively impact our schools” and emphasized that they “are not seeking any City funding for our program,” although they did want the mayor’s “whole-hearted support and endorsement of our program” and requested that he meet with DCP leaders sometime in the next month. They also asked that Washington “keynote a large meeting of parents and church leadership,” which DCP hoped to convene in mid-June.

In Barack’s own letter to Luz Martinez, he volunteered that Al Raby might have already mentioned DCP’s request to her or to her immediate boss, Kari Moe. The proposal said the number of blacks graduating from college in Illinois had declined since 1975, and that the dropout rate at the five Far South Side high schools was more than 40 percent. The scale of what Obama and DCP envisioned was grandiose, with “two central offices” coordinating the work of staff representatives at each high school plus supplementary personnel in various churches and social service agencies. The document said the program would give “individualized attention to at-risk students” and offer “incentives for student performance.” It would be “administered by the Developing Communities Project,” would have thirteen full-time employees as well as twenty part-time tutors, and required an annual budget of $531,000. “State funds would be used to fund this first year of the program,” with corporate and foundation support increasing the projected budget to $600,000 and then $775,000 in the two subsequent years. Obama’s plan might have seemed familiar to anyone who recalled Jerry Kellman’s Regional Employment Network and its initial $500,000 in state funding, but in this case underperforming high school students were taking the place of unemployed steelworkers.

Barack believed a key ingredient was his “Proposed Advisory Board,” a list of fifteen people who “have been invited or have already accepted” a request to participate. His list was headed by Albert Raby and state senator Emil Jones, but it also included Carver-Wheatley principal Dr. Alma Jones, Chicago State president Dr. George Ayers, and Olive-Harvey president Homer Franklin. They were followed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Dr. Gwendolyn LaRoche of the Chicago Urban League—whose name was misspelled—and Father Michael Pfleger. Also on the list were Ann Hallett of the Wieboldt Foundation, education researcher Dr. Fred Hess, Northwestern University’s Dr. John McKnight, and John Ayers from the Commercial Club. The list concluded with three of DCP’s most committed members: Dan Lee, Aletha Gibson, and Isabella Waller.

Obama’s proposal did not go over well at City Hall. Three of the mayor’s aides marked up the document, highlighting its astonishing scale, eye-popping budget, and the preponderance of professionals on the proposed board. One staffer wrote that it needed “more parents/local community residents, student(s), employer(s),” but even a Sun-Times story headlined “ ’85 Dropout Rate Topped 50% at 29 City High Schools” failed to elevate DCP’s request among staff priorities. Fred Hess emphasized in the Tribune how the utmost priority should be “to make the schools more accountable at the local level,” and by May powerful Illinois House speaker Michael J. Madigan, along with Danny Solis and Mary Gonzales of UNO, had embraced a Hess-drafted school autonomy pilot program, House Bill 935.

That plan would allow up to forty-six schools to operate independently of the CPS’s hierarchical bureaucracy, and when Washington appeared at UNO’s twenty-eight-hundred-person annual convention at the Chicago Hilton on May 21, he was pressed to support the bill. Washington told the crowd that UNO had “hit the nail on the head” in demanding more local autonomy, which Hess and others interpreted as an endorsement. The bill passed the Illinois House the next day, but Washington’s top aides quickly signaled that the mayor was actually opposed to such a “drastic” decentralization of CPS. Rival researcher Don Moore at Designs for Change opposed it too, and when Education Committee chairman Arthur Berman killed the measure in the state Senate, UNO acquiesced. Hess was furious, arguing that far-reaching educational changes during “the early years are the most crucial” if there was to be any hope of reducing sky-high dropout rates during high school.

Barack still sought a response from the mayor’s office to his plan, and he contacted Joe Washington, a young staffer who was a Roseland native, but made no headway. Disappointed at City Hall’s lack of interest, Barack wrote another letter to the mayor, this one featuring the names of fifteen additional signatories in addition to DCP president Dan Lee. Three were DCP members—Aletha Gibson, Isabella Waller, and Ellis Jordan, a fellow PTA leader—and twelve were Roseland clergymen: Bill Stenzel, Rick Williams, Tony Van Zanten, Paul Burak, Tom Kaminski (whose surname was misspelled), Eddie Knox (a new DCP recruit who was the recently arrived pastor of Pullman Presbyterian Church), Joe Bennett, Alonzo Pruitt, Tyrone Partee, and three more.

Obama’s inclusion of these new names suggested that a demonstration of DCP’s interdenominational support would impress either Joe Washington or the mayor. As pastors of “representative religious institutions of the Far South Side,” the signers warned that “high school age youth have been hit hard by the problems of the Chicago school system. In our area, we have seen too many youth drop out, join gangs, and turn to drugs and teen pregnancy instead of staying in school and going on to stable and successful careers.” The letter again requested a brief meeting with the mayor to discuss what was now called “a pilot Career Education and Intervention Network.” Noting that it would complement Washington’s nascent Mayor’s Education Summit, it said, “we see the urgent need for this program. We also see the need for your leadership and support in getting it started.”

But invoking the twelve Roseland pastors was not any more successful for Barack. One Washington aide jotted on the letter: “Mr. Obama is paid staff person. From Roseland upset w/ Joe.” A note to Kari Moe’s secretary instructed, “Do not schedule meeting,” and two weeks later the office file on DCP was marked “Close.” Months would pass before Barack was able to meet with one of Washington’s top aides.⁵⁰

By late May, Barack and DCP’s board decided to concentrate on the education project and pull back from any further employment focus. The new MOET office had been a signal achievement, but DCP’s visits to major local employers—Libby, McNeill & Libby, Carl Buddig, and Sherwin-Williams—to request that they hire local residents had only uncovered news that all three were soon closing their Far South Side plants. No one in DCP was more focused on jobs than Marlene Dillard, but this shift to education opened up tensions within the organization that began with Jerry Kellman’s initial decision to have DCP cover such a wide group of different neighborhoods. The southern trio of Altgeld Gardens, Eden Green, and Golden Gate were geographically separate from Roseland and West Pullman, and the westernmost and easternmost neighborhoods, Washington Heights and London Towne Homes, were not eager to be associated even with Roseland and especially not with the Gardens.

These divisions were personified by the differing perspectives of Loretta Augustine and her two close friends, Yvonne Lloyd and Margaret Bagby, each of whom lived just west of Altgeld, and the two different women who represented St. John de la Salle parish on DCP’s board, Marlene Dillard and Adrienne Jackson. “Certain issues I was not interested in,” Dillard explained years later. “I couldn’t center myself around individuals who were in Altgeld Gardens.” Residents of London Towne were “not on the poverty line,” and although they worried about job loss, they did not require the most basic job training skills that most Altgeld residents needed. In addition, “my son went to a private school,” so Roseland’s failing public high schools likewise were not a high priority. “I don’t feel that London Towne and Roseland can be linked together,” for “we have different values and different interests.”

Yvonne Lloyd, who lived near Altgeld in Eden Green, agreed with Dillard’s explanation. The areas “had different problems” and indeed were “totally different” because solid residential areas like London Towne had “facilities that Altgeld didn’t.” She, like Margaret and especially Loretta, believed Altgeld’s scale of deprivation meant it should be DCP’s top concern, because “those were the people we were really, really concerned about” the most. Betty Garrett, the gentle mainstay of Bill Stenzel’s congregation at Holy Rosary, watched as the divide deepened between Loretta and Marlene. “They fought constantly,” she recalled, mostly over Dillard’s emphasis on jobs. “Loretta wanted it to be more widespread.” Marlene understood that Loretta “was more interested in poverty issues” than she was, and over time her attitude became “let Loretta and them take care of Altgeld Gardens.”

Barack was very close to both Loretta and Marlene, often talking with Marlene’s mother and helping Marlene when she ran for election to London Towne’s board of directors. Yet by May 1987, there was no getting around the power struggle within DCP, and how Loretta’s viewpoint was more widely shared than Marlene’s. “Barack was the person who held it together” as long as it did hold, Marlene recalled, but after the May meeting, she shifted her attention to DCP’s nascent landfill alliance with UNO’s Southeast Chicago chapter.

If DCP hoped to make Barack’s Career Education Network even a modest-sized reality, it needed a second full-time organizer, such as Johnnie Owens, and the money to pay his salary. By late spring 1987, Barack had submitted his grant proposal to the MacArthur Foundation, where it went to Aurie Pennick, an African American and South Side native. MacArthur had little experience with community organizing, but soon after Pennick’s arrival in 1984, she had initiated a program called the Fund for Neighborhood Initiatives, which would direct about $700,000 annually toward “revitalizing some of Chicago’s poorest communities.” The small world of Chicago philanthropy was highly interactive, and Pennick had heard Ken Rolling speak glowingly about DCP and was aware that it was being funded by Woods, Wieboldt, and CHD. Pennick lived in West Pullman and her daughter attended Reformation Lutheran’s small school on 113th Street, so she knew of DCP’s connection there too. But when she read Barack’s proposal, she was “underwhelmed” by it. Pennick was deeply averse to the “top-down” type of projects that often won CHD support, and instead favored indigenous activists such as Hazel Johnson from Altgeld. She met with Barack and a trio of DCP members—Loretta, Marlene, and Yvonne—but came away with mixed reactions.

In every such meeting, as with city council leader Tim Evans almost a year earlier, Barack insisted that his community members take the lead while he remained almost silently in the background. “He would never speak. He always put us out front,” Cathy Askew explained in recalling a time when she and Marlene accompanied Barack to a meeting with Jean Rudd at Woods. All of the DCP women remember Barack picking them up in his small blue car; wintertime appointments downtown were more memorable than summer ones because Barack’s car had a hole in the floor and little if any heat. Yvonne Lloyd remembered the preparations for the MacArthur meeting, with Barack insisting that she, Loretta, and Marlene have the speaking parts and not him. “ ‘You have to be the ones to actually do it because this is your community, not mine,’ ” Lloyd recalled him saying. “ ‘You can tell your story better than I can.’ ”

Aurie Pennick found Loretta Augustine “very articulate, very smart” at DCP’s meeting with MacArthur. “I was impressed with her. Barack was a little skinny guy in the back, said very little.” Yet Pennick’s South Side roots left her uncomfortable with how DCP “was very much noninclusive of lower-income folk,” such as the actual residents of Altgeld. She also detected a “kind of classist thinking” in some of the DCP members’ statements. Pennick told them she had not heard about them being active in West Pullman and asked Barack if DCP had held community meetings there. He assured her that DCP did have a presence there, but when the meeting ended, Pennick “wasn’t sure whether MacArthur would make a grant.” In subsequent days, when Pennick asked her immediate neighbors if they were familiar with DCP, no one was, and she decided that DCP was “too new and lightweight” to merit MacArthur funding.

To bolster DCP’s dropout prevention focus, Barack wanted to generate parental interest in his CEN idea before school ended in early June. He and his two most energetic education volunteers, Aletha Strong Gibson and Ann West, called on the principals of all five Roseland area high schools and asked if they could hold “parent assemblies” in Roseland, Altgeld, Washington Heights, and West Pullman. Barack “was very professional … very articulate,” Ann West recalled. “He was driven, and he was committed…. It didn’t appear to be just a job.” Aletha felt similarly, describing Barack as “heartfelt” and “committed to the people” as well as “very charismatic.” He spent many hours with Aletha and Ann, but even though he knew Aletha had spent her junior year of college in Kenya, and that Ann was a white Australian woman married to an African American, Barack never said anything about his father or about Genevieve. “He was so private,” Ann remembered, and they knew nothing of his personal life. “He didn’t mix the two.”

DCP’s members collected a repertoire of Obama’s stock expressions, which became something of a running joke. Margaret Bagby remembered, “Whenever he tells you, ‘I don’t think,’ he’s telling you that he knows what he wants. And you really need to look out when he says, ‘My sense is that.’ ” Ann West recalled, “He would say to us, ‘This is what we need to do,’ ” and if he were asked a question and he didn’t know the answer, he would reply with one or both of these phrases: “Let me look into it” and “I’ll research it,” Yvonne remembered. They could all see, as Yvonne explained, how “precise and thorough” Barack was in making plans.

One Saturday morning before DCP’s “parent assembly” in West Pullman, Aurie Pennick was doing yard work in front of her home, when “all of a sudden I hear ‘Miss Pennick’ ” from someone who recognized her from behind. It was Barack, passing out flyers for DCP’s upcoming meeting. “This is a smart man. He probably figured out where I live,” Pennick immediately realized. DCP’s leafleting was extensive, and Pennick remembers going to the meeting “and it’s packed…. They really had thought it out,” and Barack’s careful strategizing paid off just as he had hoped. “I of course made the grant,” Pennick explained, and in September DCP received $20,000 from MacArthur for general operating support—exactly what was needed to pay Johnnie Owens’s salary.

Owens came from a working-class black family, and for him wearing a shirt and tie to Friends of the Parks’ downtown office was far more inviting than working out of DCP’s windowless office on the ground floor of Holy Rosary’s small rectory in Roseland. But Obama was determined to hire him, and Owens recalls Barack challenging him by saying things like, “ ‘If you’re really interested in changing neighborhoods and building power, you can’t do it from downtown.’ ” To sweeten the deal, Barack gave Johnnie money from DCP to buy a car, and yet was royally pissed when Owens got a brand-new Nissan Sentra, which was far swankier than the rapidly aging Honda Civic Obama was still driving. “We always had a little tension about that,” Owens remembered, but Barack was exceptionally happy to have Johnnie start in July.

DCP’s work in West Pullman had attracted some new members, including Loretta’s friend Rosa Thomas and a young housewife, Carolyn Wortham, but Barack’s grand plans for a half-million-dollar-a-year CEN depended on support from Emil Jones and the Illinois state legislature, which would be struggling with the state budget through June. Barack organized a lobbying trip to Springfield and took some of DCP’s most devoted members—Dan Lee, Cathy Askew, and Ernie Powell, Loretta and her friend Rosa Thomas, several other ladies, Ellis Jordan, as well as Loretta’s young daughter and both of Cathy’s. Emil Jones was a gracious host, posing with the whole group for a photo in his office. Dan Lee’s dark jacket and white pocket square matched his mod eyeglass frames all too well, Loretta looked lovely in a stylish white dress, and Ernie Powell personified strong workingman dignity with a well-knotted tie below one of Illinois’s more impressive mustaches. Barack wore a blue blazer, a white shirt, and no tie, but he closed his eyes when the camera clicked. Barack’s dream of obtaining a $500,000 state appropriation remained just that, although Jones arranged for the Illinois State Board of Education to give DCP a $25,000 planning grant that gave Barack enough to get a semblance of CEN started in early 1988.⁵¹