Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Barack also visited Emil Jones at his office on 111th Street. No elected official had done more for Barack and DCP, and Jones said he was sorry to see him go. To Jones as to others, Barack emphasized that there was no question he would return to Chicago after law school. He called Renee Brereton and other CHD staffers to tell them, plus organizing colleagues like Linda Randle. Barack apologized to Howard Stanback for pulling up stakes during their landfill effort. Stanback was surprised by Barack’s choice. “‘Why are you going to Harvard?’ He said, ‘Because I need to.’ I said, ‘Are you coming back?’” to which Obama said, “I’m absolutely coming back.”76

  Barack, Loretta, and Yvonne Lloyd all attended Lena’s thirtieth birthday party, but by early April, there was not much to celebrate regarding UNO and DCP’s position in the Southeast Side’s landfill war. Anger at Sawyer’s new task force was white hot, especially in Hegewisch, just across the Calumet River from the O’Brien Locks site. Hegewisch News editor Vi Czachorski asked Howard Stanback, “Why should UNO decide if there will be a landfill in our backyard?” and Marian Byrnes, Hazel Johnson, and three allies called the task force unrepresentative and called on Mayor Sawyer to disband it. That group held its first public hearing at St. Kevin on April 7, and this time UNO’s critics made it into the basement meeting room, mocking cochairwomen Lena Montes and Loretta Augustine with chants of “No deals,” the same slogan Lena had used during the Fitch ambush two months earlier.

  The Daily Cal reported that Loretta defended the panel’s “makeup and goals” as a “positive development for the community and said the mayor had pledged to abide by the task force’s findings,” with its report due at the end of May. “The panel approved reopening discussions with Waste Management,” with Lena declaring, “What is different about it is that it will be talked about in open hearings, not behind closed doors.” But when old foe Foster Milhouse rose to speak, “Montes quickly closed” the meeting.

  The Daily Calumet editorialized against any reopening of negotiations with WMI, and UNO’s opponents advocated for a popular referendum vote against landfill expansion on the upcoming fall general election ballot in Southeast Side wards. One week later, the task force convened its second hearing at Our Lady of the Gardens gymnasium in Altgeld Gardens, where the tumultous Zirl Smith meeting had occurred two years earlier. Father Dominic Carmon, a task force member and Our Lady’s pastor, remembered that Barack “was there listening,” as at the previous St. Kevin session too. Howard Stanback, Jim Fitch, and WMI’s Mary Ryan all spoke to the panel as a crowd of 125 chanted “No more dumps.” For the first time, Stanback publicly acknowledged that the city did want the O’Brien Locks site to become a new landfill. Mary Ryan said WMI would immediately place $2 million into a community trust fund, with similar sums to be added every year, and it would give up title to two other parcels of land, including the marshland just below South Deering whose vulnerability had led Harold Washington to impose the initial landfill moratorium. That was followed by numerous single community members who spoke fervently against the deal. In the days that followed, the Daily Cal kept up a regular drumbeat against the task force. “Why study something no one in the community wants or asked for?” political columnist Phil Kadner queried.

  As the UNO–DCP landfill gambit drew more and more flak, the task force’s third hearing, scheduled to take place at Bob Klonowski’s Hegewisch church, was postponed and moved to Mann Park’s field house. When it finally convened, Klonowski welcomed the crowd in a calm tone, but, according to Vi Czachorksi, when a city representative again explained why O’Brien Locks was the best option available, “500 angry, frustrated people shouted down the city proposal of a new landfill.” The meeting “ended abruptly when Mary Ellen Montes lost control, stating ‘This has turned into a war.’” Declaring that “It doesn’t appear we can conduct this in a civilized manner,” she dissolved the hearing, leaving the entire UNO–DCP–Stanback strategy in tatters. The mayor’s office named several additional task force members and postponed its reporting date until later in the summer, but the entire venture was now dead.

  Years later, Bruce Orenstein acknowledged that his and Barack’s game plan had gone entirely awry. When “we make ourselves the center of authority . . . we make ourselves the target” for large numbers of Southeast Side residents who for years had been opposed to the city using their neighborhoods as a dumping ground. Orenstein mused that if Harold Washington had not died, perhaps the O’Brien Locks deal with Waste Management could indeed have netted the community a $25 million trust fund, just as he, Obama, and Stanback had envisioned. But Gene Sawyer had no public stature as mayor. “With a very strong mayor” like Washington, a successful outcome was highly plausible, but “now we have a very weak mayor.”77

  During April’s landfill warfare, Gamaliel held its fourth weeklong training at Techny Towers, and Barack drove out there for several days’ sessions. By then, everyone knew he was leaving. Mary Gonzales was “pretty upset” when she heard, and David Kindler recalled thinking: “there goes one of our best and brightest.” Kindler’s friend Kevin Jokisch remembered telling Greg Galluzzo that Gamaliel would certainly miss Barack, with Greg responding, “We held on to him about as long as we were going to. Barack will probably end up being a United States senator.”

  One evening that week, Barack drank beer with Mike Kruglik and talked about what he wanted to do after law school. “Obama is talking about his vision for a very powerful, sweeping organization across black Chicago, of fifty to 150 congregations, that would be highly disciplined, highly focused, professionally organized,” Mike remembered. “This vision . . . had such a claim on his mind” and Barack was explicit about “coming back to Chicago after Harvard and reengaging in community organizing in a more powerful way.”

  Barack was thinking ahead in part because Ken Rolling and Jean Rudd at Woods had decided to fund and commission a series of articles about community organizing in Illinois Issues, the state’s premier public policy journal. Barack accepted an invitation to write one, but a quick deadline loomed. He had decided that he would travel to Nairobi to see Auma and meet the other members of his Kenyan family, but before that he wanted to spend at least three weeks on his own touring the big cities of Europe. Thus he needed to write his article before he left Chicago in late May. His essay would document how his thinking had evolved. Recent African American activism, Barack wrote, had featured “three major strands”: political empowerment, as personified by Harold Washington; economic development, of which black Chicago had seen very little; and community organizing. Barack argued that neither of the first two “offers lasting hope of real change for the inner city unless undergirded by a systematic approach to community organization.” Electing a black mayor like Washington was “not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods or cut a 50 percent drop-out rate in the schools,” though such a victory did have “an important symbolic effect.”

  At the community level, “a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership—and not one or two charismatic leaders—can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions.” Barack claimed that DCP and similar groups had attained “impressive results,” ranging from school accountability and job training programs to renovated housing and refurbished parks. Those assertions echoed what Marlene Dillard had heard Barack boast about during their visits to DCP’s funders, yet when he wrote that “crime and drug problems have been curtailed,” he was making his wishfulness give way to fantasy. It was true that “a sophisticated pool of local civic leadership has been developed” thanks to DCP’s recruitment and training efforts, but he admitted that organizing in African American neighborhoods “faces enormous problems.” One was “the not entirely undeserved skepticism organizers face in many communities,” as he had experienced; a second was the “exodus from the inner city of financial resources, institutions, role models and jobs,” as he had seen all too well in Roseland and especially in Altgeld. Third, far to
o many groups emphasized what John McKnight called “consumer advocacy,” and demanded increased services rather than “harnessing the internal productive capacities . . . that already exist in communities.” Lastly, Barack declared that “low salaries, the lack of quality training and ill-defined possibilities for advancement discourage the most talented young blacks from viewing organizing as a legitimate career option.”

  Barack also argued that “the leadership vacuum and disillusionment following the death of Harold Washington” highlighted the need for a new political strategy. “Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches,” if those institutions would “educate and empower entire congregations and not just serve as a platform for a few prophetic leaders. Should a mere 50 prominent black churches, out of the thousands that exist in cities like Chicago, decide to collaborate with a trained organizing staff, enormous positive changes could be wrought in the education, housing, employment and spirit of inner-city black communities, changes that would send powerful ripples throughout the city.”

  Barack ended his essay on a revealingly poetic note, writing that “organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people.” When the entire series of Illinois Issues articles was subsequently republished in book form, one reviewer quoted that sentence as the single most powerful statement in the entire volume. But another of Barack’s sentences about organizing was the most revealing of all, for when he wrote that through their work “organizers can shape a sense of community not only for others, but for themselves,” he was publicly acknowledging the self-transformation he had experienced in the homes and churches of Greater Roseland.

  As early as his second year at Oxy, Barack had felt “a longing for a place,” for “a community . . . where I could put down stakes.” The idea of home, of finding a real home, “was something so powerful and compelling for me” because growing up he had been a youngster who “never entirely felt like he was rooted. That was part of my upbringing, to be traveling and always . . . wanting a place,” “a community that was mine.” His “history of being uprooted” allowed Barack to develop in less than two years what Sheila knew was “his deep emotional attachment to” Chicago, one that was almost entirely a product of Greater Roseland, not Hyde Park.

  “When he worked with these folks, he saw what he never saw in his life,” Fred Simari explained. “He grew tremendously through this,” through what he acknowledged was “the transformative experience” of his life, through what Fred saw was “him getting molded.” Greg Galluzzo saw it too and said that Barack “really doesn’t understand what it means to be African American until he arrives in Chicago.” But, working with the people of the Far South Side, Barack “recognizes in them their greatness and then affirms something inside of himself.” Through “the richest experience” of his life, through discovering and experiencing black Americans for the first time, Barack “fell in love with the people, and then he fell in love with himself.”

  Years later, Barack admitted that “the victories that we achieved were extraordinarily modest: getting a job-training site set up or getting an after-school program for young people put in place.” And he also knew that “the work that I did in those communities changed me much more than I changed the communities.” Ted Aranda, who had worked for Greg and in Roseland before Barack and whose Central American heritage made it possible for him to be accepted as black or Latino, came to the same conclusion as Barack. “I’m not sure that community organizing really did that much for Chicago,” he reflected. “I don’t know that we had any really tremendous long-term effect.” But Greg, looking back on a lifetime of organizing, understood the great fundamental truth of Barack’s realization: “it’s the people you encounter who are the victories.” For Ted, the disappointments and frustration of organizing radicalized him. A quarter century later, deeply devoted to Occupy, Ted was driving a cab. Greg understood as deeply as anyone that “the great victory of the whole thing is Barack himself.”78

  In mid-April, the Spertus museum, part of a historic Jewish cultural center on South Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, opened a seven-week exhibit depicting the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi henchman who had played such a central role in the anti-Semitic effort to exterminate European Jews. The centerpiece of the exhibition was a continuous film of the trial, supplemented by large photographs and illustrations of newspaper stories plus Jewish artifacts documenting the culture that the Nazi Holocaust had sought to destroy.

  The Tribune publicized the opening, and then, less than three weeks later, a front-page Tribune story revealed that anti-Semitism was alive and well even in Chicago’s City Hall: “Sawyer Aide’s Ethnic Slurs Stir Uproar,” read the headline of a story about mayoral assistant Steve Cokely, who had recently delivered four “long and frequently disjointed” lectures under the auspices of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam (NOI). Tapes of them were on sale at an NOI bookstore, and while anti-Semitism lay at the center of Cokely’s often incoherent ramblings about a “secret society,” he also called both Jesse Jackson and the late Harold Washington “nigger.” Even worse, it was revealed that Mayor Sawyer’s office had known about the recordings for more than four months, and three weeks earlier representatives of the Anti-Defamation League had met with Sawyer about the lectures. But Cokely was still on the mayoral payroll.

  Well-known Catholic monsignor Jack Egan labeled Cokely’s retention a “travesty,” but a number of prominent black aldermen defended Cokely. Danny Davis, a supposed reformer from the 29th Ward, called Cokely “a very bright, talented researcher with an excellent command of the English language.” The 9th Ward’s Robert Shaw, citing voters he knew, said, “I don’t think it would be politically wise for the mayor to get rid of Mr. Cokely.” But the Tribune published a blistering editorial, denouncing Cokely as “a hate-spewing demagogue” and “a fanatic anti-Semite” and also lambasting Davis. After five days of feckless indecision, Gene Sawyer finally fired Cokely, but the damage to Chicago, never mind to Sawyer’s indelibly stained reputation, was already done. That evening, at a large West Side rally, Roseland’s Rev. Al Sampson introduced Cokely to a cheering crowd as “our warrior” and declared that “this is a case of Jewish organizations trying to stop one black man from having the right to speak.”

  In the middle of this, Barack took Sheila to see the Eichmann exhibit. Both of them would long remember what ensued. In Obama’s later account, in the one single public reference he would ever make to his 1980s girlfriends, he created a character who was a conflation of Alex, Genevieve, and mostly Sheila who goes with him to “a new play by a black playwright.” Several weeks earlier Barack had taken Sheila to see a Chicago amateur production of August Wilson’s powerful 1985 play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” but Sheila would remember the aftermath of the Eichmann exhibit more vividly than Wilson’s play. As they left, she asked Barack not about Eichmann, but about Steve Cokely and why so many prominent black Chicagoans were defending him rather than denouncing his moronic anti-Semitism. In Obama’s version, his white girlfriend asked about black anger, and he replies: “I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater,” and “When we got back to the car, she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.”

  Obama would admit that “whenever I think back” to that argument, “it somehow makes me ashamed.” Sheila and Barack did argue angrily that early May night on South Michigan Avenue, but it was because “I challenged him on . . . the question of black racism,” and his response was so disappointing that their argument became “pretty heated.” As Sheila recalled it, “I blamed him for not having the courage to confront the racial divide between us,” but in retrospect, she concluded that the chas
m between them was not racial at all. Instead it lay in the profound tension between Barack’s insistence on “realism,” on pragmatism, and what she believed was simply a lack of courage on his part. “Courage was a big issue between us,” and their arguments over her belief that he lacked it were “very, very painful.”

  In early May, Sheila and Barack’s mutual friend Asif Agha returned to Hyde Park after six months in Nepal. He remembers thinking at the time that “they had a good relationship. They were really tight, really solid,” but he also noted that the tensions between them were even greater than they had been during that tumultuous weekend in Madison nine months earlier. Asif thought Sheila had a deeper commitment to their lives together than did Barack, and now, listening to Barack talk about his goals, Asif understood that his friend “wanted to have a less complex public footprint” as a future candidate for public office, particularly in the black community. Asif recalls Barack saying, “The lines are very clearly drawn. . . . If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.”

  Asif realized just how profound the tension had become for Barack between the personal and the political. “If he was going to enter public life, either he was going to do it as an African American, or he wasn’t going to do it.” When asked if Barack had said he could not marry someone white, Asif assented. “He said that, exactly. That’s what he told me.”79