Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Johnson, whom friends would call “a dapper gentleman” and “the life of the party,” graduated from Lincoln University and earned a master’s degree in hospital administration from the University of Chicago. Johnson had begun working part-time as an automobile salesman in the early 1950s, when no black person, whether salesman or customer, was allowed on a dealership floor. In 1967, as the black freedom struggle crested, General Motors made Johnson its first African American franchise owner, and four years later, he switched from selling Oldsmobiles to offering Cadillacs. Al’s son Don remembered his dad as a man of “expensive tastes” who lived in a lakefront condominium in Chicago’s Gold Coast but “never wanted the limelight” despite his sustained commitment to black political advancement.

  Progressive former congressman Abner Mikva explained how very few political donors like Johnson “were in it for the right reasons. He was one of them.” Don Johnson also remembered his dad remarking about the young attorney whom Tony Rezko had introduced him to some months earlier. “There’s something special about this guy,” Al told him. “This guy is going to go places.”

  In mid-July, Barack attended a Chicago gathering of the nascent New Party, the progressive “fusion” venture Keith Kelleher and Madeline Talbott hoped to launch. The fifty attendees heard “appeals for NP support from four potential political candidates,” including a newly elected alderman who was there to express thanks. The other three included “Barack Obama, chief of staff for State Sen. Alice Palmer. Obama is running for Palmer’s vacant seat,” the meeting notes recorded, and Senator Miguel del Valle’s top aide, Willie Delgado, who also was there, remembered first encountering Barack as an “assistant” to Alice Palmer.32

  In close tandem with Pat Graham, Barack also was pitching in on the actual launch of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). He suggested to Pat that perhaps he should resign as board chairman if he ran for Palmer’s seat, and Pat immediately said the state Senate was not significant enough to merit that. Barack and Pat also experienced disagreement, and attendant delay, over whom to name as executive director of the CAC. At the end of May, the board officially asked Spencer, Joyce, MacArthur, and the Chicago Community Trust to pony up equal fourths of an initial $90,000 in operating funds because the first Annenberg money would not arrive until $500,000 in local matching funds was raised.

  Those grants were quickly made, and an executive search consultant was retained. In the interim, “since there is no actual director,” board minutes noted, “Anne Hallett and Bill Ayers had worked diligently” to write the request for proposals that CAC made public in mid-June, with applications due by August 1. For an executive director, “what was most important to Barack, given the politics of the city of Chicago, was that this person be clean and honest,” Pat recalled, and Barack’s desire was to hire Ken Rolling, the Woods program officer whom he had known well for almost a decade. Pat wanted “someone who knew something about education,” and was uncomfortable about how clubby it seemed. “I thought that was a little too much old boy network for my taste,” and so “it took us a while to agree on Ken,” whom Pat quickly realized was “absolutely sterling.”

  Ken would not start until September 1, and in the meantime the governance of Chicago’s public schools suddenly shifted in a truly astonishing way. The Republican triumph in Illinois’s November 1994 general election had included Republican capture of the state House of Representatives, which gave Republicans full control of both houses plus the governorship for the first time in a quarter century. Within days, both Republicans and business-oriented Chicago reformers like John Ayers, Bill’s younger brother, began discussing how a possible governance shake-up could kick-start the energies for reform that had largely abated in the five years since the seemingly landmark 1988 school legislation shifting authority to local school councils had taken effect in 1989. In late April 1995, Governor Jim Edgar debuted a bill that would hand direct control of Chicago’s schools to the city’s mayor, and a month later Republican lawmakers, joined by a handful of progressive white Democrats, passed the measure on what the Tribune called “a day of historic change for a system long mired in status-quo politics.”

  Edgar quickly signed the bill into law, which charged Mayor Richard M. Daley with naming a new, five-member board of education and a new chief executive officer. As everyone waited for Daley to act, the Tribune publicized CAC’s request for innovation proposals from groups of Chicago schools. Barack emphasized, “If we’re really going to change things in this city, it’s going to start at the grass-roots level and with our children.” Six days later Daley named his chief of staff, Gery Chico, as president of the new board and highly respected city budget director Paul Vallas as CPS’s new CEO, supplanting the incumbent superintendent.

  The new law would allow the hard-charging Vallas to terminate administrators and non-educational employees with just two weeks’ notice, and Vallas promised to eliminate the system’s yawning budget gap without any impact on classroom education. One school principal, a twenty-five-year veteran of the Chicago schools, told the Tribune that “this is the best news I’ve heard in all the years I’ve been in the system.” Less than three weeks later, Vallas announced that the budget deficit had indeed been eliminated, with more than $161 million saved by the termination of seventeen hundred non-instructional staffers. The Tribune’s African American education reporter Dion Haynes called the speed and scale of Vallas’s changes “miraculous” and remarked how “radical” it was for school leaders to be “putting students—not bureaucrats—first.” Editorially the Tribune praised Vallas for “a dazzling display” of “magic,” and highlighted how he also had set aside $206 million to fund “ambitious new educational initiatives.” That was exactly CAC’s mission too, and by the August 1 deadline, more than 170 proposals were submitted, a number that Hallett, Ayers, and their colleagues found astonishing. The Collaborative volunteers quickly winnowed that huge batch almost in half, and a mid-August board meeting ratified invitations asking the ninety strongest applicants to submit full proposals by October 13.33

  On Saturday, July 22, Barack and Sokoni Karanja made opening remarks at the first small gathering aimed at finally launching their long-discussed Lugenia Burns Hope Center. For more than a year, they had been discussing “the need for an organizing institute on the South Side,” conversations that in part grew out of their joint service on the Woods Fund panel that had critiqued organizing’s shortcomings. Sandy O’Donnell, who had staffed the Woods panel, played the same role in the Hope Center planning, and she noted that Barack cited the “political disaffection of the African American community in the wake of Harold Washington’s death” and “the lack of an active voice among African Americans in various major policy debates—school reform, the Chicago Housing Authority, and the criminal justice system” as primary reasons for why the Hope Center was needed.

  Barack explained that the center’s mission was to start “an organic process to duplicate leadership—to help people become actors rather than consumers,” language anyone familiar with John McKnight’s work would recognize. People manifested “lots of hunger for information, but outreach [was] sorely needed—especially to young black men.” Now the key would be to nail down the curriculum for the twelve-week training sessions they planned to begin at Sokoni’s Centers for New Horizons in Bronzeville in the months ahead. Barack “agreed that the African perspective has to be built into the idea of ‘centeredness,’” but the overall goal was that neighborhood residents who completed the training would “become organizers or even community leaders.”

  On Monday, July 24, opening arguments took place in the Cook County Circuit Court trial of U.S. representative Mel Reynolds. Lead prosecutor Andrea Zopp, a 1981 graduate of Harvard Law School, was a black woman whose presence negated any claim that Reynolds was being persecuted for his sexual exploits by white racist prosecutors. Three days of jury selection, for a case that would take four weeks to try, yielded a jury of six men and six women, six bl
ack and six white. The Tribune observed that “regardless of what happens” when the jury reached a verdict, “Reynolds’ career is probably over.” The Tribune’s news coverage was so opinionated that it labeled Reynolds “an arrogant manipulator” while explaining that “a special election will be in order if he is convicted.” That was quickly followed by a statement that the only declared candidate was “the estimable State Sen. Alice Palmer.”

  Jurors heard that Reynolds’s sexual relationship with then-sixteen-year-old Beverly Heard had begun in June 1992, and that one week after first meeting her, he took her to dinner at the tony East Bank Club, the favorite exercise and watering hole for upper-class black Chicagoans. Two years then passed before Heard told police about her underage involvement with the now-congressman. Reynolds did not take the stand until mid-August, but a Tribune reporter mocked a defense attorney’s assertion that Reynolds simply “has the most active libido in Cook County.” Thomas Hardy told readers that “Mel Reynolds makes me sick” and “doesn’t belong in public office.”

  As Reynolds’s legal prospects darkened, Alice Palmer appeared to have competition for Reynolds’s congressional seat. Sun-Times political columnist Steve Neal publicly named two potential candidates: state Senate minority leader Emil Jones Jr., with whom Barack had worked back in 1987–88 and whose 34th Ward Democratic organization, in tandem with other wards, guaranteed him black machine supporters, and thirty-year-old Jesse Jackson Jr., who had attended Barack and Michelle’s wedding, just as they had attended his because of Michelle’s close friendship with his sister Santita. Neal, a huge fan of Palmer’s, warned that “her prospects are uncertain if Jones or Jackson joins the race,” and although the Tribune reported that Palmer already had raised $51,000, reporters presumed that Jackson, as the well-spoken namesake of America’s best-known black political figure, could be a strong contender.

  Behind the scenes, however, both Palmer and Jackson were facing significant hurdles. Barack’s former Project VOTE! deputy Brian Banks had been recruited as Palmer’s campaign manager, but even before the end of July, campaign chairman Hal Baron had pushed Banks out as internal disagreements roiled Palmer’s small staff. Media consultant Kitty Kurth had recruited a D.C.-based friend, Darrel Thompson, as the campaign’s finance director, and Thompson now took charge of Palmer’s nascent campaign.

  “You’ve got to meet this guy named Barack Obama,” Alice Palmer told Darrel, who visited Barack at Davis Miner and found him to be “a really sharp guy.” Kurth first met Barack at a campaign discussion in Palmer’s kitchen, and Thompson remembered Barack being “involved but not overwhelmingly involved” as Palmer’s campaign took shape. But despite being both a state senator and 7th Ward committeeman, Palmer had no political organization to speak of beyond her husband Buzz and son David.

  Jackson and his closest friend, Marty King, plus Jesse’s wife Sandi, had been discussing a potential congressional race ever since the young couple purposely had bought a home in the 2nd District. But Jesse Jr. faced strong opposition that no one except his wife and Marty knew about, namely from his father Jesse Sr. The elder Jackson had been serving for more than four years as a “shadow” U.S. senator for the District of Columbia, a symbolic, unpaid role as an elected lobbyist for D.C. statehood, and the father refused to embrace the prospect that his son could become a real, voting member of Congress.

  Jesse Jr., Alice Palmer, and Palmer’s campaign chairman Hal Baron all remember the summons the two congressional aspirants received from Jesse Sr. “As far as I could see, it was all green, and then we get this call to go to Jesse’s house,” Palmer recounted. “Junior is relegated to sit in a corner.” Baron knew what Sr.’s intent was, but Jr. was caught by surprise. “I remember being to my father’s house for a meeting,” Jr. explained. “He said, ‘Jesse, come to my house. I want to talk with you.’ ‘All right, Reverend, I’ll be there in a few minutes.’”

  The father-son relationship had become seriously strained more than a year earlier by an intense disagreement about how best to expand Sr.’s Rainbow Coalition. But with Jackson Sr. living primarily in Washington rather than in the family’s Chicago home, tensions had abated. So “I get to my father’s house and sitting in his living room is Alice Palmer,” Jesse Jr. recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, Dad, what’s going on?’ and he said, ‘This is what I’m thinking. I’m thinking that we should support Alice Palmer for Congress, and I want her to consider supporting you for the state Senate seat.’ And I said, ‘I appreciate that, Dad, but I’ve not had this conversation with you before.’” Yet Junior immediately understood his father’s message: “He’s saying to himself that Congress is too much for his boy.”

  But Alice Palmer was not any more interested in Jackson Sr.’s idea than was his son. “Reverend Jackson, I am sorry, but I am not interested in your deal. I have committed my seat to Barack Obama should I be elected to Congress, so there is no chance I can support your idea,” Junior recalled Palmer saying. “I looked at my father and said, ‘See?’” Jesse Jr. added. “‘Reverend, that’s not going to happen. I’m not interested in that,’” and his father’s attempt to sandbag a congressional race crystallized Jesse Jr. and Marty King’s resolve to go ahead and run.34

  On July 31, Barack received his first campaign contributions, two $1,000 checks from a pair of Tony Rezko’s companies. One week later, Friends of Barack Obama was formally created, with Jean Rudd’s husband Lionel Bolin as treasurer, and the checks deposited. David Brint, who had first introduced Tony to Barack five summers earlier, was no longer working with Rezko, yet “I liked him. Everybody liked him.” Tony “was soft-spoken” and “I thought he was an okay guy.” Cook County Board president John Stroger, Rezko’s most important political patron, viewed him similarly. “Tony’s the type of guy who is always helping host fund-raisers and getting his friends to get you money. But he’s real upfront with you, and I’ve never known him to ask for favors, which is unusual in this business,” Stroger explained.

  With Barack’s odds of an actual candidacy increasing, he called Carol Harwell, his former Project VOTE! deputy. “I was kind of shocked when he called,” Carol remembered, both by Barack’s news that Alice Palmer “wants me to take her place” and by his desire to do so. Barack also wanted her to be his campaign manager, and Carol agreed to come over to East View to discuss the district over a pasta salad that Michelle prepared. “She still wasn’t quite on board,” Carol recalled, but Barack’s desire to forge ahead was crystal clear, and he also asked his sister-in-law Janis Robinson to work on his campaign. Both women agreed.35

  But Barack had to devote his next eight days to something entirely different, because finished copies of Dreams From My Father were now in stores, and he was going on a book tour that would take him to New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Times Books had printed seventy-five hundred hardback copies of the 403-page volume, priced at $23.00. Barack’s debut appearance was about ten blocks from home, a Friday-evening book signing at Hyde Park’s 57th Street Books. About thirty people showed up, including two of Barack’s favorite former DCP leaders, Loretta Augustine and Yvonne Lloyd. He inscribed, signed, and dated their copies with an identical phrase—“To Loretta” and “To Yvonne, one of my favorite people in the whole, wide world!” Barack also called Dan Lee to say that he had a copy for him. Barack explained that in the book Dan’s character had been given the pseudonym “Wilbur Milton,” a play on Dan’s middle name, Willard, and Dan laughingly objected: “Oooh, that is a crappy name!” Barack made up for it with a warm inscription: “To Dan, You have been an inspiration to me all these years. I know our paths will meet in the future for peace and justice.”

  Dreams From My Father featured pot-smoking deacon “Wilbur Milton,” but when Dan read the book, he had no complaints. “That’s not a fictitious person. That is me.” The book was organized into three major sections of roughly equal length. “Origins” started with the 1982 news of Barack’s father’s death and then traced his own life up thro
ugh his undergraduate years at Columbia. “Chicago” commenced with a brief account of his postcollege time in New York before moving to a story-filled account of his work at the Developing Communities Project. “Kenya” was an extremely detailed recounting of his summer 1988 visit there.

  Times Books’ jacket copy introduced the book as a “lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir,” one that was “filled with emotional insight and intellectual clarity.” The two-sentence author bio highlighted how he “served as the president of the Harvard Law Review,” and the back cover featured blurbs by a trio of well-known African Americans plus author Alex Kotlowitz. Marian Wright Edelman termed it “an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood” that was “perceptive and wise.” Derrick Bell called it “a beautifully written chronicle of a gifted young man,” a “soaring book” that taught how “survival demands resilience in the face of frustrated expectations.” Charlayne Hunter-Gault said it was “one of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read,” “beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.” Kotlowitz described it as “a book worth savoring” and “incisive.”

  Dreams commenced with a biblical epigraph that even in later years attracted no comment at all: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers . . . ,” from 1 Chronicles 29:15. In Dreams’ introduction, Barack noted how “Harvard Law School’s peculiar place in the American mythology” and his election as the first black president of the Review had led to an opportunity to write a book about “the current state of race relations.” He recounted how he initially had “strongly resisted” addressing instead his own life story, in part because “I learned long ago to distrust my childhood and the stories that shaped it.” He confessed to having weathered “the periodic impulse to abandon the entire project” and warned of the inevitability of “selective lapses of memory.” He explained that “although much of this book is based on contemporaneous journals or the oral histories of my family, the dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was actually said” and stated that “for the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology. With the exception of my family and a handful of public figures, the names of most characters have been changed for the sake of their privacy.” He thanked Jane Dystel “for her faith and tenacity,” Henry Ferris, Ruth Fecych, and “especially Robert Fisher” for their help with the manuscript, and Michelle and his family members for their support.