Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  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 Ke
n 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

  Back in Chicago, Obama continued his almost weekly discussions with Greg Galluzzo, who told numerous organizing colleagues that Barack was “really special.” But even though Greg spent more time with him than any other person in Barack’s workday world, he knew almost nothing of Barack’s home life, and he met Sheila Jager only once in passing.

  The young couple’s first nine months of living together had melded two intensely busy lives into an increasingly cloistered relationship where Sheila saw almost no one from Barack’s day job, and Asif was their only regular contact in Hyde Park’s graduate student community. Barack’s heavy smoking was a regular topic of comment within DCP, and Reformation Lutheran pastor Tyrone Partee nicknamed him “Smokestack.” Sheila said that at home, “he actually introduced me to smoking, so we smoked like chimneys together.” She wanted a cat, and after Barack relented, “Max” joined their household and became a less-than-fully-welcome presence in Obama’s life. “He drove Barack crazy because the cat would always pee” in their one large houseplant.

  Sheila recalls the early months of 1987 as a time when she witnessed a profound self-transformation in Barack. “He was actually quite ordinary when I met him, although I always felt there was something quite special about him even during our earliest months, but he became someone quite extraordinary . . . and so very ambitious, and this happened over the course of a few months. I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into ou
r relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president.”

  This change in Barack encompassed two interwoven themes: a belief that he had a “calling,” coupled with a heightened awareness that to pursue it he had to fully identify as African American. The “‘calling’ had more to do with developing a sense of purpose in the world,” Sheila later explained, and even two years earlier, Genevieve Cook had sensed an incipient presence of the same thing. She remembered thinking that “all along he had some notion of testing his own mettle and potential for greatness, and that it was as much about that personal journey as it was finding the best way to effect the maximum positive social change. Those two aspirations, the personal and the heroic,” were “melded from very early on.” Yet by early summer 1987, Barack’s understanding of his “calling” was as “something he felt he really had no control over; it was his destiny,” Sheila explained. “He always said this was destiny.”

  By then, Barack had gotten to know Al Raby and John McKnight, whose political roots lay in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and he had a relationship with Jeremiah Wright, whose theology sprang from that same soil. Barack had also developed an acquaintance with Emil Jones, a savvy politician, and he had witnessed at close range the charm and aura Harold Washington possessed even in a nondescript storefront. But as Sheila experienced and reflected upon what occurred, she realized the stimulus for Barack’s transformation lay not in one or another precinct of black Chicago, but in the disparaging evaluation he had received from her father back at Christmas. “After that visit, and over the course of spring ’87, he changed—brooding, quiet, distant—and it was only then, as I recall, that he began to talk about going into politics and race became a big issue between us.” Once “we got back from California,” Barack “became very introspective and quiet,” Sheila recalled. “I remember very specifically that it was then he began to talk about entering politics and his presidential ambitions and conflicts about our worlds being too far apart.”