Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Obama already knew that to build DCP two types of expansion were necessary: an outreach to congregations beyond the Roman Catholic base that Kellman had developed and the recruitment of more block club and PTA members like Eva Sturgies, Aletha Strong Gibson, Ann West, and Ernie Powell. DCP’s neighborhoods, from Altgeld northward to Roseland, West Pullman, and even solidly middle-class Washington Heights, were ill served by their elected officials, who “have generally poured their efforts into conventional political campaigns, with almost no concrete results for area residents.” Obama spoke of the need to “dramatize problems through the media and through direct action,” but DCP’s most pressing need was funds to hire another African American organizer. He realized a $10,000 entry-level salary would not attract experienced candidates, so DCP’s proposed 1987 budget called for $20,000 for that position and an increase in Barack’s salary to $25,000.

  Ken and Jean at the Woods Fund told Barack to introduce himself to Anne Hallett, the new director of the small Wieboldt Foundation, whose interests closely paralleled those of Woods, and also to consider applying to the larger MacArthur Foundation. Obama visited and spoke with Hallett in November, and soon thereafter a front-page story in the Chicago Defender highlighted MacArthur’s announcement of $2.4 million in grants to community organizations, including $16,000 to Frank Lumpkin’s Save Our Jobs Committee. Before the year’s end, Obama submitted to Wieboldt a formal request for $10,000 that was virtually identical to the one he had sent Woods. Boasting that DCP was “an organization equal to any grass-roots effort going on in Chicago’s Black community right now,” Obama admitted that his employment and educational opportunities agenda represented “an ambitious program.” He said DCP needed “about two years” to recruit enough churches to be self-sustaining, and he told Hallett that DCP would soon reach out to MacArthur too.30

  The Far South Side’s two most notable developments in fall 1986 were both environmental. In late September, Waste Management Incorporated withdrew its long-pending application to open a new landfill west of South Torrence Avenue and would instead target the 140-acre O’Brien Locks site on the west bank of the Little Calumet River, surrounded on three sides by WMI’s huge CID landfill. UNO treated this news as a huge victory, infuriating environmental activists Hazel Johnson and Vi Czachorski, whose Altgeld Gardens and Hegewisch neighborhoods were just west and east of the O’Brien site. Johnson and Czachorski’s organizations, along with Marian Byrnes, formed a new antidumping alliance, Citizens United to Reclaim the Environment (CURE). Together with Sierra Club members, CURE organized a well-covered protest outside City Hall. As officials continued to seek the least bad solution to Chicago’s looming landfill crisis, UNO and CURE would be on opposite sides wherever the battle line was drawn. A few weeks later, 10th Ward alderman Ed Vrdolyak, a nemesis of Harold Washington as well as UNO, threw his support behind CURE.

  That dispute seemed mild compared to a front-page headline in the October 25 Chicago Tribune: “South Side Facility Burning ‘Superwaste.’” The incinerator at 117th Street and Stony Island Avenue, little more than a mile from South Deering’s Bright Elementary School to the north and Altgeld Gardens to the southwest, was one of just five nationwide that was licensed to burn highly toxic PCBs. Although a front-page 1985 Wall Street Journal story ominously headlined “Plants That Incinerate Poisonous Wastes Run Into a Host of Problems” had cited the plant’s location, neither UNO nor most anyone else in Chicago had taken note that it was operating close to capacity, burning more than twenty thousand gallons of PCBs seven days a week. Experts agreed that incineration was much better than burial, but neither Illinois EPA nor Chicago officials had objected to this facility’s location.

  In early November, United Neighborhood Organization held its annual dinner at an East Side banquet hall. Frank Lumpkin was one of two honorees, and the guest speaker was George Munoz, the new young president of the Chicago Board of Education. Newspaper photographs showed two of Chicago’s most promising Hispanic political stars—Munoz and Maria Elena Montes, as Lena’s name now sometimes appeared—seated on the dais. UNO and Gamaliel’s expansion had elevated Danny Solis to UNO’s executive director and Southeast Side organizer Phil Mullins to a supervisory role, and in Mullins’s stead, Bruce Orenstein, a young IAF veteran who knew Greg Galluzzo, took charge of UNO’s Southeast Side work.31

  As Barack was drawn into Greg Galluzzo’s UNO and Gamaliel network, one Gamaliel board member, John McKnight, stood out as the most intellectually intriguing voice at the regular gatherings, where most participants adopted a macho tone. Throughout the mid-1980s, McKnight had continued the same powerful themes he had voiced in earlier years. “Through the propagation of belief in authoritative expertise, professionals cut through the social fabric of community and sow clienthood where citizenship once grew,” he told one audience while warning of the danger that “a nation of clients” posed to a democratic state. In an article entitled “Community Organizing in the ’80s: Toward a Post-Alinsky Agenda,” McKnight and his younger colleague Jody Kretzmann declared that “a number of the classic Alinsky strategies and tactics are in need of critical revision.” Rather than confronting some “enemy,” the emphasis should be on “developing a neighborhood’s own capacities to do for itself what outsiders will or can no longer do.” The focus should shift public dollars away from salaries for service providers to investment in “local productive capacities” that will strengthen rather than weaken communities.

  A year earlier, in November 1985, Chicago Magazine—a monthly not easily mistaken for a social policy journal—had devoted six glossy pages to a lengthy interview with McKnight. In the article, he said Chicagoans needed to recognize that “the industrial sector of America has abandoned us,” and that a new future loomed. “We’re turning out young people from universities right and left who really are looking for something to do. In the elite universities what do we offer them? We offer them the chance to become lawyers.” On the other hand, a sizable population of heavily dependent poor people was necessary to support the “glut” of professional servicers “who ride on their backs.” Public funds should be used to employ low-income people rather than pay servicers to patronize them. “To the degree that the War on Poverty attempted to provide services in lieu of power or income, it failed,” McKnight argued. “Poor people are poor in power.” For poor Chicagoans to become citizens rather than clients, “shifting income out of the service sector into economic opportunity for poor people is absolutely essential.”

  In early 1986 McKnight wrote in the Tribune that instead of subsidizing medical behemoths, local health dollars should be directed toward “creating neighborhood jobs that provide decent incomes for local people.” In a subsequent interview, he decried “a society focused on building on people’s weaknesses,” one that emphasized “deficiency rather than capacity.” Service professionals’ control over the lives of the poor magnified rather than alleviated their poverty, for “if you are nothing but a client, you have the most degraded status our society will provide.”

  Health services were the most dire problem, and publicly funded “medical insurance systematically misdirects public wealth from income to the poor to income to medical professionals.” Yet change would be difficult because “many institutional leaders” had come to see communities as nothing more than “collections of parochial, inexpert, uninformed, and biased people” who understood their own needs far less well than did service professionals. “Institutionalized systems grow at the expense of communities,” and America’s “essential problem is weak communities.”

  John McKnight’s influence on people exposed to his social vision was profound even if unobtrusive. Ellen Schumer, a fellow Gamaliel board member and UNO veteran, said that within the world of Chicago organizing, McKnight “really challenged the old model.” His impact was also felt throughout Chicago’s progressive foundations, with Wieboldt acknowledging that it was “fortunate to have John McKnight join us” at the board’s annual retreat �
��to talk about the substantive changes in Chicago neighborhoods today that require new strategies for organizers.”32

  If McKnight was Chicago’s most significant social critic, the front pages of the December 3, 1986, editions of all three Chicago daily newspapers announced another: G. Alfred “Fred” Hess, a little-known policy analyst, education researcher, and former Methodist minister. After completing a Ph.D. in educational anthropology at Northwestern University in 1980, with a dissertation on a village development project in western India, Hess had joined the foundation-funded Chicago Panel on Public School Finances, and in 1983 he succeeded Anne Hallett as executive director.

  Hess had made the front pages of Chicago’s daily papers nineteen months earlier thanks to a lengthy study entitled “Dropouts from the Chicago Public Schools: An Analysis of the Classes of 1982–1983–1984.” The Chicago Sun-Times had summarized Hess’s findings in a boldface banner headline: “School Dropout Rate Nearly 50 Percent!” His discovery that 43 percent of students who had entered Chicago high schools in September 1978 dropped out prior to graduation was a percentage that Obama had accurately cited a year earlier when he had written to Phil Boerner about the worst ills plaguing the neighborhoods where he worked. Hess’s data readily showed that high schools with predominantly minority populations had a dropout rate as high as 63 percent.

  One Tribune story highlighted how at one Roseland high school, remaining in school did not mean students were studying. “We were sitting at a lunch table in the cafeteria rolling joints one morning,” a seventeen-year-old girl told reporter Jean Latz Griffin. “There was a security guard right next to us, but he didn’t say anything. People smoke it anywhere. Some teachers say ‘Put it out,’ but no one really does anything. You can’t snort coke inside school though. That would be too obvious.” Out of Corliss High School’s eighteen hundred students, only forty-eight were taking physics, only seventeen had qualified for the school’s first-ever calculus class, and almost 50 percent were enrolled in remedial English. A report similar to Hess’s, from a parallel research enterprise, Donald Moore’s Designs for Change, revealed that only three hundred out of the sixty-seven hundred students who had entered Chicago’s eighteen most disadvantaged high schools in 1980 had been able to read at a twelfth-grade level if they graduated in 1984.

  In a prominent Tribune feature four weeks before Obama arrived in Chicago, Hess had warned that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) were damaging the city’s future. “We are in danger of creating a permanent underclass that is uneducated and unable to advance. It means a set of neighborhoods in which the majority of people are constantly unemployed and a strain on the social system in welfare and the high cost of crime. If we don’t take strong action now, we’ll pay for it later.” Don Moore emphasized how job losses were magnifying the consequences of CPS’s failures. “Parents are feeling a real desperation now because they are seeing unskilled jobs disappearing . . . 20 years ago the manufacturing industries in Chicago didn’t depend on employees being terribly literate. The economy has changed.” Former Illinois state education superintendent Michael Bakalis wondered to the Tribune why “the general community of Chicago, particularly the business community, has not been absolutely outraged by the performance of the Chicago Public Schools.” In July 1986, Hess told Crain’s Chicago Business that the way to reform public schools was to develop “real power for local citizens to control their local schools. Let local citizens hold local school officials accountable for the effectiveness of their schools. This would be real and significant decentralization of power that could make a difference.”

  Illinois state law mandated that high school students receive at least three hundred minutes of daily instruction. Beginning in spring 1986, Hess’s Chicago Panel discovered that many Chicago high schools had fictional “study hall” classes in their students’ otherwise skimpy schedules that created a false paper trail to meet that requirement. The resulting report, “Where’s Room 185?,” released on December 2, created an immediate uproar. The Tribune editorialized that CPS “administrators are deliberately and illegally cheating students of part of the education to which they are entitled.” It also showed that in an overwhelming majority of actual classes, teachers actively taught for less than half of the class period. Noting how recently promoted CPS superintendent Manford Byrd’s response was to “hunker down and criticize the design of the study,” the Tribune declared that it was “inexcusable that it took an outside research panel” to uncover CPS’s “fundamental failure.”

  The Chicago Defender ran a prominent page-three story, “Dropout Rate Irks Parents,” publicizing DCP’s desire to meet with board of education president George Munoz to discuss the problem. “We have a lot of dropouts,” DCP project director Barack Obama told the Defender. “We acknowledge that the dropout question is complicated, and there are no quick fixes to keep kids in school. We are urging Munoz to study the counseling system, recommend changes, and expand the numbers. This will have a direct effect on kids in the schools now.” Obama also said that students’ preparation prior to their high school years should be examined, “because there are a lot of possibilities out there.”33

  In addition, two public controversies highlighted Altgeld Gardens residents’ problems with both the CPS and the CHA. On December 4, one day after “Where’s Room 185?” debuted in Chicago newspapers, the Defender’s Chinta Strausberg reported on six teachers at the Wheatley Child-Parent Center who had transferred to other schools because they feared that Wheatley was permeated with asbestos. Superintendent Byrd insisted that tests had shown the air at Wheatley was “safe,” but Wheatley parents threatened to boycott the school and demanded an immediate inspection. On December 15 just 37 of Wheatley’s 377 young children attended school, and for the next two days that number dropped to 17 and then 11. One parent told the Tribune, “We can’t help but notice that the kids go to school all week and come home with rashes and wheezes. When they are home for the weekend, it all clears up.”

  The boycott continued until the Christmas–New Year’s break, but being “home” at Altgeld was no picnic either, as a Tribune series detailing what it called the CHA’s “national reputation for mismanagement” documented. “If I had a job, I wouldn’t be here. This is not a good place to raise kids,” one young Altgeld mother told the newspaper while complaining about the prevalence of youth gangs. Two days later the Tribune reported that Zirl Smith was resigning as CHA executive director, and the next day’s paper emphasized how “Chicago has used the CHA as a way to isolate blacks.”

  When news broke that administrative ineptitude had cost CHA $7 million in federal aid, CHA’s board chairman resigned as well. Fifteen months would pass before asbestos removal finally began in some 575 Altgeld homes, almost two years after Smith’s tumultuous visit to the Gardens. Harold Washington’s press secretary, Al Miller, later recounted the mayor remarking that “he didn’t believe there was a solution” to the CHA’s profound problems.34

  Shortly before Christmas, Barack Obama and Sheila Jager flew to San Francisco to spend a holiday week at her parents’ home in Santa Rosa. Although they had been living together for hardly four months, their relationship had quickly become one of deep commitment—indeed, so deep that for several weeks they had been discussing getting married during the trip to California.

  Asif Agha had watched their relationship grow. Over the previous sixteen months, Asif had seen “Barry”—as he alone called Obama—acclimate to Chicago. “We were kind of an anchor point for each other,” and “Barry” spoke frankly to Asif about his acculturation. “I am the kind of well-spoken black man that white organization leaders love to give money to,” Asif remembered Obama remarking. Asif saw Obama with the eyes, and ears, of a linguistic anthropologist. “In terms of his performed demeanor, diction, speech style, he was white, not black,” Asif observed. Obama was open enough with Asif for him to know that Barack’s significant girlfriends prior to Sheila had been white, and Asif appreciated the underlying duality
of Obama’s Chicago experience. His weekday work in Altgeld and Greater Roseland immersed him in African American life in a way that no prior experiences ever had, but in Hyde Park, his home life with Sheila and their occasional socializing with other anthropology graduate students was entirely multiethnic and international, just like his Punahou and Pakistani diaspora life had been in Honolulu, Eagle Rock, and New York.

  Asif Agha. Eunhee Kim Yi. Arjun Guneratne. Their names alone, just like Sheila Miyoshi Jager, highlighted their international and ethnic diversity. Tania Forte was Egyptian, Jewish, and had grown up in France. Chin See Ming was born and raised in Malaysia before graduating with honors from Rice University in Houston. It was a “very, very cosmopolitan” group, Ming recalled, and when Sheila one day introduced Ming to Barack, I “just assumed he was a graduate student.”

  For Sheila and her classmates, the first two years of the graduate anthropology program were “like boot camp,” Ming explained. Everyone had to take a double-credit introductory course called Sociocultural Systems, taught by Marshall Sahlins, a prominent anthropologist but “not a warm and cuddly person” and indeed “a very, very scary man” to some. Sheila coped far better with Sahlins than most of her classmates, and in her dissertation she wrote that “my greatest intellectual debt” was to Sahlins. “There was a very strong esprit de corps among the grad students” and “people worked very hard,” Ming recalled. “You were never off,” and everyone knew that student attrition would reach 50 percent.