Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Even as his time in Roseland was ending, Obama still had to keep up with DCP’s school reform alliance with UNO. Johnnie, Aletha Strong Gibson, and Ann West were more involved than he was, but DCP continued to follow UNO’s Danny Solis and Lourdes Monteagudo. By late April, what was left of Harold Washington’s official Education Summit had failed to endorse reform legislation that was muscular enough to satisfy top reformers like Don Moore, Fred Hess, and Pat Keleher of Chicago United. So UNO and DCP were now formally backing Chicago United’s proposal, which was introduced in the state legislature by Senate Education Committee chairman Arthur L. Berman as S.B. 1837.

  When Berman’s committee held a daylong hearing on four competing bills on Tuesday, April 26, Barack and a small group of DCP members including Loretta Augustine, Rosa Thomas, Aletha Strong Gibson, and Ann West traveled to Springfield to lobby legislators and to hear Lourdes Monteagudo testify on behalf of UNO and DCP in support of S.B. 1837. Writing in the Tribune, CPS superintendent Manford Byrd once again energized reform advocates by decrying their attacks on “some monolithic, intractable bureaucracy which in fact does not exist” and claiming that “the school system is broadly understaffed.” First the Sun-Times and then the Tribune began publishing multipart exposés on CPS’s failings. The Trib series debuted with a long feature on one elementary school, “a hollow educational warehouse” that is “rich in remedial programs that draw attention to a child’s failures.” An accompanying editorial warned that “Chicago’s public school system is failing its children and jeopardizing the city’s future.” The next day, in a culmination of negotiations that Don Moore’s Designs for Change colleague Renee Montoya had been conducting with UNO’s Danny Solis, DFC’s reform bill, H.B. 3707, sponsored by African American Chicago representative Carol Moseley Braun, was strengthened with the addition of provisions from Chicago United’s S.B. 1837. UNO and DCP joined in publicly shifting their support to the Braun bill, whose cosponsor was progressive Chicago Puerto Rican state senator Miguel del Valle, and reform energies increasingly coalesced behind the Braun–del Valle measure. In one Trib story, powerful 14th Ward alderman Edward Burke declared that “nobody in his right mind would send kids to public school.” In another, Manford Byrd called himself “probably the most gifted urban administrator in this country” while once again dismissing CPS’s obligations to its students: “When you’re all done, the learner must learn for himself.”80

  In the final ten days before Barack’s departure from Chicago for his two-month trip to Europe and then Kenya, things came completely apart at 5429 South Harper Avenue. Ever since Barack had transferred to Columbia almost seven years earlier, he had kept a journal, using it to record vignettes that might find their way into a future book and also sometimes for creating drafts of short stories and even letters to friends. Sheila knew of Barack’s practice, and sometime after their heated argument outside the Spertus museum, she decided to take a look at it. Lena Montes heard from Barack what ensued. “She reacted to this journal that he kept under his bed or mattress,” Lena recalled. “I remember when he says that she found some journal, and he talks about somebody in this journal and that she’s upset” after she read it. Barack did not tell Lena whether she was that someone. “Was it a straw that broke the camel’s back? I’m not sure. I just remember him saying that she . . . was leaving because of this journal.”

  Just as Barack was about to leave Chicago, Sheila moved out of their apartment and moved in with her younger friend Simrit “Sima” Dhesi, who had just completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, and her sister in an apartment four blocks away at 5324 South Kimbark Avenue. Sheila later said that May 1988 “was kind of a blur for me.” Barack mentioned what was happening not only to Lena, but also to Loretta Augustine and even to his archdiocesan friend and Hyde Park neighbor Cynthia Norris. Cynthia understood that Sheila “was upset,” and that the tensions between her and Barack were “because of her race. . . . Yes, I do remember that.” Norris knew that Barack “had a lot of respect for” Sheila, and from what she knew, “I thought he handled things very, very well.” Loretta remembered it similarly. “He talked to me about her,” she recalled. “We had some really open and candid conversations” about the turmoil. “He obviously cared for her,” and was disturbed by what was happening. “I remember telling him, ‘If it’s really real, what you all have, you’ll come back’” after his trip and revive the relationship, “‘and if it’s not, you’ll go forward.’”

  A number of small going-away parties occurred during Barack’s last week before he departed. Reformation Lutheran caretaker John Webster remembered one there, which was also where the small CEN program was now centered; Margaret Bagby recalled another one at St. Catherine’s with catered food. One evening everyone from DCP was invited to a quiet party at a small restaurant in suburban Blue Island. Greg Galluzzo, who had spent so many hours with Barack over the previous eighteen months, “bought him a briefcase and had it engraved” with just “Barack” as a useful going-away present for a law student.

  On another night, Barack and Bruce Orenstein went out to drink beer, and Barack asked Bruce what he would be doing ten years from now. “I’m going to be making social change videos,” Bruce answered. Bruce in turn asked Barack the same question. He said he intended to write a book about his upcoming trip to Kenya, and then “I’m going to be mayor of Chicago.” Bruce was taken aback. “That was the first I heard of it,” and “I thought it was a lot of moxie to say that he was going to be mayor.”

  A few days later, with Sheila having moved from their apartment, Barack flew east. Almost that same day, a dinner announced several weeks earlier was taking place to honor Frank Lumpkin for the eight years he had devoted to winning recompense for the Wisconsin steelworkers who had been thrown out onto the streets of South Deering back in March 1980.

  Frank’s loyalties had not changed. The banquet’s proceeds would “benefit the People’s Daily World,” the newspaper of the Communist Party USA, but that did not deter a trio of notable figures from signing on as public patrons. State Senator Miguel del Valle, sponsor of the pending school reform bill, was one, 22nd Ward reform alderman Jesus “Chuy” Garcia was a second, and Monsignor Leo T. Mahon was a third. “Best wishes to a man who fights for justice,” read Leo’s greeting in the banquet program. Maybe Foster Milhouse and the other right-wing zealots had been right all along, that social justice Catholicism and grassroots communism were indeed one and the same.

  Roberta Lynch, CCRC’s first staff organizer, and Tribune business editor Dick Longworth both sent their apologies for being out of town, but a crowd of more than four hundred attended, including U.S. congressman Charles Hayes, a veteran of both labor struggles and the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement. The Daily Calumet gave the event glowing coverage—“Lumpkin Honored at Dinner”—and three days later editorialized in his honor, simply and accurately calling him “a hero.” After eight years of organizing, Frank Lumpkin had prevailed, and even triumphed.

  Just short of three, Barack Obama was headed toward Harvard Law School with the intent of becoming not just mayor of Chicago but eventually president of the United States.81

  Barack had scheduled a full month to see the great cities of Europe all by himself: Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, and Rome, then to London and from there to Nairobi. He later wrote that he anticipated “a whimsical detour, an opportunity to visit places I had never seen before,” but his memory would be that “I’d made a mistake” in allocating so many days for his European grand tour, because “it just wasn’t mine.” After almost three years of interacting with a dozen or more people almost every single day, now he was entirely alone in countries where he knew virtually nothing of either the language or the culture.

  Before the end of May he was busily dispatching postcards to Sheila, Lena, Cathy Askew, and Cynthia Norris from Paris, “some quite humorous,” Sheila remembered. To Cathy, he wrote about how beautiful the buildings were, to Cynthia he described the city’s as
tonishing appeal: “I wander around Paris, the most beautiful, alluring, maddening city I’ve ever seen; one is tempted to chuck the whole organizing/political business and be a painter on the banks of the Seine. You’ll be amused to know that since I don’t know a word of French, I’m left speechless most of the time. Wish you a fruitful summer. Love, Barack.”

  Traveling largely by bus and train, Barack was also reading a journalistic account of modern Africa in preparation for his visit to Kenya. He later told about meeting and trying to converse with a Senegalese traveler on the way from Madrid to Barcelona, but in subsequent years, Barack never referred to any experiences or memories from his four weeks on the continent. By the last weekend in June, he was in London, where Hasan and Raazia Chandoo had moved six months earlier from Brooklyn. The three of them had lunch in a brasserie before seeing Wim Wenders’s new film, Wings of Desire, at a cinema in Notting Hill.

  From London Heathrow, Barack flew to Nairobi. His sister Auma and his Aunt Zeituni, the family member who had been the closest to his late father, met him at the airport, but Barack’s suitcase did not arrive until several days later. In preparation for his visit, Barack also had read a brand-new book on Dedan Kimathi, a Kenyan anticolonial warrior of the 1950s whom the British had executed in 1957, but instead of discussing Kenyan history while he stayed at Auma’s apartment, sleeping on her couch, they talked mostly about their extended clan of relatives. “There was never a moment of silence or embarrassed awkwardness” between them, Auma recalled. But with Barack wanting to meet as many family members as possible, “It wasn’t all nice. Sometimes he wanted to see a relative I didn’t really get along with, and he’d be like ‘It’s my right, and I need to see them, and I’m not going alone, and you’re coming with me,’” she explained.

  Auma always assented, although her thoroughly unreliable Volkswagen Beetle was their primary mode of transport around sprawling Nairobi. One drive took them to see Auma’s mother Kezia and her sister Silpa Jane, who six years earlier had been the telephone caller who told Barack of his father’s death. On another, Zeituni took Barack to meet her older sister Sarah, who was living in a scruffy slum. But the most difficult visit was to Ruth Baker Ndesandjo, whose son Mark—Barack’s younger brother—was home for the summer and about to begin graduate school at Stanford after having just graduated from Brown. Barack later imagined that Ruth had invited him and Auma to come for lunch, but both Ruth and Mark convincingly remember Barack and Auma turning up with no forewarning. As Mark recounts, a “very awkward, cold” encounter ensued, as Ruth found the unexpected arrival of her ex-husband’s namesake “pretty traumatic.” Years later she recalled, “I closed up. I had nothing to say,” for “I didn’t have the capacity to talk with him or exchange with him because he was a reflection of a man I hated. So I didn’t want anything to do with him.”

  Barack wanted to see more of Mark, and they arranged to have lunch a few days later. Mark remembered thinking that Barack had a “cold” demeanor, “absolutely no sense of humor,” and “wanted to shut out any emotional involvement” with his likewise half-Luo, half-white American brother, especially when Mark bluntly stated that “our father was a drunk and he beat women.” Barack later admitted that meeting Ruth and Mark, and grasping at least in part how abusively his father had treated them, affected him deeply. “The recognition of how wrong it had all turned out, the harsh evidence of life as it had really been lived, made me so sad,” far more so than he had been three years earlier when he had learned during Auma’s visit to Chicago just how deeply tragic a life Barack Obama Sr. had led.

  During Barack’s second week in Kenya, Auma took him on a wild-game safari, and then the two of them plus Zeituni and Kezia took a train northwest to Kisumu and then a jitney bus to the family homestead at Nyang’oma Kogelo. There Barack met Sarah, the stepmother who had raised his father. Barack asked her if anything of his father’s still survived. “She opened a trunk and took out a stack of letters, which she handed to me. There were more than thirty of them, all of them written by my father,” carbon copies “all addressed to colleges and universities all across America” from when Obama Sr. was seeking admission to the University of Hawaii and other colleges. Holding them reminded Barack of the letters he had written a few years earlier, “trying to find a job that would give purpose to my life.”

  That moment, even more than standing at his father’s unmarked grave in the side yard of Sarah’s small, tin-roofed brick home, marked the most powerful and direct paternal link Barack had ever experienced. The connection was underscored when relatives remarked that Barack’s voice sounded “exactly how his father spoke.” Barack’s visit to Nyang’oma Kogelo, like his earlier one to Aunt Sarah in that Nairobi slum, made Barack realize that his Kenyan relatives’ lives sometimes paralleled those of people whom he knew in Altgeld Gardens. Pondering John McKnight’s analysis, in Kogelo Barack wondered whether “the idea of poverty had been imported to this place, a new standard of need and want.”

  Barack later wrote that while in Kenya, “for the first time in my life, I found myself thinking deeply about money,” perhaps foreshadowing the debt load he was about to take on to follow his father’s footsteps to Harvard rather than attend Northwestern cost free. He told Auma that his decision to attend law school was a response to his experiences in Chicago, because as a community organizer he could not “ultimately bring about significant change.” Back in Nairobi, everyone went to a photography studio so that a family portrait could be taken, and Barack and Auma made a brief visit to an elementary school so that he could meet his youngest sibling, George, the son of Jael Atieno.

  One night Auma took Barack to meet one of her former teachers, a woman who had also known their father. Barack recounted her presciently telling him that being a historian “requires a temperament for mischief” and instructing him that when confronted with roseate fictions, “truth is usually the best corrective.” For his final weekend in Kenya, Auma and Barack took a train eastward to the country’s second largest city, coastal Mombasa. Overall, “it was a magical trip,” Barack remembered, an immersion into the life of the father who had abandoned him, an immersion that “made me I think much more forgiving of him” than he had been before experiencing Luo life and culture for the very first time.82

  Before the end of July, Barack returned to Chicago, where he was all alone in the 5429 South Harper apartment until the lease expired in early August. When Asif’s friend Doug Glick stopped by, he was struck by how different the place looked without Sheila. But Barack and Sheila’s two months apart had not ended the relationship between them. Johnnie Owens had run into Sheila in Hyde Park during the summer and remembers how “upset,” even “brokenhearted” she seemed about what had happened just before Barack’s trip. But Barack’s more-than-weekly letters from Europe and Kenya had rebuilt much of their bond. Even so, in little more than two weeks he had to head to Massachusetts before the start of Harvard’s fall semester. He needed to purchase a better car than the blue Honda Civic that he had driven from Manhattan just over three years earlier, and he replaced it with an off-yellow 1984 Toyota Tercel hatchback he bought for $500 from a suburban police officer.

  Barack also wanted to be sure that Johnnie’s transition was going as smoothly as possible, not just at DCP, where everyone already knew Johnnie, but also with DCP’s downtown supporters. “He made sure that the leaders were comfortable,” Johnnie remembered, but “the main thing he did was transfer those financial funder relations” with Jean Rudd at Woods, Anne Hallett at Wieboldt, and Aurie Pennick at MacArthur. Just a few weeks later, MacArthur would award DCP its second annual $20,000 grant. Barack “left the organization in a very good position,” Johnnie explained, and the effort Barack put into the transition further showed that he intended to return to Chicago after law school.

  Barack’s greatest disappointment was the lack of state funds to expand DCP’s after-school tutoring program, but with state government consumed by the struggle over Chicago school
reform, the legislature had remained in session beyond its normal end-of-June adjournment to pass a compromise bill. At the end of May, reform forces had reunified themselves into a new coalition called the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, or ABCs, with UNO playing a lead role and DCP a minor one. A massive June 6 rally had called upon reform supporters to make their case in person to state legislators in Springfield, and the slogan “Don’t come home without it!” became reformers’ new rallying cry.

  The Chicago City Council approved a vote of no confidence in Manford Byrd by 39 to 4, soon followed by the resignation of a board of education member who now felt similarly. “I assumed education was the first priority of the whole system, and it is not,” retired business executive William Farrow announced. Down in Springfield, House speaker Michael J. Madigan brought the interested parties together for marathon negotiation and drafting sessions in his office. Danny Solis and Al Raby both took part, but the most influential participant was one of Madigan’s deputies, Chicago state representative John Cullerton. By the end of June Al Raby was proclaiming that “real reform of Chicago schools is within our grasp,” and on Saturday, July 2, both houses of the state legislature passed a compromise bill. Failure to adopt the measure by the end of June would delay its effective date for a year, but Chicago United’s Patrick Keleher said the bill represented “as much if not more than any of us had hoped for.”

  Barack heard far less encouraging news about his other top concern, the Southeast Side landfill tussle. Mayor Sawyer’s new UNO-and-DCP-dominated task force had held additional public hearings during June, and in late July met privately with both city and Waste Management representatives. By the end of the summer, its report to Sawyer was complete, though several weeks would pass before cochairs Loretta Augustine and Mary Ellen Montes joined the mayor at a City Hall press conference. “The city of Chicago is facing a crisis,” Sawyer announced. “We’re going to have to bite the bullet and do some things that we would prefer not to do,” namely allow the O’Brien Locks site to become a landfill. That outcome had always looked inevitable, but Bruce, Barack, and Mary Ellen’s strategic success in blowing up the Fitch negotiations meant that any landfill now would be controlled not by Waste Management but by the Metropolitan Sanitary District.