Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  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 ear
ly 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 i
n 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.