Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  At dinner that night, Barack and Michelle questioned Jarrett about the mayor’s office. “You know, I’ve never been interviewed by someone’s fiancé before,” Jarrett joked. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be doing the interviewing.” But much of their conversation was devoted to Barack and Valerie’s unusual early lives. “That night we talked about his childhood compared to my childhood,” Jarrett recalled. “We were comparing Indonesia to Iran.” Valerie also quickly realized that the fiancé was just as impressive as Michelle. “I remember that night, sitting across the table from him at dinner, and I thought to myself, ‘This is one extraordinary young man.’”

  By mid-August, Barack as well as Michelle had a decision to make. Barack had had several more lunches with Judd Miner, and also spoke with Allison Davis, the other cofounder of Miner’s twenty-year-old, now twelve-attorney law firm. Unlike Sidley, whose roster of corporate clients meant the firm was often opposing employment discrimination claims, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland (DMBG) combined civil and voting rights litigation with Davis’s strong interest in housing development. With DMBG as a definite employment option once Journeys was complete, Barack felt entirely comfortable in telling Gerry Alexis, John Levi, and Newton Minow that he would not be accepting Sidley’s job offer. “Gerry, I want to tell you that I’ve decided that I’m not going to come to Sidley after all,” she remembered Barack telling her. Rob Fisher and his girlfriend Lisa recalled hearing about Michelle mulling whether to leave Sidley for the mayor’s office, with Michelle’s only hesitation being the “50 percent cut in pay.” “I was going to walk away from a pretty huge salary,” Michelle later recounted. But within a day or two of Barack’s apology to Gerry Alexis, “Michelle came and told me that she was leaving and she was going to work in the mayor’s office,” Gerry remembered. John Levi recalled, “I thought I was going to have a coronary” upon hearing the double-barreled bad news. Newt Minow learned about the pair of departures when Barack came to his office to explain that he would not be joining Sidley because “‘I think I’m going to go into politics.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s good,’” Minow recounted. “‘We’ll try to help you.’” Knowing the other news he had to impart, Barack remarked half-jokingly that “I don’t think you’re going to want to help me when I tell you the rest of the story” and suggested they both sit down. “‘You know Michelle?’ I said, ‘Of course I know Michelle.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m taking Michelle with me.’” Minow sputtered in dismay before Barack interjected, “‘Hold it—we’re going to get married.’ I said, ‘That’s different,’” a relieved Minow remembered. Back at Davis Miner’s town house office, Barack told Judd and Allison that he indeed would join the firm once his book was complete. “There’s only one condition,” Davis remembered Barack adding. “You’ve got to reimburse Sidley for the bar review fee.”2

  With the bar exam over, Barack could turn his full attention to “Journeys in Black and White.” He took the time to register to vote at the Robinsons’ home address, and one weekend he and Michelle drove out to Beverly Shores, near the Indiana Dunes on the shore of Lake Michigan, to see Jean Rudd, whom Michelle had met briefly two summers earlier, and her husband Lionel Bolin, who was black. Barack also had lunch one day with Douglas Baird, who had taken the lead in arranging his new appointment as a Fellow in Law and Government at the University of Chicago Law School (UCLS). Several other faculty members joined them, and Baird also took Barack to meet law school dean Geof Stone, who found him “very impressive.” With only one single black male instructional staff member—clinical professor Randolph Stone—the law school was “looking to find diversity,” Geof Stone explained, and “our goal was maybe this is somebody we should be thinking about for a faculty appointment” once Barack finished his book. Stone’s secretary Charlotte Maffia shared her boss’s reaction, remarking to Stone that “he’s going to be governor of Illinois some day!”

  By the beginning of September Barack had a small office, room 603, on the top floor of the law school’s cubical, glass-sheathed main building, designed by famed architect Eero Saarinen in the late 1950s and significantly expanded in 1987. His appointment carried no salary or benefits, but the school’s small cadre of black law students—no more than about a dozen in each of the three current classes—were pleased to hear about Barack’s arrival, even if the law school’s annual directory, The Glass Menagerie, erroneously stated that at Harvard, he had been president of BLSA, not the Law Review. Barack’s biographical sketch accurately summarized his work at DCP and said he “will spend this year writing a book on issues of race and politics.” Some weeks later, when Barack remarked to Douglas Baird that his book manuscript would be in part autobiographical, Baird was greatly perplexed by exactly what Barack was up to.3

  Either just before or soon after Michelle began work in mid-September as a $60,000-per-year assistant to the mayor, Barack had a journey for them to take together. He wanted to introduce his new fiancé to his Kenyan family, and Barack arranged with his sister Auma, who was still living in Germany, to meet him and Michelle in Nairobi. From there, they traveled to the family homestead in Kogelo, where brother Roy, who had adopted Abon’go Malik as his given names instead of Roy Abon’go, was also visiting from the U.S. Barack and Michelle spent almost a week living at stepgrandmother Sarah’s humble home, which had no electricity or running water, yet Michelle adopted easily to traditional Luo customs such as eating with one’s hands, and Barack later joked that her ability to learn basic Luo words quickly surpassed his. Michelle was taken aback, however, when someone asked her, “‘Which one of your parents is white?’ which shocked her,” Barack later recounted. “‘Why would you think that one of my parents is white?’” an astonished Michelle replied. Her surprise at being asked that by a true African illuminated “how American African Americans are,” Barack realized.

  Back in Nairobi, Aunt Zeituni loaned the trio the decrepit Volkswagen that Auma had driven three years earlier during Barack’s first visit to Kenya. One day a highway breakdown left them on the roadside until a pair of mechanics made repairs, with Barack jotting down observations in the notebook he carried throughout the trip. Michelle had to head back to the U.S. for work well before Barack did, and after two weeks in Nairobi Barack and Auma returned to Kogelo for another visit with granny Sarah as Barack recorded additional family details to use in “Journeys in Black and White.”4

  Upon his return to Chicago, Barack learned that he had passed the Illinois bar exam. Much like Auma’s Beetle, Barack was still driving the rusty off-yellow Toyota Tercel that had carried him to and from Harvard, and which now, just like his previous car during his time at DCP, sported a floorboard hole large enough so that passengers could watch the ground go by. Early on November 1, Barack headed north to Racine, Wisconsin, for a three-day conference to which Jacky Grimshaw, whom the late Al Raby had introduced to him in 1987, had arranged an invitation. The National Center for Careers in Public Life was the brainchild of two young women, Vanessa Kirsch and Katrina Browne, who had met in Washington, D.C., and wanted “to create a national mechanism to recruit, place and train the next generation of issue leaders.” Browne, a 1990 graduate of Princeton University who was working for a newly founded, alumni-sponsored public interest endeavor, Princeton Project ’55, won support from the Johnson Foundation for her and Kirsch’s plan, and their kickoff gathering was taking place at Johnson’s lush Wingspread Conference Center.

  Kirsch and Browne’s starting point was “the belief that a project for young people should be designed by young people,” but many of the four dozen attendees were, like Barack and Jacky, now past their thirtieth birthdays. His listing was simple indeed—“Barack Obama, Writer, 7436 South Euclid,” Chicago—and years later no other attendees would recall Barack speaking up during the Friday-Saturday-Sunday set of meetings. At the outset, Browne and Kirsch had a catchier name in mind for their new organization—“Public Allies,” playing off the well-known music group Public Enemy—and also had a seventeen-me
mber board lined up, including Barack. The two women envisioned a regional structure for the group, with an initial arm in D.C. that would recruit, train, and place in public interest organizations several dozen young “allies” who would be mentored for a year with the explicit expectation that they would pursue careers in public service. Chicago, given its set of enthusiastic local backers, including John McKnight and his Northwestern University colleague Jody Kretzmann as well as Jacky Grimshaw, was envisioned as Public Allies’ second start-up a year or so hence.5

  In addition to his Kenyan family, Barack had one particular piece of his Chicago life he wanted to introduce Michelle to: Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. The Robinson family had never been regular church attendees during Michelle’s childhood, and in black Chicago “church weddings are normally at the wife’s church,” Jerry Wright explained. With Michelle and Barack now thinking ahead toward their own wedding sometime in 1992, joining a church in order to have a church wedding was very much on their agenda. Trinity’s growth had continued apace during Barack’s three years at Harvard, and another capital campaign to build yet a larger new sanctuary was well under way.

  Trinity required aspiring members to attend new members’ classes “to teach you, ‘What have I joined?’” Jerry explained, and he strongly encouraged them to enroll in one of Trinity’s weekly, semester-long Bible classes. Aspirants also had to choose which of Trinity’s many service ministries they would invest time in, such as the legal ministry, which dated to 1979: “Where do you want to work in this church?” Tithing was aspirational indeed, since at Trinity that meant not just 10 percent of a member’s income “but 10 percent of your time,” yet Wright understood full well that not everyone who joined Trinity did so in order to personally contribute to the church. “Some of the members of Ebenezer,” Jerry explained, “belong to Ebenezer church because it’s Ebenezer church in Atlanta,” the home church of Martin Luther King Jr. and his family. “Same thing at Riverside, same thing at Abyssinian,” upper Manhattan’s two best-known churches, and similarly for Trinity on the South Side of Chicago.

  A good many Trinity members, like Barack’s friend Sokoni Karanja, were deeply devoted to the betterment of black Chicago, but just as many “were there when it’s not golfing season,” Jerry realized. New members were admitted at the evening service on the first Sunday of a month once they had completed new members’ classes, and their chosen ministry would be announced as well, with contact information passed along to those leaders the next morning.

  Barack later explained that for him, joining Trinity “wasn’t an epiphany. . . . It was an emotional and spiritual progression, as well as an intellectual one. And it didn’t happen overnight.” Barack also would say, “What I love about Trinity is that everyone is involved in something—it’s not just the pastor doing everything.” Wright’s preaching appealed to university professors as well as to activists like Karanja and public sector bureaucrats like former Chicago school superintendent Manford Byrd. Young University of Chicago theologian Dwight Hopkins, who had completed his Ph.D. at New York’s Union Theological Seminary under the guidance of James H. Cone, the founder of black liberation theology, viewed Wright as a “humble and unassuming” pastor with “a remarkable grasp of the Bible.” One perhaps jaded local black journalist believed Wright “provided kind of a vicarious militance for Chicago’s black elites” such that “they could get a dose of militance on Sunday and go back home and feel pretty good about doing their part for the black movement.” Yet Jim Cone had a far less cynical view: “I would regard Jeremiah Wright’s church as the really contemporary embodiments of all the things I’ve tried to say.”

  Barack would state on multiple occasions over many years that he was first drawn to Wright’s ministry by one particular sermon he heard Wright preach early in 1988, called “The Audacity of Hope.” Yet Wright did not preach that sermon at Trinity in 1988; he had preached it there exactly three years earlier, on February 17, 1985, before Barack arrived in Chicago, and he would next preach it at Houston’s Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church in January 1991. A tape of the 1985 rendition was available for purchase at Trinity, and the 1991 Texas version soon appeared in a collected edition of Wright’s sermons, so Barack knew the sermon even though he had not heard Wright deliver it in person.

  Years later critics who knew little about African American Christianity would claim that Trinity was “arguably the most radical black church in the country” when Barack and Michelle formally joined on Sunday evening, February 2, 1992, but anyone who knew Trinity and its congregation would all but laugh out loud at that assertion. Newly elected 4th Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle later explained that Trinity “was a good church for an aspiring, upwardly mobile politician to join,” and many people who knew Barack and viewed him as “a very pragmatic person” felt likewise. Barack later declared that he was “offended by the suggestion” that careerist considerations had played a significant role in his choice of Trinity, but among the people who had spent the most time with Barack in Chicago, that belief was widespread if not universal.

  Barack was “an immensely pragmatic person,” Greg Galluzzo realized, and his fundamental life choices in that vein dated back to when he had first told Sheila that his destiny would not allow them to marry no matter how deeply they loved each other. Galluzzo asked, rhetorically: “Did he leave her for pragmatic reasons? Did he go to Jeremiah’s church for pragmatic reasons? Did he go to Harvard for pragmatic reasons?” He stopped before uttering the next, obvious question, remarking instead that Michelle was “the ideal person” with whom he could “start a base in the black community.” Barack readily admitted that “settling in Chicago and marrying Michelle was a conscious decision to root myself.” Many black Chicagoans agreed with Galluzzo, but Barack, confronted with such sentiments years later, would dismiss them as “pretty cynical” as well as “pretty offensive to me.”

  Marrying Michelle “was the single most important step that he was to make in his journey to define himself and reconcile his search for racial identity,” one local African American scholar rightly thought, and he was far from alone in his conclusion. “Michelle is a representation of Barack Obama’s choice to aggressively move toward blackness,” a black female professor agreed. “He could have actively made a choice to move toward whiteness or something else.” Indeed, a month after Barack and Michelle joined Trinity, they scheduled their wedding there for Saturday, October 3, and on March 9, Barack wrote to Sheila for the first time since they had last seen each other in Cambridge to tell her that he and Michelle were engaged and would marry in October.

  Trinity members who remembered Barack from DCP, like Carolyn Wortham and Deloris Burnam, plus Patty Novick, the late Al Raby’s girlfriend, recalled often seeing Barack and Michelle at the 11:00 A.M. Sunday service around the time that they first joined. Barack remembered similarly, but he and Michelle were not there the Sunday after they joined, because on the previous day Stanley Dunham had died at age seventy-three after a prolonged bout with prostate cancer. Barack and Michelle arrived in Honolulu before Stan expired, yet for Barack his passing represented the loss of the most sustained male presence he had known in his life, one far more akin to a real father than a grandfather. Indeed, as Barack’s sister Maya said of Stan and Madelyn, “they raised him.” For Madelyn, the loss was profound, for despite perceptions of her disappointment and at times unhappiness with Stan, her brother Charles had no doubt that they were not only “extremely attached” to each other but “dependent on each other.” For Ann too, it was a grievous loss, for “clearly her stronger emotional bond was with her father” rather than her mother, one close friend explained.

  Ann’s oral defense of her now finally completed Ph.D. dissertation was just two weeks away, and for that she owed tremendous gratitude to her endlessly supportive mentor Alice Dewey, who had loaned her money as well as convinced Ann to narrow and trim the huge ethnographic study. The Internal Revenue Service was still seeking more t
han $17,000 from Ann thanks to her unpaid income taxes from twelve years earlier, but Ann was ecstatic to finally complete her long-sought doctorate. She dedicated the dissertation to Madelyn, Alice Dewey, “and to Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field.” But among Ann’s closest friends, there was no mistaking how “she felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity,” because that “had not really been a part of who he was when he was growing up.” Ann viewed it as “a professional choice” on Barack’s part, and although “it would be too strong to say that she felt rejection,” she certainly felt “that he was distancing himself from her.”6

  In Chicago, the 1992 election year was well under way, with two serious primary challengers to incumbent Democratic U.S. senator Alan “Al the Pal” Dixon. Mel Reynolds was again challenging U.S. representative Gus Savage, but this time Reynolds’s odds of success looked much improved thanks to a redrawn, more suburban district following the 1990 Census. The South Side’s other black U.S. representative, Charlie Hayes, was facing a difficult reelection battle against alderman and former Black Panthers leader Bobby Rush. Senator Dixon’s first challenger was Cook County Recorder of Deeds Carol Moseley Braun, who had been outraged when Dixon in October 1991 voted in favor of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who won confirmation by only a 52–48 margin. Moseley Braun’s effort was troubled by the behavior of her boyfriend and campaign manager, Kgosie Matthews, who had been accused of sexual harassment. While polls a week before the primary showed Dixon with a 20-point lead, Braun’s “engaging warmth” during a final televised debate won statewide praise. A final poll showed Dixon’s lead down to 12 points, while in the congressional primaries both Rush’s challenge against Hayes and Reynolds’s against Savage looked likely to prevail. The Chicago Tribune praised Reynolds as “bright, capable and promising,” and on the South Side Donne Trotter was poised to join Alice Palmer in the state Senate thanks to the new redistricting. The Hyde Park Herald endorsed Rush over Hayes and praised Palmer as an “extraordinary woman” who while “basically a novice . . . has done a fine job” during her first nine months in office.