On the Sunday morning Wright delivered that sermon, Obama listened with tears streaming down his cheeks, never imagining that one day his name would have a place in that list of African-American pioneers.
By Obama’s third year in Chicago, the DCP was thriving. With more than a dozen churches paying dues, Obama was earning $27,500 a year and employing Owens as a full-time assistant. So he decided to pursue a project that reached beyond Altgeld and Roseland: school reform. It fit perfectly into his mission of community empowerment. There was a move afoot in Springfield to establish local school councils—boards composed of parents who would have a say in hiring and firing the principals at their children’s schools. The plan was adamantly opposed by Machine Democrats, who feared the councils would become training grounds for amateur politicians who might get the big idea of running for alderman. Obama organized a bus trip to the state capitol—another time-honored lobbying tactic—and conducted a teach-in on the three-hour ride down Interstate 55. The parents, who had grown up in Richard J. Daley’s segregated Chicago, were skeptical that any politician would hear them out.
“They’re not gonna listen to us,” they told Obama. “They’re elected officials.”
“They’ll listen to you,” Obama assured them. Then he said, “This is what you do.”
He split the parents into groups and gave each the name of a legislator. They were to write notes and hand them to the uniformed doorkeepers outside the house and senate chambers. It was intimidating just to walk into the capitol, past bronze statues of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Mayor Daley, then climb three flights of marble stairs, past the two-story mural of George Rogers Clark parleying with the Indians, and stand in front of the ceiling-high wooden doors, among a crowd of professional lobbyists in suits and smart dresses. But the doorkeepers took the notes onto the floor. The legislators came out. To the parents’ surprise, they listened and even asked questions. On the ride home, the parents, who had gone to Springfield glumly expecting to be ignored, were feeling sky-high—“energized, like we could do anything,” one would later say. The school reform bill passed.
In the late 1980s, the Chicago schools were so decrepit, so indifferent to the task of guiding teenagers toward college, that Secretary of Education William Bennett condemned them as “the worst in the nation.” No mayor in recent memory had sent a son or daughter to public school. Daley, Bilandic, and Byrne were Catholic, so their children were educated by the archdiocese, and Washington’s brief marriage had been childless. At some inner-city schools, fewer than half the freshmen ended up graduating.
The Career Education Network, which aimed to prevent kids from dropping out of high school, was Obama’s most ambitious piece yet. Obama wanted to recruit tutors for an after-school program at four South Side high schools. The tutors would help the kids study, but they’d also teach job skills and act as mentors. In a sign he was already maturing from organizer to politician, Obama wanted Mayor Washington to sign on.
“We can either partner with downtown or challenge downtown,” he told Owens.
This time, he wanted to partner. It would fulfill his dream of working with Harold, and the mayor’s endorsement would bring in other players. Obama got as far as a meeting with Joe Washington, the mayor’s education adviser. It didn’t go well.
Joe Washington (no relation to the mayor) was unimpressed with the young organizer from out of town. They got into a heated argument about the community’s role in the schools. “He doesn’t know shit about Roseland,” Washington later told a friend. “Or Chicago.”
Undeterred, Obama approached his state senator, Emil Jones Jr. As president of the Illinois state senate, Jones would become Obama’s political godfather. In the 1980s, though, Jones was just a backbencher. Obama wrote a proposal asking for half a million dollars in state aid. Jones could only deliver $150,000. That was enough to hire a director and four part-time tutors, and rent space in a Lutheran church. It wasn’t enough, however, to spin off the Career Education Network into an independent organization that could eventually work in schools throughout the city, as Obama had envisioned.
Obama was frustrated. Owens thought he saw the wind go out of his boss’s sails. After three years, he was beginning to see there was only so much he could accomplish from the outside, as an organizer going cup-in-hand to politicians. One weekend, he visited McKnight in Wisconsin, where he told the professor he wanted to quit organizing and go to law school.
“I’ve learned what I can from this, and I’ve seen its possibilities and its limits, and I want to go into public life,” Obama said.
Obama asked McKnight to write him a letter of recommendation to Harvard. McKnight agreed but warned Obama that most organizers were unhappy in law and politics.
“The most important thing is what would you be satisfied with, because you have to do it every day,” he told his twenty-six-year-old protégé. “To do something that’s unsatisfying is a waste of life.”
Lawyering, McKnight said, was nothing like organizing, “where you take the right position and fight for it to the end.” And the essence of an elected official’s job was compromise. That’s why Alinsky had discouraged his pupils from getting involved in lawsuits or partisan causes.
“Most people I know who are organizers would not be satisfied with politics,” McKnight concluded.
Obama understood, but he was still determined to follow his new course. McKnight wrote the letter, and Obama sent his application to Harvard.
After three years, Obama had not only learned all he could learn, he had also taught all he could teach. Thanks to Obama’s training, the women of the DCP were starting to feel confident enough to undertake projects on their own. Waste Management Inc., America’s largest trash hauler, operated the enormous landfill on 130th Street. The dump was a neighborhood blight. The tainted extract of sodden garbage leached into the groundwater through its porous clay lining. The gulls who perched on the Gardens’ ziggurat rooflines were strays drawn away from the lake by the feast inside the dump. Word got out that Waste Management planned to expand into land abutting the O’Brien Lock, which allows river-going barges to enter Lake Michigan—the source of Chicago’s drinking water. Alarmed, the DCP and the United Neighborhood Organization—a Latino group that goes by the acronym UNO—held a rally at Saints Peter and Paul Church in the South Chicago neighborhood. Two hundred people attended. That same night, Waste Management officials were meeting with community leaders in a conference room at South Chicago Bank, trying to win approval for the expansion. At seven o’clock, all two hundred demonstrators left the church and walked silently toward the bank. Once inside, they marched up the stairs and filed into the conference room without saying a word. The president of UNO read a statement about meeting behind closed doors to cut deals that would damage the far South Side. Then everyone left, as silently as they had entered.
Another rally, at the same church, was attended by the city’s new mayor, Eugene Sawyer. Sawyer had been appointed to replace Harold Washington, who died of a heart attack on the day before Thanksgiving in 1987. DCP and UNO wanted a task force to debate the dump’s expansion. Augustine prepared a speech. Since it was a bilingual crowd, she would have an interpreter. But she was asked to deliver one phrase in Spanish: vamos a decide. We will decide. Obama walked her through the presentation, including the pronunciation of those three words. When Augustine recited “vamos a decide” the room burst into cheers and chants of “We will decide!” For that performance, Augustine was appointed to cochair the task force, which succeeded in blocking Waste Management’s plans. Obama, she believed, had given her the confidence to speak before a crowd.
“I wanted to follow him,” Augustine would say years later. “I wanted to be part of the things that I felt he could make happen, and I really wanted to learn. He brought out something in me. I was never that outgoing before. I would feel like something needed to be said but I was afraid to say it. He changed that dynamic to the [point] that when I would be at
these meetings, and I knew something needed to be said, it was something inside of me that overcame that fear of speaking up and out that went from ‘Needs to be said, but I’m afraid’ to ‘It needs to be said, and if I don’t say it, even though I’m afraid, I’m gonna die. I have to say it.’ ”
Johnnie Owens was surprised to hear Obama was quitting the DCP, even more surprised to hear he was quitting for Harvard Law School. Obama gave his assistant the news in a roundabout way that emphasized it would be a change for Owens, too.
“Are you ready to lead?” Obama asked Owens one day at the rectory.
“Lead?” Owens responded. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been accepted at Harvard.”
“What?”
Owens was thrilled for his boss. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he was ready to take over a community organization. He was going to have to run the fledgling Career Education Network and deal with two dozen pastors. And he’d be succeeding a leader who, in three years, had become beloved by his followers. Loretta Augustine, Yvonne Lloyd, and Margaret Bagby were as loyal to Obama as they were to the DCP.
To make the change easier, Obama took Owens around to all the DCP churches.
“I’m leaving,” he told his priests, bishops, and reverends. “John’s gonna take over. I have complete confidence in him. If you like what I did, you’ll like what he does even better.”
Some did. Owens ended up serving six years as the DCP’s director, twice as long as Obama. Alvin Love, who eventually became president of the group, thought Owens was the best community organizer he’d ever met. But, he always added, Obama had trained him.
It was different for the women of the DCP. None of them had expected Obama to stay forever—he was too smart, too talented, to spend his life driving them to church-basement meetings in a decaying Honda. They wanted to see Obama go to Harvard, but when they lost him, they also lost some of their devotion to community organizing.
“We continued working, but I guess, I don’t know, I dwindled away,” Margaret Bagby would say. “I just got tired, I guess.”
Eventually, all three women left Chicago. Bagby found a house in the suburbs, Augustine moved to Mississippi with her second husband, and Lloyd, by then widowed, went home to Nashville.
Just before Obama left for Harvard, he wrote an article about organizing for Illinois Issues, a statewide political journal. Entitled “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” it was later reprinted in the anthology After Alinsky.
Despite the success of the civil rights movement, the election of black mayors, and the Buy Black campaign, the inner city still suffered, Obama argued. In some ways, it was worse off, because middle-class blacks, who had once been bound there by restrictive covenants, were now free to leave, taking their money and education with them. Politicians and businesses couldn’t transform the ghetto “unless undergirded by a systematic approach to community organizing.”
“Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement those solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that 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,” Obama wrote.
Alinsky’s disciples still believed an organizer’s task was to wrest money and resources from powers outside the neighborhood. Why not, Obama suggested, build power within the neighborhood?
“Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.”
That could have been a manifesto for Obama’s next Chicago endeavor, which he undertook the year after he came back from Harvard.
Chapter 4
PROJECT VOTE!
I N H I S T H I R D Y E A R of law school, Obama was named president of the Harvard Law Review, the first African-American to win that position. His election scored him a profile in the New York Times and even more job offers than most Law Review presidents have to fend off.
Obama was getting calls from judges and law firms all over the country. Abner Mikva, a former Chicago congressman then serving on the District of Columbia court of appeals, invited him to interview for a clerkship. The old gray judge had heard about Obama from one of his current clerks, a fellow Harvard law student. Most of Mikva’s young assistants were Ivy League WASPs, so he was interested in diversifying his staff. At least an Ivy League black would be different. Mikva asked his clerk to approach Obama on her next trip back to Cambridge. She did but came back with bad news: “He doesn’t want to interview with you.”
“Oh,” Mikva replied. “He’s one of those uppity blacks who just wants to clerk for a black judge.”
“No,” the clerk said. “If he were going to clerk, he certainly would interview with you, but he’s going back to Chicago and run for public office.”
Mikva was both floored and impressed. He himself had arrived in Chicago as an outsider, a Jew from Milwaukee who attended the University of Chicago Law School and decided to make his career in the city. On his first attempt to get into politics, he walked into a ward office and announced that he wanted to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson’s campaign for governor. “Who sent you?” the man behind the desk demanded. Nobody, Mikva admitted. He was a volunteer. The ward heeler brushed him off with a phrase that became part of Chicago’s political lore: “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”
That is one brash kid, thought Mikva, who didn’t know that Obama had already spent three years on the South Side. You just didn’t come to Chicago and say, “Here I am. Elect me.”
Obama could have gone to work at Sidley and Austin, the white-shoe Chicago law firm where he had interned over a summer and met his fiancé, Michelle Robinson, a fellow Harvard Law student who served as his mentor. But in spite of the money, Obama wasn’t interested in becoming one of dozens of first-year associates in a corporate shop. Instead, he was responding to the courtship of Davis, Miner and Barnhill, a small firm specializing in civil rights litigation. One of its founders, Allison Davis Jr., was the son of the first black professor to win tenure at the University of Chicago. Another, Judson Miner, had been Harold Washington’s corporate counsel. Miner called Obama after reading about his Law Review presidency in the Chicago Sun-Times. The piece mentioned that Obama was interested in civil rights and planned to come back to Chicago. Miner figured everyone in the country would be trying to hire this guy, but Davis, Miner was the leading civil rights firm in Chicago. He had nothing to lose by throwing his hat in the ring. Thinking, What the hell? he dialed the Law Review office and asked for Obama.
“Is this a recruiting call?” the secretary asked.
“Well, I really don’t know the fella, so I guess it’s a recruiting call,” Miner said. “It’s a curiosity call.”
“All right,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll put you on the list. You’re number six hundred forty-three.”
“Okay. Great. Here’s the deal. I’ll let you use my name if you promise to call me as I percolate to the top, so I can prepare for this phone call.”
The secretary never called back. Obama did—that same day. When Miner returned home from an evening bike ride, his daughter told him that “a man with a very funny name” had left a message. Obama knew about Miner’s work in the Washington administration. They agreed to have lunch the next time Obama came to Chicago for a job interview.
“You won’t be offended if I fly there on another law firm’s dime, will you?” Obama asked.
Miner ran a twelve-lawyer office, so he said no, he wouldn’t.
They met at a Thai takeout joint and talked for three hours. Obama was impressed to learn that Davis, Miner gave legal advice to not-for-profits in the black and Latino community, helping them set up government part
nerships. That offered the possibilty of continuing his work as an organizer.
“How satisfying is it dealing with these problems as a lawyer?” Obama asked Miner. “Have you ever thought you could have been more effective addressing those issues in some way other than being a lawyer?”
Miner went back to his office, called his wife, and told her he’d just had lunch with the most impressive law student he’d ever met. Like so many powerful, accomplished men before and after him, he had succumbed to Obama’s talent for charming potential mentors.
“Gosh, I don’t know that I’ve ever met a young man who was more comfortable with himself,” Miner gushed. “He’s just enormously comfortable with his own intellectual capacity, and not in an offensive way at all, in an enormously positive way. He never once reminded me who he was. This kid has powerful credentials, but he didn’t brag about that or say ‘I can do whatever I want.’ He was just a curious kid who had a lot of questions. There was an even keel to him.”
After another half-dozen lunches, Obama agreed to join Davis, Miner. But, he said, he was going to need a year off first. He was working on a book, which would be published as Dreams from My Father. He didn’t want to start full-time until he was sure the writing wouldn’t be a distraction. And he’d agreed to head up a voter registration drive that summer. Miner knew that nearly every other law firm in Chicago was pursuing Obama, offering to pay for his bar exam and let him do whatever he wanted until he was ready to start. The first black president of the Harvard Law Review was the class of ’91’s most coveted rookie. So Miner said, “Fine, Barack. See you next year.”
Project Vote! was the brainchild of Sandy Newman, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and civil rights activist looking to register minority voters. Newman focused his efforts on D.C. and had only been tangentially involved with Chicago, donating money to the registration drive that helped elect Harold Washington. He’d avoided the city because in Chicago, voter registration was closely controlled by ward organizations, which typically paid street beaters a buck for every voter they signed up.
Young Mr. Obama Page 6