Several weeks before the March 17 primary, Barack received a call from Sanford “Sandy” Newman, a Washington attorney who a decade earlier had founded a nationwide voter registration project called Project VOTE! The organization concentrated its efforts on major states in presidential election years; in 1984 Al Raby, then in exile from Harold Washington’s Chicago, had served as Newman’s codirector before becoming the group’s board chairman. Project VOTE! was overtly nonpartisan while focusing on the registration and turnout of minority citizens who were likely to become Democratic voters. In 1992 President George Bush was running for a second term, and in 1988 Bush had won Illinois’s twenty-four electoral votes after carrying the state by just ninety-five thousand votes out of over 4.5 million that were cast. Illinois was at the top of Newman’s list, and early in 1992 he asked Raby’s old friend Jacky Grimshaw who might best direct a Chicagoland effort that summer and fall. Grimshaw’s recommendation was the same she had made to the young Public Allies women, and Sandy claimed to have written the surname as “O’Bama” while insisting “I didn’t want to rule him out just because he was Irish.” When Sandy called, however, Barack immediately cited his book contract and its June 15 due date. He asked Newman if he could do it on a part-time basis, and Sandy said no, it would be more like sixty hours a week once the registration drive got under way. Barack declined, but by March 17 Newman had not hired anyone else.
That evening, as returns came in, Mel Reynolds easily defeated Gus Savage by a margin of 63 to 37 percent, and Bobby Rush similarly ousted Charlie Hayes by a much narrower 42 to 39 percent tally. But the big news was in the Senate primary, where Carol Moseley Braun won 38 percent of the vote in the three-candidate field and defeated Senator Dixon by more than fifty thousand votes. The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune all used the exact same phrase to describe Moseley Braun’s victory: a “stunning upset.” The Post further characterized it as a “political earthquake,” and the Tribune called it “one of the most stupendous upsets in Illinois political history.” Not only had a two-term U.S. senator been bested by a county officeholder, but a previously little-known African American woman was now on the verge of becoming the first black female senator in U.S. history.
As the historical significance of Moseley Braun’s statewide win sank in, Sandy Newman again called Barack, and this time the answer was yes. Following Moseley Braun’s victory, “I realized that this presented an opportunity in Illinois to enfranchise and engage a lot of African-American voters that previously had not been involved,” Barack later explained, “and the work needed to be done.” Sandy flew to Chicago to meet Barack before formally hiring him as Project VOTE!’s Illinois state director, and Sandy remembered that it was “as much him interviewing me as me interviewing him.” Barack alerted Judd Miner and Allison Davis that this temporary job that would run through October meant that he could not join Davis Miner until late in the year. “Journeys in Black and White” would largely be put on hold too, yet rare indeed was it for a publishing house to hold an author strictly to a contract’s due date.
At the suggestion of Bettylu Saltzman, a well-heeled Chicago Democratic activist who had formerly been U.S. senator Paul Simon’s local chief of staff, Sandy already had lined up John R. Schmidt, a progressive, mainstream attorney who had served as Mayor Richie Daley’s first chief of staff, to lead Project VOTE!’s Illinois fund-raising effort. Schmidt in turn had recruited John Rogers Jr., the young black investment executive, as his cochair. Once Barack was on board, Sandy quickly had him meet with Schmidt and Rogers, with whom he immediately meshed very well. “We wanted the state directors to be able to focus on organizing,” Sandy said, so raising money would not be Barack’s responsibility. In a savvy move to attract independent black political support in addition to Daley backers like Schmidt and Rogers, Newman recruited former mayoral challenger Joe Gardner to be Illinois Project VOTE!’s official chairman.
A raft of progressive grassroots groups would be ready to work with Project VOTE! if funding was available, and Barack quickly had to begin building a citywide organization to fully coordinate an enterprise that would be vastly larger than either DCP or the Harvard Law Review. Barack’s own Chicago experience was limited to just some parts of the huge South Side, and equally important in black Chicago was the similarly spacious but economically weaker West Side. Far west 29th Ward alderman Sam Burrell’s political organization was the West Side’s best voter-outreach operation, and one day in early April Barack headed there to meet Burrell and his top staffer, Carol Harwell. Upon arrival, Barack apologized for being late. “I never realized Chicago was this big. I thought I was never going to stop driving.”
Carol remembered Barack carrying two lightweight bags, one with Project VOTE! materials while saying of the second one that “this is my book,” which he tinkered on when he could. Harwell was eager to pitch in, and quickly introduced Barack to another grassroots activist, Bruce Dixon. Given the size of Chicago, dividing the city up into sectors was mandatory. Carol would take the West Side, Bruce the North Side, and Brian Banks, a 1978 Harvard College graduate who had worked for more than a decade in the computer industry, would handle the South Side. With that trio of key staffers on board and office space on the fifth floor of 332 South Michigan Avenue provided by the Community Renewal Society (CRS), “we sat down and tried to hash out how we were actually doing to do this project,” Carol recalled. “Barack was big on community organizations,” and wanted to do as much registration work as possible through them, rather than get involved with committeemen’s ward organizations, which always paid a cash bounty to workers based upon the number of people they signed up. When Carol explained the traditional Chicago way, “Barack was appalled” and quickly said, “We’re not doing that.”7
Before the end of April, a letter cosigned by CRS executive director Yvonne Delk, Joe Gardner, and Barack went out to several dozen grassroots activists inviting them to an 8:30 A.M. meeting on Tuesday, May 5. Attendees would create a Cook County–wide steering committee for the Project VOTE! Chicago Coalition, whose goal would be to “register at least 130,000 new voters, primarily targeting low income and minority persons.” Some two dozen invitees attended, including some Barack already knew: Johnnie Owens from DCP in Roseland, Father Mike Pfleger from St. Sabina in Auburn-Gresham, Sokoni Karanja from the Centers for New Horizons in Bronzeville, and Alderman Burrell from the Far West Side. Others represented established community groups like the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, the Greater Grand Crossing Organizing Committee, the Woodlawn Organization, and Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH. Timuel “Tim” Black, a well-known black political sage and historian, had met Barack briefly during his Hyde Park years; Rev. Princeton McKinney of Christ Temple Community Baptist Church in Markham was a mainstay figure in Mike Kruglik’s flourishing South Suburban Action Coalition. The husband and wife team of Keith Kelleher and Madeline Talbott had launched ACORN in Chicago a decade earlier before Keith had begun organizing home health care workers into SEIU Local 880.
The May 5 “founding meeting” began with a CRS welcome, a brief statement of purpose from Joe Gardner, and then twenty minutes of remarks by Barack detailing his “Proposed Plan.” The “Target Goal” would be “150,000 new minority and low-income registrants statewide,” with 130,000 of them in Cook County. Project VOTE! would reach out to church congregations, who would be asked to register 100 percent of their members, to Chicago Housing Authority tenants’ councils, as some fifty thousand CHA residents were unregistered, and to forty public high schools before the school year ended. Activities would get under way in late May, with a goal of twenty thousand new registrants for June, thirty thousand during July, and forty thousand a month for both August and September. Community groups needed to train their volunteers as deputy registrars who were able to enroll new voters, and groups could apply to Project VOTE! for four-figure grants. Everyone’s expenses could be reimbursed, but no group could pay workers on a per-signatur
e basis.
Before the steering committee’s second meeting on May 19, Barack obtained Jeremiah Wright’s agreement that Trinity members would actively participate. Barack also sought advice from retired state senator Dick Newhouse, who offered to buy him a meal, and Operation PUSH activist Jamillah Muhammad was recruited to help Brian Banks with Project VOTE!’s South Side work. In advance of a third meeting on June 3 where the grant-making process would be detailed, Barack drafted the group’s first press release, targeted for distribution at an upcoming press conference in Daley Plaza, Chicago’s premier outdoor space in the center of the downtown Loop.
In his statement, Barack addressed the Southern California urban disorders that had followed the April 29 acquittals of four police officers who had been videotaped assaulting black motorist Rodney King. “The Los Angeles riots reflect a deep distrust and disaffection with the existing power pattern in our society,” Barack wrote. “We must make political leadership in this country more responsive to the pressing issues,” and in order to do so “voter registration is a necessary, constructive first step.” In particular, “it’s critical that people on the bottom of the economic ladder participate in the process.”
That June press conference was not covered by any of Chicago’s newspapers, though Barack did win the enthusiastic cooperation of Marv Dyson, the general manager of WGCI, the city’s top black radio station, who “agreed to publicize our efforts and recruit the other black radio stations” to do likewise. That was all to the good because throughout the summer the Chicago Defender, the city’s premier black newspaper, made no mention of Project VOTE! Only in early August did two Sun-Times columnists mention the project, with Vernon Jarrett highlighting how Edward Gardner, owner of Soft Sheen Products, a large personal-care-products firm who had a long-standing interest in voter registration, had become a major contributor to Project VOTE!
Throughout June and July, new registration numbers ran about one-third below Barack’s initial, overly optimistic monthly targets. Some of the most successful allied groups, like Keith Kelleher’s Local 880 and Madeline Talbott’s ACORN, were buttressed with $500 apiece each week from Project VOTE! DCP, now headquartered on 95th Street, helped in Roseland, multiple members of both Trinity and St. Sabina churches worked as deputy registrars, and Operation PUSH volunteers did yeoman work. In the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, named for Michelle’s boss Valerie Jarrett’s grandfather, super-energetic Rita Whitfield knocked on every door in the sixteen-story towers. On the West Side, squeaky-clean 28th Ward alderman Ed Smith’s organization was the only Democratic Party arm Project VOTE! funded, and on the North Side, seventy-two-year-old retired machinist Lou Pardo, Chicago’s best-known voter registration volunteer, pitched in as usual. Pardo’s mentor, progressive state senator Miguel del Valle, recalled first hearing Barack’s name from Lou. “I just met this young man who is so impressive,” Pardo told him. “He’s gonna be big someday.”
Only once a week did Barack’s top staffers—Carol Harwell, Bruce Dixon, and Brian Banks—sit down with him in the office for a formal staff meeting. Otherwise everyone was out and about, shuttling volunteers to retail stores and other locations with large numbers of passersby. Uppermost in Barack’s mind were the weekly and monthly numerical targets he and Sandy Newman had agreed upon. “It was very competitive in the office, West Side versus North Side versus South Side,” Carol recalled, declaring that “the West Side won every week.” Barack was “managing to the number,” Brian explained, always emphasizing that “We’ve got these numbers to make.” Barack also continued to work on his Journeys manuscript when he could, and Carol remembered that “he wrote the first couple of chapters in longhand” and then asked her if she could type up the initial part. Carol agreed, even though Barack’s small, left-handed penmanship was difficult to read. Carol also offered punctuation and word-change suggestions, which Barack had no interest in hearing. “I didn’t ask you to read it, I asked you to type it,” she remembered him barking. “Gimme my book. I’ll type my own book.”
With Project VOTE! taking up most of his time, Barack’s presence at the University of Chicago Law School became very infrequent, but by midsummer one colleague he had first met months earlier had a request for him. Jim Holzhauer was a former Supreme Court clerk who had taught full-time at the law school for several years before moving to Mayer Brown, a top-ranked law firm, while continuing to teach several courses, including Current Issues in Racism and the Law. Chicago operated on a trimester schedule—Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters—and although Holzhauer had taught Racism six months earlier, in Winter 1992, a lengthy out-of-town trial was already on his calendar for early 1993. So “I asked Barack to take over the course,” and Barack agreed to do so for Spring 1993—well after he would have completed Journeys and begun practicing law at Davis Miner. With that would come a change in title from Fellow to Lecturer in Law, as UCLS politely called its adjunct instructors. Barack had to submit a course description before the 1992–93 academic year got under way, and he took Holzhauer’s catalog copy—“How have past and present legal approaches to racism fared?”—and expanded it significantly.
Has the continued emphasis on statutory solutions to racism impeded the development of potentially richer political, economic, and cultural approaches, and if so, can minorities afford to shift their emphasis given the continued prevalence of racism in society? Can, and should, the existing concepts of American jurisprudence provide racial minorities more than formal equality through the courts?
Holzhauer had said that “students will prepare papers” rather than take an exam, but Barack specified that the papers should “discuss the comparative merits of litigation, legislation and market solutions to problems of institutional racism.” Of course neither Rob Fisher nor David Rosenberg were mentioned, but the impact and legacy all of those Cambridge discussions were writ large in the first course description Barack had ever crafted.
At the same time, UCLS’s annual Glass Menagerie corrected Barack’s biographical sketch to note that he had been president of the Law Review. Barack, in thinking ahead to the fall, added that he was now “an associate at the firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland” and had “recently completed a series of essays on race and politics that will be published this fall by Simon & Schuster.”
By early August, Project VOTE! was in strong financial shape, largely thanks to John Schmidt’s fund-raising efforts, but the project badly needed to raise its visibility throughout black Chicago, and especially among younger nonvoters, if it was to catch up to its numerical targets. Saturday, August 8, would witness the annual Bud Billiken Day Parade on the Near South Side, a six-decade summer tradition and “the biggest voter registration opportunity of the season” for Project VOTE! Ed Gardner of Soft Sheen had drawn his daughter Terri, who handled their company’s marketing and media efforts, into the campaign, and in tandem with Bruce Dixon, Terri designed a handsome black and yellow poster plus a button featuring a memorable slogan: “Register to Vote—It’s a POWER Thing!,” implicitly playing off of the then-current saying “It’s a black thing—you wouldn’t understand.”
The Billiken Day outing was a great success, with more than two thousand new registrants enrolled, and in its wake, the Sun-Times’ Vernon Jarrett devoted an entire column to Barack’s efforts. “There’s a lot of talk about ‘black power’ among the young but so little action,” Barack complained, highlighting how lack of interest among younger nonregistrants was why Project VOTE! was enrolling only seven thousand people a week rather than the hoped-for ten thousand. “We see hundreds of young blacks talking ‘black power’ and wearing Malcolm X T-shirts, but they don’t bother to register and vote. We remind them that Malcolm once made a speech titled ‘The Ballot or the Bullet,’ and that today we’ve got enough bullets in the street but not enough ballots.”
The key to Project VOTE!’s entire effort was the scores of unheralded volunteer deputy registrars, individuals like Rita Whitfield on the South Side and Lou Pa
rdo’s multiethnic band of North Side regulars, five of whom would tally more than one thousand new registrants apiece before the rolls closed on October 5. On the last Wednesday in August, Project VOTE! hosted a “Deputy Registrar Appreciation Affair” with free food at a well-known center-city jazz venue, and by late summer the effort was getting significant boosts from labor unions like the United Auto Workers and District Council 31 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which pledged $50,000 to the drive. By Labor Day weekend the confirmed Chicagoland registration tally was up to sixty-three thousand new registrants, and ten days later, with the Defender finally according Project VOTE! some much-needed coverage, the total was up to seventy-one thousand.
“There were some real tough times in terms of whether we were making those numbers or not,” Brian Banks recalled. Carol Harwell’s widespread contacts meant “she certainly was the political brains of it,” Brian believed, but Barack was the one answerable to Sandy Newman, and as they headed into their final four weeks, Barack would “smoke packs of cigarettes” each day. By mid-September they had their weekly tally up to about nine thousand, and an overall total of eighty-one thousand. Project VOTE!’s staff and volunteers regularly interacted with both Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton’s Illinois campaign, and even more so with Carol Moseley Braun’s Senate race workers, but everyone was fully schooled on how Moseley Braun’s workers had to be kept at arm’s length. Moseley Braun herself understood “there was every effort . . . to keep a firewall between Project VOTE! and the actual campaign,” for “we didn’t want to get in trouble.” Yet ACORN’s Madeline Talbott knew that “We were working to elect Carol . . . but that was never stated and we knew you couldn’t.” In later years, Talbott’s husband Keith Kelleher would write of how they and Project VOTE! had mounted “a large-scale voter registration program for U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun,” and on multiple occasions Barack too would later bluntly state that the purpose of Project VOTE! was “to get Bill Clinton and Carol Moseley Braun elected.”
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