Rising Star

by David Garrow

  One on one, Barack addressed what needed to change in black Chicago, echoing what he had told Mike Kruglik years earlier. “All these churches and all these pastors are going it alone. And what do we have? These magnificent palatial churches in the midst of the ruins of some of the most run-down neighborhoods we’ll ever see. All pastors go on thinking about how they are going to ‘build my church,’ without joining with others to try to influence the factors or forces that are destroying the neighborhoods. They start food pantries and community-service programs, but until they come together to build something more than an effective church, all the community-service programs, all the food pantries they start will barely take care of even a fraction of the community’s problems.”

  Barack voiced a larger vision. “In America, we have this strong bias toward individual action . . . but individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.” Indeed, “what we need in America, especially in the African-American community, is a moral agenda that is tied to a concrete agenda for building and rebuilding our communities. . . . We must invest our energy and resources in a massive rebuilding effort and invent new mechanisms to strengthen and hasten this community-building effort.” Wasted potential was a recurring theme. “In every church on Sunday in the African-American community, we have this moral fervor; we have energy to burn. But as soon as church lets out, the energy dissipates. We must find ways to channel all this energy into community building. The biggest failure of the civil rights movement was in failing to translate this energy, this moral fervor, into creating lasting institutions and organizational structures.”

  Barack also addressed Harold Washington’s legacy, calling him “the best of the classic politicians . . . but he, like all politicians, was primarily interested in maintaining his power and working the levers of power. He was a classic charismatic leader, and when he died all of that dissipated. This potentially powerful collective spirit that went into supporting him was never translated into clear principles, or into an articulable agenda for community change. The only principle that came through was ‘getting our fair share.’ . . . When Harold died, everyone claimed the mantle of his vision and went off in different directions. All that power dissipated. Now an agenda for getting our fair share is vital. But to work, it can’t see voters or communities as consumers, as mere recipients or beneficiaries of this change,” a view that echoed John McKnight. People must be “producers of this change. The thrust of our organizing must be on how to make them productive, how to make them employable, how to build our human capital, how to create businesses, institutions, banks, safe public spaces—the whole agenda of creating productive communities,” just as McKnight had long argued.

  Barack riffed onward. “What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We could come together to form concrete economic development strategies . . . and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grassroots structures that would hold me and other elected officials accountable for their actions.”

  Alluding to the pressure to defer to Palmer, Barack said, “I am also finding people equivocating on their support. I’m talking about progressive politicians who are on the same page with me on the issues but who warn me I may be too independent.” In his own campaign, “I want to do this as much as I can from the grassroots level,” relying on small contributors rather than large ones. “But to organize this district I must get known,” and “before I’m known . . . I’m going to have to rely on some contributions from wealthy people.” Apart from the early $2,000 each from Al Johnson and Tony Rezko, the sole contribution of more than $1,000 to Barack’s campaign had come in the name of Janet Gilboy, wife of Project VOTE! fund-raiser John Schmidt, now a top U.S. Department of Justice official. But “once elected, once I’m known, I won’t need that kind of money, just as Harold Washington . . . did not need to raise and spend money to get the black vote,” Barack said.

  He concluded by critiquing the Million Man March. “What was lacking among march organizers was a positive agenda, a coherent agenda for change. Without this agenda a lot of this energy is going to dissipate” rather than be directed toward the top problem he had cited at the outset to DeZutter: “our unemployment catastrophe.”

  In a shorter but no less revealing interview with a young white contributor to the weekly Hyde Park Citizen, Barack spoke more as the author of Dreams. “If I’m trying to pick up a cab in New York City, I can’t hold up a sign saying I’m multicultural,” Barack volunteered, but likewise “it’s damaging when blacks refuse to speak proper English or read correctly in an attempt to ‘out black’ each other. Some of our youth view education as white, and that’s damaging. We all need to get to the point where we can be diverse . . . we can listen to Mozart as well as Miles Davis, we can play chess as well as basketball.” Barack was especially disappointed with “youth who have opportunity yet try to adopt this . . . urban street gang mentality,” youth “trying to prove their blackness” who “reject the values of self-discipline, respect, and love which has been the glue that has kept the African-American community together.”

  Yet ultimately, “it’s about power. My travels made me sensitive to the plight of those without power and the issues of class and inequalities as it relates to wealth and power. Anytime you have been overseas in these so-called third world countries, one thing you see is the vast disparity of wealth [between] those who are part of [the] power structure and those outside of it.” But in any “environment of scarcity, where the cost of living is rising, folks begin to get angry and bitter and look for scapegoats. Historically, instead of looking at the top five percent of the country that controls all the wealth, we turn towards each other, and the Republicans have added to the fire.”6

  On Monday, December 11, one week before the final deadline, Barack filed more than four times the necessary 757 petition signatures in Springfield. Ron Davis “was a stickler for how to do petitions,” campaign volunteer Will Burns remembered, and two weeks earlier, attorney Tom Johnson had reminded Davis and Carol Harwell that “the Chicago Board of Elections did its biggest purge ever this year. As a result, lots of people who think they are registered are, in fact, not registered.” Tom, Ron, and Barack reviewed and blessed all of their petition pages, and only one other candidate, virtually unknown 17th Ward resident Ulmer D. Lynch, also filed early. The next day Jesse Jackson Jr. swamped a Republican opponent in the special general election, winning 76 percent of the vote, and less than forty-eight hours later he was sworn in as Mel Reynolds’s congressional successor. The night before that ceremony, campaign consultant Delmarie Cobb joined Jackson and his wife Sandi for a quick meal at a D.C. café that doubled as a bookstore, and Jesse remarked that he needed to find a copy of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father.

  Barack’s campaign scheduled a Saturday-afternoon Christmas party for December 16 at its headquarters, and more than two dozen attendees wrote out contribution checks for $150 or more. Friends like Elvin Charity and Bernard Loyd were joined by newer acquaintances like Robert Blackwell Jr., another young black professional, Dr. Quentin Young, and even Chicago Reader author Hank DeZutter, who had contributed $300 two weeks earlier. Then, as Carol Harwell remembered, “somebody came in and said, ‘Alice Palmer’s on the corner circulating petitions.’”

  Harwell immediately went to have a look. “They weren’t asking anything,” she said of the people who were soliciting. “I didn’t live in the district,” but “I signed the sheet, gave them a bogus address. They never said anything, they never looked at it.” With just a week before the submission deadline, the Palmer loyalists had only begun to collect the signatures necessary for
Palmer to appear on the March 19 primary ballot. Palmer did not ask her Senate leader, fellow congressional also-ran Emil Jones, or Jones’s chief of staff, Mike Hoffmann, for help with her petitions. Instead, Palmer’s two secretaries, Beverly Criglar in Springfield and Constance Goosby in Chicago, informally asked several Senate Democratic staffers who had worked on Jones’s congressional campaign to help out, but the actual on-the-street circulating fell to Goosby and a handful of neighborhood youngsters. Asked years later who had circulated her petitions, Palmer said, “I don’t know,” adding that whatever transpired was “pretty much removed from me.”

  On Monday morning, December 18, Palmer formally announced her entry into the race. Emil Jones and fellow state senators Donne Trotter and Art Berman all endorsed her, as did Lou Jones, Robert Starks, and 5th Ward alderman Barbara Holt. From there Palmer left directly for Springfield, where she submitted petition sheets containing 1,580 signatures. Barack told reporters that “my attitude is one of disappointment on a personal basis,” since “I am disappointed that she’s decided to go back on her word to me.” He said Palmer’s decision was “indicative of a political culture where self-preservation comes in rather than service,” even by someone with “her reputation for integrity.” Previously announced candidates Gha-Is Askia and Marc Ewell also filed their petitions, and Barack said, “I intend to run a positive campaign and win in the March 19 primary.” At lunch on December 20, Ellen Schumer told Barack that “this is going to burn you,” since in Chicago politics “You’ve got to pay your dues. I told him to back off and let Alice stay in office.” But Barack’s resolve, and what Ellen saw as his ambition, were fully crystallized, irrespective of what his prospects might be. Palmer booster Robert Starks told the Defender that “he’s in and so is Alice and she will win.” Even Emil Jones, citing Palmer’s “courageous representation,” stated that “I’m very pleased that she has decided to run again.”

  Palmer’s decision to enter the race angered a number of people who admired both her and Barack. St. Sabina’s Father Mike Pfleger made a “very painful” phone call to Alice to say, “You can’t do this. . . . I think you’re making a mistake. . . . You stepped out, and understand I’m going to stay with Barack.” But Palmer faced a more serious problem, because Carol Harwell and Ron Davis knew how carelessly her petition signatures had been gathered. On the same day Palmer submitted her sheets, Davis went to Springfield to do what experienced political operatives always did: obtain photocopies of her petitions, as well as those submitted by Ewell, Askia, and Lynch, so that the Obama workers could review them to see if there were as many invalid signers as Harwell expected.

  Harwell was waiting at the Chicago train station when Davis returned with the copies, and after a quick stop at Harold’s Chicken, a famous Chicago chain, Carol and Ron began reviewing Palmer’s filings. It did not take long to confirm that her sheets were “just pure garbage.” Volunteers Will Burns, Kathy Stell, and Lois and Alan Dobry pitched in too, and it soon became clear that Ewell’s and Lynch’s petitions were almost as error strewn as Palmer’s, leaving all three candidates, and perhaps Askia too, vulnerable to a formal challenge before the Cook County Electoral Board.

  Barack was initially nonplussed when Ron and Carol told him that Palmer, and perhaps the other candidates, might be knocked off the March primary ballot. “I don’t think he thought it was, you know, sporting,” Will Burns remembered, although the veteran Davis “was more than happy to knock someone off the ballot.” Once Barack saw how bad Palmer’s petitions were, his discomfort gave way to acceptance. Even apparently good signatures were from voters whose residences were outside the boundaries of the 13th Senate District, and as the evidence of faulty signatories grew, Tom Johnson on Tuesday, December 26, filed the notarized declaration and objector’s petitions that Ron Davis had executed four days earlier, asserting that all of Obama’s potential opponents had fewer than the 757 valid signatures required to qualify for the primary ballot.

  Tom Johnson remembered Davis (who died at age fifty-six in 2008) as a crucial figure in Barack’s early political education. Ron “really knew election work” and was also “a link to a lot of the South Side I think that Barack did not know.” Davis was “really his adviser” and “was very close to him—not just really petitions.” Worries about Palmer’s signatures spread when two of Emil Jones’s Springfield Senate staffers learned of Johnson’s filing and looked at copies of Palmer’s sheets. “When you saw her submission, you knew she was in trouble,” deputy chief of staff Dave Gross recounted.

  After a break for the holidays, on Tuesday, January 2, the Cook County Electoral Board hearing on the Obama campaign’s four petition challenges began with Alan and Lois Dobry, Kathy Stell, and longtime Hyde Park independent Saul Mendelson sometimes spelling Davis during the tedious, signature-by-signature review before hearing officer Lewis Powell that ran for five full days. West Side state senator Rickey Hendon happened to glance in on the proceedings, and he recognized the Dobrys as Palmer supporters who were now helping Barack in trying to have her thrown off the ballot.7

  Also on January 2, the South Side’s longest-running social tragedy came to a bittersweet end in a South Chicago meeting hall. Three weeks earlier, the last lawsuit over the shutdown of Wisconsin Steel more than fifteen years earlier had finally settled. In 1988, attorney Tom Geoghegan had won $14.8 million for the former Wisconsin steelworkers from Navistar, the successor corporation to International Harvester. In 1991, in Frank Lumpkin v. Envirodyne Industries, Geoghegan, along with fellow attorneys Tom Johnson and Leslie Jones, Johnson’s wife, won a ruling from the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals holding that the tiny firm that had bought Wisconsin Steel from Harvester was also liable for former workers’ unpaid pensions.

  Through it all, Frank Lumpkin’s Save Our Jobs Committee (SOJC) had held annual gatherings to mark the anniversary of the 1980 closing that initiated the Southeast Side’s decline. Richard Longworth of the Chicago Tribune also remained dedicated to the workers’ struggle, writing in March 1995 about “the bitter nostalgia that still rules their lives” and then writing a long profile of the seventy-eight-year-old Frank Lumpkin. “There are people—other steelworkers, lawyers and politicians who have worked with him, reporters who have written about him—who consider Frank Lumpkin the best man in Chicago,” Longworth wrote. Months later, in early December 1995, Longworth finally was able to announce the last chapter in the long-running saga: “Wisconsin Steel Deal May End Ex-Workers’ Agony.”

  Envirodyne would sign over nine hundred thousand shares of its own stock, valued at about $3.37 million, to the former workers. Envirodyne now was worth far less than when founder Ronald K. Linde had sold his stake six years earlier, walking away with $75 million, but the roughly $18.5 million in total recompense from Navistar and now Envirodyne was a victory for the aging former workers. “Altogether, from these two, they may have gotten back more than half of what they lost,” Geoghegan told Longworth. Individual workers would receive $3,000 to $6,000 apiece from the new settlement, but there were no complaints whatsoever at SOJC’s celebratory rally on the night of January 2 in South Chicago. “We sure got a whole lot more than anybody thought we were going to get in 1980,” Geoghegan remarked.8

  Ron Davis and Carol Harwell gave Barack a nightly update on each day’s developments at the electoral board. Volunteer Saul Mendelson recalled that signatures were struck if they were obvious forgeries, if names were printed rather than signed, if the individual had listed an address outside the 13th Senate District, or if the individual was not registered at the specified address. A routine purge by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners in 1995 had dropped 15,871 names from the 13th District’s rolls, which meant that many people who had been registered but had long failed to vote were no longer on the rolls. As the days passed, it became increasingly clear that Alice Palmer and Ulmer Lynch would fall well below the 757 minimum, and it was close for Marc Ewell and Gha-Is Askia. As the chances of striking all four fr
om the ballot grew, Barack worried out loud to Ron and Carol about how “shotgunning” all of his opponents might look.

  At Saturday’s IVI-IPO endorsement session, Northwestern political science professor Adolph Reed, who had just moved to South Shore, plus 5th Ward alderman Barbara Holt, likewise a relatively new member of the organization, argued that the group should endorse Alice Palmer rather than Barack. Saul Mendelson, who had worked on the petitions challenge and knew that many of Palmer’s signatures were faulty, expressed high regard for Palmer yet utter disdain for those who—like Reed—had dragooned her into the race but then left her victim to amateurish signature gathering. Afterward Reed wrote an op-ed piece for New York’s Village Voice in which he excoriated an unnamed candidate whose “vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics” included “his fundamentally bootstrap line” about the needs of black America. The allusion to Booker T. Washington was an academic’s way of calling Barack an Uncle Tom, one whose base is “mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds,” and Reed rued how “I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics.”9

  On Sunday Barack completed an issues questionnaire from a group whose endorsement he sought. “Impact” was Illinois’s Gay and Lesbian Political Organization, and Barack hand-printed his responses. He said he supported domestic partnership legislation, and he was for outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation. “I oppose restrictions on a woman’s right to choose, including various notification statutes, and support public funding of abortions.” He opposed any restrictions upon gay people as foster or adoptive parents and “I plan to set up a gay/lesbian task force in the district to identify and promote issues.” He also wrote that a state “should not interfere with same-gender couples who chose to marry” and “I would support such a resolution” allowing them to do so. In a subsequent letter to a gay newspaper, Barack wrote, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.” He also reiterated, “I support a woman’s right to choose an abortion, favor Medicaid funding of abortions for poor women, and oppose parental notification laws.”10