Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  On November 16 South Chicago Savings Bank president Jim Fitch convened an initial meeting of all interested parties, ranging from South Deering’s Foster Milhouse to Bruce Orenstein and Mary Ellen Montes from UNO and hard-core landfill opponents Marian Byrnes and Hazel Johnson, who did not like anything they heard. Four days later Lake Calumet environmentalist James Landing distributed a letter warning that the Washington administration “is making prodigious attempts” to win over opponents of a new O’Brien Locks landfill.63

  On Wednesday morning November 25, the day before Thanksgiving, a Chicago Tribune headline announced “948 School Jobs Axed for Teachers’ Raises.” In order to meet the pay raises in CPS’s new union contracts, 167 elementary school teachers had been terminated. Then, at 11:01 that morning, Harold Washington collapsed with a heart attack in his City Hall office. The sixty-five-year-old mayor was seriously overweight, and attempts to revive him were unsuccessful. An official announcement was delayed for more than two hours, but word that Washington had died spread rapidly throughout the city, with tearful crowds gathering outside City Hall.

  “Mayor’s Death Stuns City” read one headline the next day. Black Chicago’s loss was especially painful and heartfelt. Seven months earlier, when Washington was reelected, the Tribune editorialized that “he has been a symbol more than a leader,” but he was also the greatest “symbol of black empowerment” the city had ever seen. Only with his April 1986 erasure of Ed Vrdolyak’s city council majority had Washington truly become Chicago’s mayor, and as one Tribune story poignantly declared, “Washington’s legacy is not what he did, but what he was on the verge of doing.”

  The next morning the Tribune lauded Washington as “a symbol of success and dreams realized for people who felt they had little reason to dream, let alone achieve,” while again noting that “his tangible record of accomplishments is a short list.” Economic development commissioner Rob Mier would write that “many of his goals and plans remained unfulfilled or barely started.” Mier also recognized that Chicago’s loss was greater because Washington had “died at the peak of his power.”

  Tribune reporter John Kass highlighted how Washington had been “an incredibly charismatic leader,” but one of Washington’s most fervent early backers identified the mayor’s greatest mistake. “He took the power to himself, almost like Mayor Daley” in earlier decades, “and the political maturity of black politics stopped while he increased his power.” White 49th Ward reform alderman David Orr, who became interim mayor upon Washington’s death, had articulated the underlying problem months earlier: “There’s a large group of black aldermen . . . who don’t support reform but who have to vote with the mayor because he’s so popular in their wards.” By tolerating rather than purging those black aldermen who professed to support him while nonetheless remaining fully loyal to the Democratic party machine, Washington had advanced “his own political self-interest at the expense of institutionalizing his reform movement,” wrote historian Bill Grimshaw, the husband of Washington’s top political aide, Jacky Grimshaw.

  The enormity of Washington’s failure became clear within the first hours after his death, as his city council majority sundered into two angrily hostile camps. Washington’s true supporters rallied behind the mayor’s council leader, 4th Ward alderman Tim Evans, with whom Barack and DCP’s Altgeld asbestos protesters had met eighteen months earlier. Washington’s opponents eagerly reached out to the black machine aldermen, who now controlled the balance of power in a political world where they no longer had to bow to a singularly charismatic leader. Washington’s political base “unraveled immediately after he was pronounced dead,” John Kass wrote, and Rob Mier also rued “the immediate collapse of his political coalition.”

  Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the two factions warred publicly as Washington’s body lay in state for a fifty-six-hour around-the-clock wake in the lobby of City Hall. Monday night at the UICC Pavilion where Washington had hosted his Education Summit just seven weeks earlier, his official memorial service turned into a political rally for Evans. Yet the only votes that would count were those of the fifty city council members, and by Tuesday morning, there was little question that 6th Ward black machine alderman Eugene Sawyer would become Chicago’s next mayor thanks to Washington’s hard-core opponents plus at least five black aldermen who would support Sawyer over Evans.

  As Tuesday night’s council meeting convened, a crowd of thousands stood outside City Hall, chanting “No deals” and “We want Evans.” Clownish behavior marred the council’s proceedings as protesters mocked black Sawyer allies like 9th Ward alderman Robert Shaw, and Sawyer was not formally elected as Harold Washington’s successor and sworn into office until 4:00 A.M. Wednesday.

  In skin color Gene Sawyer was just as black as Harold Washington, but as the angry crowd well knew, Chicago now had a completely different mayor than the one it had just buried. When Sawyer was asked by a historian some months later about Washington nemesis Ed Vrdolyak, his answer highlighted the chasm: “He’s a fun guy!”64

  “I loved Harold Washington,” Barack blurted out years later when asked what he had thought of the mayor. He once wrongly but perhaps wishfully stated that in 1985 “I came because of Harold Washington,” and at another time, he mused that “part of the reason, I think, I had been attracted to Chicago was reading about Harold Washington.” There was no doubt that Washington, or more precisely Washington’s treatment at the hands of the Vrdolyak majority during Barack’s first nine months in Chicago, contributed in some degree to Barack’s own embrace of a resolutely black racial identity. “Every single day it was about race. I mean every day it was black folks and white folks going at each other. Every day, in the newspapers, on TV, in meetings. You couldn’t get away from it,” Obama later recounted. “It was impossible for Harold to do anything.”

  Upon his arrival in Chicago, and throughout all of his Oxy and Columbia years prior to Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run, Barack had been “skeptical of electoral politics as a strategy for social change,” he later acknowledged. “I was pretty skeptical about politics. I always thought that the compromises involved in politics probably didn’t suit me.” Jerry Kellman, Greg Galluzzo, and the Alinsky tradition of organizing certainly did not teach respect or admiration for elected officials. But watching Washington week after week, even if he had never been physically closer than in that nondescript Roseland storefront eight months earlier, had fundamentally changed Barack’s mind. “You just had this sense that his ability to move people and set an agenda was always going to be superior to anything I could organize at a local level,” Obama explained in 2011.

  In his own telling years later, Obama was in that angry, chanting crowd outside the city council chambers that Tuesday night, witnessing what he called Washington’s “second death.” Yet even at the time he wrote that, Barack understood Washington’s fundamental error, just as Bill Grimshaw had explained it. “Washington was the best of the classic politicians,” Obama told an interviewer. “But he, like all politicians, was primarily interested in maintaining his power and working the levers of power. He was a classic charismatic leader, and when he died, all of that dissipated. This potentially powerful collective spirit that went into supporting him was never translated into clear principles, or into an articulable agenda for community change,” Obama rightly stated in words that would echo painfully two decades later. “All that power dissipated.”

  Yet in those last weeks of 1987, Washington’s death strengthened Barack’s belief that now was the time to leave DCP for law school. He had “a sense that the city was going to be going through a transition, that the kinds of organizing work that I was doing wasn’t going to be the focal point of people’s attention because there were all these transitions and struggles and tumult that was going on in the African American community,” he recalled in 2001. “So I decided it was a good time for me to pull back” and attend law school.

  Barack’s long-pondered personal essay
was finished, but completing his application required soliciting letters of recommendation as well. Al Raby was a recognizable name to anyone who knew the history of the 1960s, and Michael Baron had given him an A for his senior year paper at Columbia, the most serious piece of coursework Barack had ever tackled. Now working at SONY, Baron readily agreed to write a letter. But Baron’s knowledge of him was now more than four years dated, so Barack also went to see John McKnight, asking him to keep their conversation confidential, especially from Greg and Mary. “Would you write me a letter of reference? You’re the only professor I know.” McKnight immediately said yes, but asked Barack what his plans were. “I want to go into public life. I think I can see what can be done at the neighborhood level, but it’s not enough change for me. I want to see what would happen in public life” and “I think I have to go to law school to do that.” McKnight questioned whether Barack understood how fundamentally different life as an elected official would be from that of an organizer. While the latter was quintessentially an advocate, “my experience is that legislators are compromisers,” McKnight observed, people who synthesize conflicting interests. “You want to go into a world of compromise?” he asked. Barack responded affirmatively, saying, “That’s why I want to go into public life” and to pursue a role quite opposite that of a confrontational Alinsky organizer. “It’s clear to him he’s making a decision that that’s not the way he’s going,” McKnight remembered. “He left for a different mode of seeking change.”65

  With Gene Sawyer uncomfortably ensconced in City Hall, the Parent Community Council’s ten public forums were surrounded by uncertainty. At the first one, Chicago United’s Patrick Keleher reiterated the business community’s demand for dramatic reforms, and at the third Sawyer pledged “my commitment to the Washington reform agenda.” In response, Manford Byrd protested that CPS’s “many needy students” meant that any improvement in schools’ performance would require “major additional funding” for more teachers, counselors, and, of course, “other professionals.” DCP’s Aletha Strong Gibson told one reporter that the reform movement would be undeterred by the mayor’s loss. “Harold Washington did not move the community. The community moved Harold Washington,” she declared. “It is incumbent upon us to keep our voices raised. We have to take back ownership of the schools.”

  Sawyer also inherited Chicago’s landfill problem, with Howard Stanback seeking to quickly explain the city’s O’Brien Locks strategy to the new mayor. Environmental activist James Landing realized that Washington’s death would not alter the situation, and even he wondered whether the opponents should give up and join Jim Fitch’s effort to agree on what the Southeast Side neighborhoods should demand from WMI. Senator Emil Jones’s special legislative committee concluded its investigation by ruing “the lack of one centralized authority to address all environmental problems” in the area, but also bluntly acknowledging that continuing Chicago’s ban on landfill expansion “is irresponsible unless the city is able to implement a successful citywide waste-disposal plan” through massive recycling.

  At DCP, Barack and Johnnie were preparing the CEN tutoring program to start in early 1988, in both Roseland and Altgeld, undeterred by the December murder of an eighteen-year-old Gardens youth by five fellow teenagers, all members of the infamous Vice Lords gang. Weeks earlier Barack had asked Sheila to go with him to Honolulu for the Christmas holidays so that his relatives could meet her, the first time Barack had ever introduced a girlfriend to his family.

  Madelyn had just turned sixty-five, and a year earlier had retired from the Bank of Hawaii. Stanley, almost seventy, was now retired too. Ann Dunham, still struggling to complete her dissertation, told her mentor Alice Dewey how much she was looking forward to meeting Sheila, and Sheila would always remember how exceptionally warm Ann was to her throughout the couple’s visit to Honolulu. Ann was fascinated that Sheila had written her master’s thesis on Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Sheila remembers the two of them “talking about that thesis, my time in Paris, and my work at Chicago.” Ann was “genuinely very interested and warm and inquisitive. She was extremely generous with us and treated Barack with reverence. She really admired him and thought the world of him.”

  Even though Ann and Sheila liked each other very much, Sheila felt that Ann was not in favor of her and Barack getting married. She wondered if Ann “sensed what we already knew, that we were too isolated and would sophisticate each other.” Sheila was especially struck by how everyone in Hawaii—Gramps, Toot, Maya—called Barack either “Bar” or “Barry.” In Chicago, only Asif used “Barry.” When Sheila called him “Barry for fun one day, just because everyone else was calling him that name,” Obama’s reaction was unforgettable. “He got so angry at me. Irrationally furious, I’d say. He told me that under no circumstances was I ever to use that name with him.” Perhaps Obama had some deep boy-versus-man association to the two names, but Sheila understood that he “was very sensitive about this aspect of his life and wanted me walled off from it—like a lot of other things in his life.”66

  Back in Chicago, the mayor’s Parent Community Council moved toward recommending that each Chicago public school be controlled by a locally elected governing board, but without Harold Washington present to embrace its conclusions, school reformers started arguing over which of several just slightly different proposals should be introduced in the state legislature. DCP participated tangentially, following UNO’s lead, with Danny Solis in charge and Johnnie Owens rather than Barack following developments most closely.

  In late January Barack wrote to Phil and Karen Boerner to apologize for missing their wedding, and updated them on his plans: “I’ve decided to go back to law school this fall—probably Harvard.” At the end of the month, Barack also wrote to Anne Hallett at Wieboldt to submit DCP’s 1988 grant application, but he gave no indication that he might be leaving DCP anytime soon. He wrote that “DCP has come a long way in the past year,” most notably in hiring Owens, “someone with both the talent and background to become a lead organizer in his own right.” Because of DCP’s “success with the education issue . . . we have the potential in the coming year to become a truly powerful advocate for change not only in the area, but citywide,” Barack boastfully asserted. “Whether we fulfill that potential will depend on two things: how well we parley the Career Education Network into a vehicle for organizing parents and community, and whether the relationships we have established with the major Black churches in the South Side translate into their making a full commitment” to DCP by contributing financially so that the organization could begin to wean itself from outside funders. “If we succeed, I envision us having 30 new churches involved by the end of 1988.”

  That was optimistic, because Obama’s ongoing efforts to connect with dozens of black pastors had garnered polite conversations but few enlistments. If CEN was to grow beyond a small pilot program in which DCP housewives tutored dozens of high school students in a trio of church halls, funding was necessary for “significant expansion of the program by the State Legislature.” Barack also still hoped that Olive-Harvey could reallocate resources “to create a comprehensive job training program with specific emphasis on Public Aid recipients and with the outreach and satellite facilities necessary to target the Altgeld Gardens population.”

  DCP would soon hire a CEN project coordinator, thanks to Emil Jones’s state money and the Woods Fund, and hoped to approach major corporations through Chicago United. Barack’s success at fund-raising had let him raise his own salary to $27,250 and Johnnie’s to $24,000. Ideally Olive-Harvey would foot the bill to house CEN, but expanding the program for the 1988–89 school year depended on state board of education officials and state legislators.

  Obama believed that “parents and churches” were “the most crucial ingredients” for “a long-term process of educational reform.” Gamaliel and Don Moore’s Designs for Change, now a top player in the citywide school reform movement, could be asked to provide parental training. The city’s co
mmunity colleges were responsible for vocational and general educational development (GED) training, but their actual track record was even worse than that of Chicago Public Schools. “Only 8 percent of the 19,200 persons enrolled in GED preparation classes in 1980 actually received certificates,” Barack had discovered, and “only 2.5 percent of those enrolled in City College basic education programs end up pursuing additional vocational or higher education.” Instead, just as at CPS, “funds go into central administrative tasks rather than student instruction.”67

  Barack’s church-recruitment efforts continued throughout the winter of 1987–88. One successful visit was to a small church on West 113th Street just across from Fenger High School. Thirty-two-year-old Rev. Alvin Love had arrived at Lilydale First Baptist Church four years earlier, inheriting an “elderly congregation” that was “comfortable sitting and doing nothing.” Love wanted to “get this congregation engaged in their community,” and he was happy when Obama “just walked up to the door and rang the bell” and asked if Love would tell him what he thought Roseland needed. Love, like other pastors before him, asked Barack which church he belonged to. Love warned Barack that his standard response—“I’m working on it”—wasn’t going to be acceptable to all black clergymen. Barack invited Love to a box-lunch gathering of other interested pastors, and he was slowly beginning to expand DCP’s ties to freestanding Protestant congregations.

  The clergymen with whom Barack was having the most contact, however, were not involved at all in DCP. One was Jeremiah Wright at Trinity United Church of Christ, whom Barack continued to visit on a regular basis. Barack also began speaking with Sokoni Karanja, a longtime Trinity member whom he had met through Al Raby when Karanja emerged as one of the most outspoken African American voices calling for school reform. Barack “was trying to think about ministers and how to organize ministers across the whole city—African American ministers—because he felt like the power that was needed for the community to get its just due was through that,” Sokoni remembered. “He was trying to think about churches and how to organize the churches.” Barack also told Sokoni about his plan to attend law school. “One of the things I notice is that a lot of these politicians get in trouble because they don’t know the law,” Barack commented. Becoming a politician was indeed his goal. “He was talking about becoming mayor of Chicago,” Sokoni—just like Mike Kruglik—remembered. “We had a lot of conversations about it,” and “that’s what he emphasized to me. It sounded like a good idea.”