Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Mike Kruglik was not happy about what had happened. “The people said, ‘We don’t want you because you’re not black,’” he acknowledged years later. Kellman, feeling “desperation,” told CCRC clergyman Bob Klonowski he would shift gears and advertise for a “black organizer trainee” in addition to an experienced organizer. Since the late 1970s, a little-known national organization called the Community Careers Resource Center had published Community Jobs, a small newsprint magazine comprised mainly of want ads that came out ten times a year. Community Jobs did not have many individual subscribers, but many university and public libraries paid twenty dollars a year to subscribe. It was not a publication they saw any point in retaining—who could possibly want to read job ads from 1985?—and so a quarter century later only one single library would still possess the June 1985 issue containing the job ad that Jerry Kellman submitted.

  Community Jobs organized its ads geographically, so on page 3, under a large “Midwest” heading and directly below an ad for “Canvass Director, North Dakota,” appeared Jerry Kellman’s ad with a boldface title, “Two Minority Jobs Chicago.”

  The Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) is an Alinsky organizing project in the industrial heart of Chicago. This region was once a world leader in steel production. However, in the past four years, 50,000 jobs have been lost. CCRC has pulled together 60 churches from the far Southside of Chicago and suburban Cook County to address this economic crisis. Half of CCRC’s budget comes from local church dues. The project is also committed to church renewal.

  APPRENTICE DIRECTOR

  Duties: Help to supervise all organizing on the far Southside of Chicago, an area which is 95 percent black. Serve as consultant to local parishes; recruit and train lay leaders in listening skills, research, strategic planning, public action skills and (with local clergy) theological reflection.

  Requirements: Experience with church-based or community organizing; or experience in leadership and church development; highly disciplined; confident; mature; reflective; able to think and act strategically; experience in black community preferred.

  Salary: $20,000/year to start, negotiable for more experienced organizer. Automobile allowance; health insurance.

  To apply: Send resume to Gerald Kellman, Director, CCRC, 351 E. 113th St., Chicago, IL 60628. 312/995-8182. Selected candidates will receive phone interviews. Finalists will have interview in Chicago (CCRC will cover travel expenses). Affirmative action position.

  TRAINEE

  Duties and Requirements: Same as for Apprentice Director but not expected to have skills in advance, must have ability to pick up skills and master them quickly.

  Salary: $10,000/year to start. Similar benefits as Apprentice Director.

  To Apply: Same as for Apprentice Director.

  In early June 1985, the new issue of Community Jobs started landing on library shelves across the United States.42

  Chapter Two

  A PLACE IN THE WORLD

  HONOLULU, SEATTLE, HONOLULU, JAKARTA, AND HONOLULU

  AUGUST 1961–SEPTEMBER 1979

  Barack Hussein Obama departed Nairobi’s Embakasi Airport on the evening of August 4, 1959, bound for New York, via Rome, Paris, and London. He was twenty-five years old—not twenty-three, as he would later claim—and he was leaving behind a nineteen-year-old wife, Grace Kezia Aoko, who was three months pregnant with a second child, and a sixteen-month-old son, Roy Abon’go.

  Obama’s dream was to have an education beyond what was available in colonial Kenya. A possession of Great Britain since the late nineteenth century, Kenya lacked any post-secondary educational institution aside from a newly opened technical college. Three years earlier, a dynamic young Kenyan politician, Tom Mboya—who, like Obama, was a Luo, Kenya’s third-largest ethnic group—had visited the United States and begun making it possible for young Kenyans to seek higher education opportunities there. Mboya was introduced to Bill Scheinman, a wealthy young businessman likewise interested in African decolonization, and thanks largely to Scheinman’s personal largesse, as many as thirty-nine Kenyan students enrolled at a variety of U.S. colleges and universities during the years 1957 and 1958.

  By 1958, Barack Obama and his young wife were living in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi, yet the first twenty-four years of his life had been anything but easy. The second child, and first son, of Hussein Onyango Obama and Habiba Akumu, he was born near Kendu Bay in the Nyanza region of western Kenya, close to Lake Victoria. Hussein Onyango had served as a cook with the British colonial military forces, traveling widely. Hussein’s third child, Hawa Auma, later recounted that “he loved all the whites, and they loved him.” Another younger daughter, Zeituni Onyango, remembered Hussein as “unyielding and unapologetic. . . . My father never shed the attitude of a soldier,” nor his belief in corporal punishment for wives as well as children.

  When Barack Hussein was nine years old and his older sister Sarah Nyaoke about twelve, Hussein Onyango moved the family—now including a second wife, Sarah Ogwel—from Kendu Bay to the village of Kogelo, well north of Lake Victoria in the Alego area of Nyanza, where his ancestors had historic roots. But Alego was wild and rugged, and within a few months, a pregnant Habiba Akumu escaped from her husband and three children and returned to Kendu Bay. In despair, Barack and Sarah soon tried to follow her but were returned to Kogelo to live with their stepmother, Sarah Ogwel, while their father increasingly worked in Nairobi. Decades later Sarah would tell her stepgrandson that his father “could not forgive his abandonment, and acted as if Akumu didn’t exist. He told everyone that I was his mother.”

  In Kogelo Barack attended Ng’iya Intermediate School, and in 1949, at age fifteen, he took the Kenya Africa Examination. In early 1950, he was admitted to Maseno Mission School, Kenya’s oldest secondary institution. School records initially described Barack as “very keen, steady . . . reliable and outgoing,” but during his senior year school administrators took a strong dislike to him and effectively expelled him. Classmates acknowledged that Obama had become “rude and arrogant” toward teachers, and the white English principal fingered him as the primary author of an anonymous letter criticizing the school’s practices. Wherever the blame lay, Obama was out of school without having graduated, and a furious Hussein Onyango instructed him to move to Mombasa, Kenya’s eastern port city, to earn his own living.

  By some time in 1955, Barack had relocated to Nairobi, where he was a clerk typist in a law firm and also did some work for a British engineering firm. At a Christmas Day 1956 dance party back in Kendu Bay, he met sixteen-year-old Grace Kezia Aoko, and the next month, they were married and moved into Obama’s Nairobi apartment. Fourteen months later, Kezia gave birth to Roy Abon’go. Soon thereafter, sometime in mid-1958, Barack met Betty Mooney, the forty-four-year-old American woman who would become his ticket to the United States.1

  For more than a decade before arriving in Nairobi in 1957, Betty Mooney had worked closely with world-renowned literacy advocate Frank Laubach, whose “each one teach one” method had helped millions across the globe learn to read. Mooney had spent eight years in India before moving to Baltimore to oversee the training of additional literacy teachers at the Laubach-sponsored Koinonia Foundation. In Nairobi, she quickly won the active support of Tom Mboya, who introduced her to a large crowd at one of his weekly political rallies. Then, in the summer of 1958, she and Helen Roberts, another American literacy teacher, began preparing a series of elementary instructional readers in Swahili, Luo, and Kamba.

  In September 1958, Mooney hired the young Barack Obama as her secretary and clerk and paid him the handsome sum of $100 monthly. Before long Obama was taking a lead role in the writing of two Luo readers Mooney’s team was producing. Laubach himself visited Nairobi in November 1958; a photo published in the monthly newsletter Mooney had just launched pictured her, Laubach, and “Mr. B. O’Bama.”

  This was a great opportunity for Obama to perfect his own English literacy, and Mooney quickly became impressed by h
is abilities. “Barack is a whiz and types so fast that I have a hard time keeping ahead of him,” she wrote Laubach. “I think I better bring him along and let him be your secretary in the USA.” Indeed, getting to the U.S. was Obama’s express goal, and by early 1959, even without a diploma from a secondary school and with only some UK correspondence courses on his record, he wrote to several dozen U.S. colleges and universities seeking undergraduate admission for fall 1959. He had read about one of them in the Saturday Evening Post, a weekly U.S. pictorial magazine, in Mooney’s office. The University of Hawaii was described as being a “Colorful Campus of the Islands.” The article praised the “multi-racial make-up” of the university’s student body and emphasized that Hawaii was “one of the few spots on earth where there is little racial prejudice.”

  In early March, Barack Obama received notice of his acceptance from the University of Hawaii, plus a certificate to show U.S. consular officials in order to obtain a student entry visa. Classes would begin on September 21. Betty Mooney was overjoyed, and quickly wrote Frank Laubach to request his help. Barack “is extremely intelligent and his English is excellent, so I have no doubt that he will do well.” Mooney wanted to pay both Obama’s tuition and half of his estimated $800 annual room and board, but she wanted Kenyan officials—and apparently Barack too—to view these funds as a scholarship rather than a personal gift, and Laubach agreed to help. “I remember him very well, and agree that he is unusually smart. I have no doubt that he will do a very good job.” Enclosed with his reply to Mooney was a copy of a letter addressed to the University of Hawaii, which stated that the Laubach Literacy and Mission Fund had granted Obama $400 toward his first year of studies.

  Barack worked to complete the Luo primers and also advertised in Kenya’s Luo language newspaper, Ramogi, for contributions toward his upcoming expenses in Hawaii. Gordon Hagberg, an American whose family had employed Hussein Onyango Obama while they resided in Nairobi, asked his employer, the African-American Institute (AAI), to assist with Obama’s airfare, explaining that Obama “is what could be called a self-made man.” In late July the U.S. consul general formally issued Barack’s nonimmigrant student visa, and AAI booked and paid for his flights. Obama wrote to Frank Laubach, thanking him “for all that you have done for me to make my ways for further studies possible,” including the essential $400 that actually came from Betty Mooney. Barack hoped to see Laubach during the three weeks that Betty had arranged for him to stay at Koinonia, outside Baltimore, before going to Hawaii. On Sunday morning, August 9, 1959, Barack Hussein Obama arrived on a British Overseas Airways Corporation Comet 4 at New York’s Idlewild Airport and was granted entry to the United States.2

  Even before Obama registered for his fall semester courses on September 21, one of Honolulu’s two daily newspapers, the Star-Bulletin, ran a photo of the twenty-five-year-old freshman in an article entitled “Young Men From Kenya, Jordan and Iran Here to Study at U.H.” Obama had secured a room at the Atherton YMCA, just across University Avenue from the campus, but he told the newspaper he was already surprised by the high cost of living. He enrolled in a roster of unsurprising freshman courses—English Composition, World Civilization, Introduction to Government, Business Calculations—and as the first and only African student on campus, and perhaps the only student always wearing dark slacks and dress shirts rather than casual Hawaiian clothing, Obama was immediately a standout presence at UH.

  Obama frequented a campus snack bar with lower prices than the main cafeteria, and he soon fell in with a band of friends. Neil Abercrombie was a newly arrived graduate student in sociology from Buffalo, New York; undergraduates Andy “Pake” Zane and Ed Hasegawa had grown up on Oahu—Hawaii’s commercial hub—and the Big Island—Hawaii’s most rural isle—respectively. Abercrombie recalled Obama as “an unforgettable presence” with a “James Earl Jones voice. It was resonant, deep, booming and rich. It carried authority. He spoke in sentences and paragraphs.” Zane agreed. It was “a simply amazing voice,” sometimes “mesmerizing.”

  But Abercrombie remembered Obama for more than just his voice. “He was always the center of attention because he had an opinion on everything and was quite willing to state it. . . . He had this tremendous smile, a pipe in his mouth, dark-rimmed glasses with bright eyes. He was incandescent.” Abercrombie told journalist Sally Jacobs how Obama “talked about ambition, his ambition for independence in Africa in general, and his own personal ambition to participate in the emerging nationalism in Kenya . . . it was the central focus of his life. He was full of such energy and purpose.” Obama’s brimming self-confidence was usually engaging rather than off-putting. “He thought he was the smartest guy in the room, I think, and with good reason . . . everybody else thought so too,” Abercrombie recalled. “I could easily call him the smartest person I’ve ever met.”3

  Just two weeks into the fall semester, the UH student newspaper, Ka Leo O Hawaii, published a story on Obama, in which he said he chose UH over other acceptances from San Francisco State College and Morgan State College in Baltimore but again referred to Honolulu’s high cost of living. He spoke of his homeland’s desire for independence from Britain, saying, “Kenyans are tired of exploitation.” Several weeks later, Ka Leo O Hawaii ran a photograph on its front page of Obama talking with university president Laurence H. Snyder about UH’s newly proposed trans-Pacific East-West Center. In late November, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin printed its second story on Obama, under the headline “Isle Inter-Racial Attitude Impresses Kenya Student.” This time Obama was quoted as saying he was surprised that “no one seems to be conscious of color” in Hawaii, adding that “people are very nice around here, very friendly.” He hoped to finish his degree in three years and hoped to take up some type of government work when he returned to Kenya.

  Sometime in November, Betty Mooney, returning to the U.S. via Asia and the Pacific, stopped in Hawaii for several days and was “much impressed” with how well Obama was doing. So was Frank Laubach when he passed through Honolulu several weeks later. In early December Obama sought permission from U.S. immigration officials to work part-time, citing the “high cost of meals,” and he was approved for up to twenty-five hours weekly. Once the 1960 spring semester began, Obama participated in a model United Nations exercise that debated race, and in early June, he submitted a strongly worded letter to the editor criticizing a Star-Bulletin editorial that had denounced “Terror in the Congo.” “Speaking as one who has been in the Congo,” he wrote, Africa needed to throw off “the yoke of colonialism” as “the time for exploitation, special prerogatives and privileges is over.”

  By midsummer, Obama had moved first to an apartment on Tenth Avenue east of the university, then to one on Eleventh Avenue, and finally westward to a neighborhood just north of the Punahou School. In late July 1960, he submitted a routine request to extend his student visa, noting that he was earning $5 a day as a dishwasher at the Inkblot Coffee Shop while also taking a full summer-session course load. After summer session ended, Obama earned $1.33 an hour from Dole Corporation—Oahu’s principal pineapple grower—during August and September as an “ordinary summer worker.”

  During his time in Honolulu Obama exhibited an increasing appetite for alcohol. Drinking and talking were two of Obama’s favorite pastimes, but there was also a third. As one female student later told Sally Jacobs, Obama “was always ready to engage you as a woman beyond the normal conversation, you know, to take it one step further. Today you’d call it ‘coming on.’” Another woman agreed. “He was flirtatious,” but “he was too close in my personal space. . . . I thought he was a little bit almost aggressive in his way of meeting and being around women.” Among Obama’s Luo friends in Kenya, “he-man-ship” was “no big deal,” and one of his closest acquaintances later boasted that Luo men of their generation had a “habit of waylaying foreign women and literally pulling them into bed.”

  When fall 1960 classes began on September 26, Obama’s seven courses included Russian 101. A fello
w student was a virginal seventeen-year-old freshman with an incongruous first name who still lived at home with her parents. By early November 1960, however, Stanley Ann Dunham was pregnant.4

  Stanley Ann Dunham was born on November 29, 1942, at St. Francis Hospital in Wichita, Kansas. She received her forename not from her identically named father but from her mother. Seventeen-year-old Madelyn Payne had secretly married twenty-two-year-old Stanley Armour Dunham a month before her own high school graduation in June 1940. Stanley’s mother, Ruth Armour Dunham, had named her second son after the explorer Henry M. Stanley, her eldest son Ralph would later explain, and the Dunhams didn’t see Stanley as “a man’s name or a girl’s name, it was a family name.”

  Ruth Dunham had committed suicide by swallowing strychnine in 1925, at age twenty-six, after learning that her husband was busy womanizing. Her sons, ages seven and eight, grew up living with their maternal grandparents in the small town of El Dorado, Kansas, and would only “very rarely” ever see their father again.

  Teenaged Madelyn Dunham was also a devoted fan of the actress Bette Davis, who six months earlier, in a popular feature film titled In This Our Life, had played a southern belle character named Stanley Timberlake. Asked decades later why she had named her daughter Stanley, all Madelyn would say is “Oh, I don’t know why I did that.”

  Madelyn’s family had been far from pleased about her marriage to Stanley Dunham, who had failed one year of high school and whose older brother Ralph described him as “a Dennis the Menace type” given to naughty high jinks. One of Madelyn’s younger brothers later said, “I think she was looking at Stanley as a way of getting out of Dodge,” and the newlyweds soon set out on a road trip to the San Francisco Bay Area. By 1941 they were back in Kansas, with Stanley apparently working in an auto parts store before enlisting in the army a few months after Pearl Harbor. With her husband away and a new baby to care for, Madelyn moved in with her parents and commuted to a night shift job at a new Boeing B-29 bomber plant in Wichita. Stanley had become a sergeant by the time his unit entered France some weeks after D-Day, but in April 1945 he was reassigned back to Britain before being discharged that August, following Germany’s defeat and Japan’s announced surrender.5