Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  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.