Rising Star

by David Garrow

  At UCLS, Barack’s second iteration of Current Issues in Racism and the Law began on Tuesday afternoon, March 29. Given his heavy workload at Davis Miner, Barack otherwise spent little time in his law school office, now room 403, but his colleague David Strauss recalled Barack speaking about race at an early 1994 faculty workshop where someone asked him about journalist Ellis Cose’s new book The Rage of a Privileged Class, which addressed the anger felt by many black professionals over recurring experiences with discrimination. Barack acknowledged that Cose “has got a point,” although such books are “all a little whiny.” Strauss was struck by how “undogmatic” Barack was about race. “This guy’s playing it straight—he’s not striking a pose.”

  Barack’s students from his first time teaching and now the second had a similar impression of him. One 2L who was among the fourteen students who enrolled asked a female classmate who had the course a year earlier what she thought of it. Instead she described Barack. “He’s so beautiful. He looks like food. It looks like someone made him.” Once she “got beyond how good-looking he was, she also described what a terrific teacher he was,” Adam Gross recalled.

  Barack’s syllabus and readings were almost entirely unchanged from a year earlier—only a brief recent essay by Cornel West was added at the end. Gross found it to be a “really interesting and provocative reading list,” and Barack “would frequently show up wearing a suit,” coming straight from Davis Miner to their basement-level seminar room carrying a “battered satchel.” Susan Epstein, a 2L, realized he was “very bright” and an “excellent teacher,” and Adam Gross thought he was “this luminous guy” whom classmates viewed as “sort of a rock star.” One day that image took a serious hit when “his bag of stuff got sort of knocked over and a pack of cigarettes came out and people were like ‘Ugh!’ shattered,” Adam remembered.

  Gross recalled how Barack’s “tie would always be off by the time the class started” and “he was really insistent, in every class and on every subject, that we clearly articulate all of the arguments on all sides.” Susan Epstein was struck by how it was “a very diverse class in an otherwise largely white school,” a class with “a real wide range of political perspectives.” Even with each session featuring what Adam remembered as “really hard discussions about incredibly complicated issues,” everyone was always “incredibly respectful” and Barack did “an amazing job” of “making certain we teased out all sides,” that “every angle and every nuance” was covered.

  In sharp contrast to many Chicago professors, particularly the fiery and intense Richard Epstein, whose Socratic questioning never left any doubt as to what the right answer was, Barack’s approach was “incredibly refreshing.” Susan Epstein realized that Barack “never really said what his view was,” and 2L Rob Mahnke believed Barack “was very guarded about what he was thinking,” as if “he was masking his own views.” During the second half of the quarter, when the students’ group presentations took place, discussions were “very student-directed” and Barack “didn’t talk that much,” Adam remembered.

  When Barack did speak up, he talked about “what policies could be enacted that would make a true difference,” Susan recalled. Barack “spent a fair amount of time talking about political rhetoric,” asking that “even if this might be a good policy, how would you get it enacted—what pragmatic steps would you need to take in the framing of it?” Yet despite eight weeks of persistent questioning by Barack, “I couldn’t tell you at the end of it what his views were.” That did not count against Barack when course evaluation forms were distributed at the end. On a ten-point scale, the students’ overall evaluation of Barack’s teaching performance was 9.1.19

  At Davis Miner, the December 1993 hiring of another young associate, John Belcaster, a 1992 Yale Law School graduate, meant that Barack no longer was the firm’s most junior member. Barack also pressed his best friend Rob Fisher, who had been doing so much yeoman work on Barack’s book manuscript, to consider moving to Chicago in order to join the firm. Rob visited and formally interviewed, meeting and impressing everyone and immediately receiving an offer. Rob also was impressed with Barack and Michelle’s “beautiful” and “spacious” East View Park apartment, where old friend Ken Mack also stayed during a spring 1994 visit. But Rob finally decided that moving to Chicago would take him too far away from his southern Maryland family.

  On Thursday, April 7, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument in Baravati v. Josephthal, Lyon & Ross, the arbitration award case Barack had inherited a year earlier. It was Barack’s first significant courtroom appearance, and his seventeen minutes of remarks and answers to a three-judge panel headed by prominent chief judge Richard A. Posner demonstrated that Barack was well prepared and fully conversant with the issues presented. He spoke clearly and responsively when Posner and his colleagues asked questions, and at the end Posner commended Barack and his opposing counsel for presenting “very good arguments.” Barack’s client, Ahmad Baravati, thought he was “a very smart, innovative, skilled, relentless advocate,” and less than three months later, the panel unanimously affirmed the district court’s award of $180,000 in both actual and punitive damages to Baravati.

  A few weeks later, Barack joined Judd Miner as Judd sought to revive the firm’s case against the 1991 redistricting of Chicago’s city council before another three-judge panel also headed by Posner. But Barack spent almost all of his work hours at Davis Miner, not in Chicago courtrooms. That Barnett case was a recurring constant in Barack’s workday life, and Judd remembered one occasion when Barack was “really upset” and “unhappy” that one brief was not as good as he had hoped. Barack also “was spending as much, perhaps more” of his time “on the other side of our practice,” in the transactional work handled by Allison Davis, Bill Miceli, and Laura Tilly. Davis represented Bishop Arthur M. Brazier’s Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., a major development presence in the struggling Woodlawn neighborhood just south of Hyde Park. Davis also was interested in development prospects in the deeply troubled Near North Cabrini-Green area. On one occasion, Davis remembered, “I asked Barack if he wanted to represent” one or another development entity there, “and he said ‘No, I don’t want to see poor people thrown out.’”

  Barack felt no such qualms about Section 8 bond transactions for the Chicago Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation, loans for the nonprofit Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC), or work for the Near North Health Service Corporation. Laura Tilly remembered that Barack “carried himself with such confidence and authority” and how he “was just terrific with clients. They just loved him.” Some days Barack, Jeff Cummings, Paul Strauss, and John Belcaster ate lunch in the firm’s basement conference room, with Barack reading the newspaper. On other days they went around the corner to Thai Star or across the street to PK’s Place, a small, family-owned Greek diner.

  The four men talked about sports more often than legal issues or politics, but a regular presence in their lives were the residents of the adjoining single-room-occupancy Dana Hotel, at 666 North State Street. One fellow named Tony regularly drank in Davis Miner’s small parking lot and enjoyed greeting Barack, but one day after lunch “right in the middle of State Street is this white-haired older fellow who we see every day,” John Belcaster recounted, “wearing nothing but a shirt.” “We all know him, he’s a recognizable face,” but “my initial reaction nonetheless is to move away from him,” and ditto for Jeff and Paul. Yet Barack “takes this older white fellow by the elbow and walks him to the curb. He’s the only one among us to literally extend the hand of human kindness to get this guy out of harm’s way.”

  Mental impairment rather than drink was at issue, and as the men walked back to the law firm, Paul Strauss voiced a rhetorical question. “You know what’s really sad about what we’ve just seen? What’s sad is that that guy at one point was a youngster like our young kids who had parents who loved him, and now look what’s happened to him.” Barack disagreed.
“No, Paul. You know what’s really sad about this? That guy quite likely never had anybody at home who loved him. That’s what’s really sad.”

  Barack’s childhood still offered him perspectives different from those of the offspring of nuclear families, but Davis Miner was a group of attorneys whose views of the legal profession were highly atypical, even among self-identified civil rights lawyers. “All of the folks at that firm had a certain ambivalence about the practice of law,” John Belcaster explained, and indeed “a certain skepticism about . . . litigation in particular.”

  Barack’s fundamental attitude, as John remembered it, was wholly in keeping with everything Barack and Rob Fisher had written back at Harvard. “The pathway to civil rights and justice in the past generation has been the courthouse. That in many ways has been where the battles have been won and fought,” John recalled Barack saying. But “going forward, I don’t see the battles being won and fought in the courthouse from this point forward.” Instead, “from my vantage, the problems of our times are going to be solved not in the courthouses of America but in the statehouses of America. The problems of our time are going to be addressed by folks organizing, folks petitioning, folks legislating through problems.”

  “That stuck with me,” Belcaster recounted, because “it’s somewhat uncanny to hear that in a law firm context.” Yet Judd Miner, who had been patiently litigating difficult and lengthy race discrimination and voting rights cases for several decades, was anything but romantic about lawyers’ lives. “Practicing law is a pretty shitty job,” he later explained. “You spend an enormous amount of time on keeping your head above water. There are just a million skirmishes that are unrelated to the end result. They’re really tedious, it’s irritating. It’s not what anybody wants to do. I think it irritated Barack a lot,” because “there was just a lot of this skirmishing that he didn’t like. He didn’t like just the game of lawyering,” especially since “there’s a certain combativeness that comes along with practicing law, and that’s not Barack’s instinct.” As Barack similarly told Belcaster, “I joined this firm not to become some scorched-earth litigator,” and Barack later bluntly declared that being a trial lawyer “was never attractive to me.”20

  In the late spring of 1994, Barack took off six weeks or so from Davis Miner to finish work on his book. Thanks in large part to the copies of his summer 1988 letters to Sheila Jager, the final portion of the manuscript, recounting his trip to Kenya and the stories of his African family, was now complete. Thanks to Henry Ferris’s cutting and Rob Fisher’s continued input, the earlier sections were no longer bloated, and the normally self-effacing Rob admitted, “I was deeply involved with helping him sort of shape it” and “had a big influence on” the final manuscript.

  One particular issue Barack and Rob debated was how forthcoming the book should be about some of Barack’s experiences before he first moved to Chicago. Rob knew that Barack “already had political ambitions” and that “the book was written with that in mind, no question about that,” so “we certainly struggled with the question of whether to include the fact that he had used illegal drugs.” Rob did not know the full extent of that, particularly from Barack’s post-Columbia years in New York, but “I was on the side of being honest about it,” and “there was no doubt that we wrestled with that, about what to put in and how much to put in.” Rob understood that Barack also had changed people’s names and melded some individuals into composite characters, but the manuscript now read more like a book than a series of journal entries from years past.

  Michelle was ecstatic that the end of what was now a four-year-long struggle was finally in sight. “That book was very cathartic for him, and it was a hard book to write. It was very hard for him to get all the pieces and make sense of them.” Barack flew to New York to deliver his final revised typescript to Henry Ferris in a quick handoff in the elevator lobby outside Times Books’ offices. A few weeks later, after signing off on the final line edits, Henry called Barack to explain that in July he would be leaving Times Books, as well as getting married, and that another editor, Ruth Fecych, would shepherd the manuscript toward publication. Ruth read it herself, and remembered “suggesting cutting paragraphs he wanted to keep,” but by summer’s end the manuscript was in final copyediting and the end of Barack’s most difficult challenge in life was finally in sight.21

  Barack was happy to tell colleagues like Keith Kelleher, who was striving to emulate Project VOTE!’s 1992 success with a 1994 voter drive, that his book was done. For the first time in four years, Barack could now consider other opportunities and involvements without having that burden looming over him. In his new role on the Woods Fund’s five-member board, Jean Rudd and Ken Rolling asked Barack to chair a special panel that would review Woods’s past decade of grants in support of organizing so as to inform how Woods could best aid “the Future of Organizing.” Barack was well acquainted with most of the other participants, who included Mary Gonzales, Jacky Grimshaw, Madeline Talbott, and Sokoni Karanja. That year alone Woods would allocate $105,000 to Madeline’s Chicago ACORN and $72,000 to Sokoni’s Centers for New Horizons, for “a new African-American leadership development institute,” plus another $20,000 to Public Allies Chicago.

  The panel assembled for the first of four long discussions on Wednesday, June 29, with Ken Rolling and Barack describing the task ahead. Barack then posed three fundamental questions: “what is the definition of ‘community organizing’?,” “what is organizing effectiveness?,” and how effective is organizing in fostering leadership development? Barack “raised the concern that no one can name a leader in many community organizations, but everyone can name the lead organizer.” He pointedly asked, “have we built a cadre of community leaders, as the civil rights movement did?” Barack also questioned why local organizations were not more involved in policy arenas, and asserted that community organizing “has bought into three myths: 1) that self-interest needs to be small, ‘rinky-dink stuff’ . . . ; 2) that results need to be short-term to sustain interest by members and funders . . . a ‘quarterly report’ mentality; and 3) that leadership development ‘slows us down.’”

  Ken Rolling acerbically noted that “the brains of some organizers are not as big as their egos,” and Barack agreed with Sokoni and Jacky that organizing tried too hard to fit leaders “into a mold rather than to tap their diverse talents.” When Barack asked, “do we have to manufacture conflict?” Sokoni said that he saw “seizing schools as the next real chapter in school reform.”

  In advance of the second meeting, the panel’s secretary, Sandy O’Donnell, sent Ken and Barack some suggested topics, including whether organizing is “becoming strong enough to sustain quality career organizers? (or are they inevitably lost to downtown law firms & private foundations—just joking, you guys).” Barack sent panel members some agenda suggestions, including whether “organizing lacks the tactics to be effective in the policy arena,” and Barack focused their second discussion on “community organizing and public policy making.” Sandy’s notes recorded how “Barack challenged the group to think about a major problem with policy implications—overcrowding in the County Jail—and ask itself whether organizing would say ‘there’s no constituency (for change), so I won’t organize around it.’”

  Responses were inchoate, so “Barack pushed further—citing health-care and welfare reform as two more examples of significant policy issues on which the voice of organizing has been silent. Why, he asked, especially when we know—having observed business roundtables & lobbying—how to be effective in the policy arena?” Again discussion faltered, so Barack asked “are there constraints in this (organizing) model that preclude longer term vision development?” and “whether lack of ambition is a problem.” Barack then expressly cited how in his own organizing experience, “despite his desire to get involved in the larger arena, ‘something was keeping me narrow’” and too locally oriented.

  Barack began the group’s third session by asking: “is it the rol
e of organizing to change the culture in a community?” Sokoni Karanja and veteran organizer Josh Hoyt said yes, and Barack noted how “this kind of goal—more specifically, having regular theological reflections on their work—was incorporated by community leaders early in his organizing career, but that it slipped off the agenda.” Barack acknowledged that “time constraints with leaders are intense,” but added that organizing has not “thus far been good at” framing “materialistic issues . . . in ways that build ‘internal capital—people having a sense of their importance’ in the civic sphere. Material issues can be used to overcome a ‘poverty of spirit.’” Barack asked whether issues should be chosen so as to optimize “the building of community spirit,” and Madeline Talbott observed that lots of attention was paid to “leadership development, but we don’t focus on membership development.”

  The fourth and final discussion began with Madeline describing how ACORN recruited organizers from within their own neighborhoods, but Barack questioned whether such recruits “have staying power” and “strategy skills.” Madeline said “we’ve professionalized organizing to the point where we can’t make it a mass-based movement,” but Northwestern’s Jody Kretzmann wondered whether Woods and similar foundations could fund entry-level organizing jobs for “graduates of Public Allies.” Sokoni said he had “found supervising Public Allies enormously labor-intensive,” and Madeline stated that the fundamental problem was how difficult organizing was, not what it paid. The normally quiet Jean Rudd asked whether Woods should fund a “formal recruitment plan” for organizers, and Barack joined Madeline in demurring, saying “good recruiters must be good organizers. But good organizers think they have to be organizing all the time.”