In Austin, a neighborhood on the far West Side, he spent nights drinking with church and neighborhood leaders, learning people's life stories and the details of their disenfranchisement. He was no longer trying to end a war. He was trying to stop a bank from leaving the neighborhood, trying to get a pothole filled, a local drug dealer arrested, a stop sign replaced. He arranged meetings with priests to gain their support, with ordinary people to build up an energized community, with politicians to get them to do the right thing.
Like so many young organizers, Kellman became obsessive about his work. He did not stay long in any one place. He bounced from Austin to suburban DuPage County, from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Philadelphia. To slow down, and to please his wife, and maybe earn a decent living, he studied for a while at the University of Chicago, but it wasn't for him.
In 1982, Kellman trained organizers for the church-based group the United Neighborhood Organization, converted to Catholicism a couple of years later, and then joined the Calumet Community Religious Conference, which worked with black churches, and started organizing in the most poverty-stricken areas of the South Side. He and colleagues like Greg Galluzzo, an Alinsky apostle who had extensive organizing experience, and Mike Kruglik, a barrel-chested Chicagoan, took stock of the devastation in the wake of all the mill closings in the Calumet region, which ranged from the far South Side into Indiana. With thirty thousand workers in a single industry, Calumet was a kind of local Detroit; it had once produced more steel than Pittsburgh. But now, because of foreign competition and the cost of retooling plants, the men were out of work, the plants were rusting shells.
Kellman's early attempt to organize church leaders in the area got a boost when Cardinal Joseph Bernardin signaled that if local priests didn't join the effort they should rush to confession. Father Stenzel at Holy Rosary helped Kellman pull together ten parishes, which kicked in a thousand dollars apiece and promised to help organize willing parishioners. Kellman knew that he couldn't sustain an organization that tried to yoke together the white neighborhoods of Indiana and the black areas of the South Side; to deal with the South Side and gain access to greater funding, he conceived the Developing Communities Project for Chicago. He told his board of local activists, all of whom were black, that he would find an African-American organizer. What he could offer was a miserable salary, a resistant public, and only a slender hope of success.
"It was easier to promise than it was to deliver," Kellman said. "The logic is that you need someone very smart, but if you are smart enough to be an organizer you should be smart enough not to do it. And if you are black and the pride of the family, why become downwardly mobile? It doesn't make a lot of sense. It was hard. I got no one I liked. The heat was beginning to build. I procrastinated. I scrambled. Meantime, I kept taking out ads and looking at resumes. The Tribune. The Times. The Detroit Free Press. But also that one in Community Jobs."
Kellman read Obama's resume and called him in New York. They spoke for two hours. ("Over the phone I figured out he wasn't Japanese.") A couple of weeks later, Kellman, in New York to visit his parents, met Obama at a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue. He looked very young to him. Obama was twenty-four. What concerned Kellman about very bright, very young candidates was the possibility of early burnout. Community organizing is isolating, tedious, and deeply frustrating work. More often than not, battles drag on, and then fizzle out without a satisfying result. A young person with some options is likely to leave at the first hint of boredom or defeat. Kellman had already known a young organizer who was so psychologically distressed by the work that he'd had to let the person go and find psychiatric help.
The terms for a training organizer like Obama were less than modest--a ten-thousand-dollar salary and a couple of thousand more for a car. "But preposterous propositions are what being an organizer is like," Kellman said. "So we went over Barack's story, and it was clear to me that he was never very long anywhere and he was different wherever he goes." Even in that early conversation, Kellman saw Obama as someone looking for himself and for a place to call home.
"He kept asking, 'What will you teach me, and how will you teach me?'" Kellman recalled. "I thought of him as an outsider, and he wanted to work with the poor, with people who have faced racial discrimination. His heroes were in the civil-rights movement, but that was over. This was as close as he could get. And he needed to live in a black community."
Kellman quizzed Obama about his background and, like most people, found the flood of details hard to absorb on first hearing. Kellman tried to push him: Why didn't he go to graduate school? Didn't he want to make money? Obama had said that he was excited by the election, in 1983, of a black mayor in Chicago, Harold Washington. So why not go work for him? Kellman asked. Why organize? But Obama kept repeating how inspired he was by the civil-rights movement and his desire to work on a grassroots level.
Obama admitted to Kellman that he had another motivation for wanting to be an organizer on the South Side. He was thinking about being a novelist. "He told me that he had trouble writing, he had to force himself to write," Kellman said. He was looking not only for experience, an identity, and a community; he was also in search of material.
Before Kellman could hire him officially, Obama had to be confirmed by a small board of directors, which met at St. Helena of the Cross, a Catholic church on the South Side. Many of the community activists on the South Side were middle-aged black women, and they were more eager than ever for Kellman to settle on an African-American organizer. "We interviewed three other people before Barack. Nobody really fit the bill of what we needed," one board member, Loretta Augustine-Herron, said. "We did want someone to look like us, but that wasn't the only thing. If Barack hadn't had the ability to understand our needs, it wouldn't have worked. He had the sensitivity. He was honest to a fault. He told us what he knew and what he didn't. When we described our plight, he understood. He didn't have a cockamamie idea to resolve some problem we didn't have." Augustine-Herron and the others had only one concern: "He was so young. Was he going to be up for this?"
Obama decided to move to Hyde Park, an integrated neighborhood and home of the University of Chicago. Obama found himself a cheap first-floor apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street and Harper Avenue. As he had in New York, he outfitted the apartment for monkish living: a bed, a bridge table, a couple of chairs, and some books. Eventually he went out and got a gray cat which he named Max. Hyde Park was the logical neighborhood for Obama from the start. The area was mainly black, but integrated, and, because of the presence of the University of Chicago, salted with intellectuals. From Hyde Park it was a short trip to the neighborhoods where he would be working, including Roseland and West Pullman on the far South Side.
During his first weeks in Chicago, Obama spent many hours with Kellman, touring the South Side and talking. "He was very idealistic--naive only in his lack of experience," Kellman recalled. "He had no experience of Chicago ward committeemen and graft and the rest. We talked a lot about race, how to deal with it. We were trying to organize blacks with white priests. Barack has always had to deal with the way people react to him, which has nothing to do with him, but, rather, with the fact that he is black or looks black. A lot of the struggle for him was to figure out who he was independent of how people reacted to him. He was working on it. He had been in school all his life, which is not a very real environment in terms of race. This was the first time when he would be in one neighborhood and identified in one way. He had never encountered a place where race was so determinative."
Kellman drove Obama around to see the abandoned mills, the rusted ships in the abandoned port, and to meet with community leaders. "It was like going to an exotic country for him," Kellman said. "He had so much learning to do about how people live their lives, but he learned almost effortlessly. He had gifts. He was comfortable with people and talked easily with people."
The standard books for beginning organizers are Alinsky's two theoretical tracts: Reveille for Radicals and
Rules for Radicals. Kellman thought those were trivial and glib and recommended Alinsky's biography of John L. Lewis and Robert Caro's The Power Broker, a titanic biography of the unelected master builder of New York, Robert Moses. The books were intended to give him a short course in the way cities and power really work. "Decisions in Chicago are not made where they are supposed to be," Kellman said. "Aldermen and state representatives make no decisions; ward committeemen do, and they are making a lot of those decisions because of their second professions as funeral-parlor directors, insurance salesmen, attorneys."
Obama spent most of his time methodically compiling lists of priests, ministers, and community leaders and arranging to interview them. The idea is that the organizer does not barrel into a neighborhood like some sort of Moses in a black leather jacket, ready to lead; first he listens and only then tries to engage enough people to form an effective leadership group. He helps them learn to analyze power and even speak in public. That group then goes on to confront elected officials and city bureaucrats and take power into its own hands.
At night, Obama wrote long meticulous reports about what he had learned in his interviews. He often drew sketches of his subjects in the margins to help him remember names and faces.
"He was very disciplined in the way he lived," Kellman said. "In the first few months when he was an organizer, he had no social life and I was worried that I was going to lose him. He wasn't dating. He was doing his interviews, doing his reports, reading--and on the weekends he was visiting black churches and writing short stories. He was very focused and disciplined, monkish not in the sense of being a celibate but of holing up and reading." To relax, Obama played basketball or took long runs by the lakefront, stopping only to reward himself with a cigarette--his most glaring vice. He ate sparingly. If his friend and fellow organizer John Owens ordered dessert, Obama would say, like a particularly ironic cleric, "Did you deserve that?"
"I don't think he had much of a life outside of work," Loretta Augustine-Herron said. "I used to worry about that! He worked seven days a week most weeks. Early-morning meetings and then meetings till ten that night. He went to places that I told him not to let the sun go down on you there, but he went anyway."
The more Obama got to know the South Side and the people who lived there, the more his writing became about what he was seeing and hearing. Occasionally, he sent drafts of his stories to old friends like Phil Boerner or gave them to Kellman and Kruglik.
"He gave me two or three of his short stories," Kruglik recalled. "They were about the streets of the South Side of Chicago, what they looked and felt like to him, the dreariness of the landscape in winter. One was about a pastor who is overwhelmed by his problems but he still wants to build a strong congregation and take care of himself, too. Something shines through the pastor's spirit that allows him to do that. The stories were very descriptive. At first, I wondered, how does he have the energy to do all this? I figured he must have copied it somehow from someone. But they were about people I knew." Obama was meeting, and becoming friends with, black church people on the South Side like Dan Lee, a deacon at St. Catherine's Church in West Pullman, and the Reverend Alvin Love, the young minister at Lilydale First Baptist Church. Obama's fellow organizers had no problem identifying them in his fiction.
Kellman remembers reading a story about a small church: "Barack had the experience of being in a foreign land for the first time. The storefront church was as foreign as could be. At that point in his life, Indonesia was more familiar to him. But he was writing about what he was seeing." (Kellman says he probably should have kept copies of Obama's stories. "I would have made a killing on eBay.") Another story, "A Man of Small Graces," describes a character on the South Side who seemed to be based on Obama's stepfather, Lolo Soetoro.
When Obama did have free time he usually liked to spend it alone. Sometimes Kruglik would drag him out to a blues or jazz club--Obama was a fan of the Jazz Showcase downtown--or have him come over to watch a ballgame: the Bears, the Bulls, the White Sox. ("It was amazing how fast he became a Chicago partisan," Kruglik said. "I mean who else was he supposed to root for? Honolulu? Jakarta? It was all part of integrating himself into Chicago and making it home.") On summer afternoons, Kellman was occasionally able to lure Obama out for a walk at Montrose Harbor or to his house in Beverly, an Irish and black neighborhood on the South Side, for a backyard barbecue. "One thing I understood personally is that he wanted to be around us simply because we had a family," Kellman said.
One of Obama's organizing colleagues, Sister Mary Bernstein--"my father was Jewish and my mother won"--often teased him about his social life. "One morning," Sister Mary said, "I came in the office and he was sitting at his desk and stirring his tea and he said, 'How's it going, Sis-tuh?' He always called me 'Sis-tuh' and I called him 'O-bama.' And he said, 'Sis-tuh, how am I going to find a date?' And I said, 'Barack, everyone I know is too old for you, and they're all nuns. I'm the last person you should ask.'"
Kellman and many other of Obama's friends agree that, as engaging as Obama was, he was, at least for a long time, wary about revealing information about himself--his past and his emotions. But as he and Kellman spent more and more time together, it became clear that Obama was still thinking through questions about his family and his identity, about politics and his own future. One thing that struck Obama's friends and colleagues in Chicago was how much he admired his mother for her independence and her social idealism. His father was quite another story. "He didn't want to repeat his father's life," Kellman said. Observing Obama's seriousness, his cool, and his modest way of living, Kellman couldn't help but think that the younger man had cast himself in stark contrast to the bitter, brilliant, volatile, and wholly unreliable man who was his father.
Obama and Kellman took their walks in the park, ate lunch at a McDonald's near the old steel mills, and sometimes the talk drifted away from work. "Dating was a challenge," Kellman said. "How do you live in two worlds? Could he marry a white woman? Where would he live? Was it even right to ask? Is love all that matters? He thought a lot about marriage, his long-range plans, and how to handle the questions that arose out of it. Then there was money: How can you do what you believe in and still live decently? What degree of sacrifice? Or should I just be smart and make a lot of money? We would talk about all of this. Or politicians. How much should we work with them and how much in opposition? Were they enemies or were they allies? Should you work within the system or stand outside of it, advocating? Can you join the system and not lose your sense of what is just?"
Obama dated various women--in that department, Kellman said, "He was more than capable of taking care of himself." Toward the end of his time as an organizer, Obama had a steady girlfriend, a white University of Chicago student who was studying anthropology. Even though he knew that the relationship would come to an end, Kellman said, "They were both committed to paths that would lead to some dedication. They parted for geographic reasons. They both had commitments that would take them out of Chicago. Long term, in general, Barack wanted kids and he wanted a house. He wanted a family--even young and single and not having met Michelle and being in a relationship that he felt wasn't going to last."
By the time Obama came to Chicago, he had become comfortable not only with his given name but with his racial identity in particular. What his work on the South Side was bringing him was something larger--a deepening connection to an African-American community. He was no longer a student trying to make friends in the Black Students Association. This was life, daily and natural contact, whether at home in Hyde Park--a more middle-class, integrated, university-town environment--or farther south, among the poor and the dispossessed.
"Barack simply believed that he'd been black all of his life," Mike Kruglik said. "Part of it was, as he told me, that while all these people were thinking about his being biracial or asking was he black enough--all that stuff--when he walked down the streets of the South Side no one asked that question. No one asked that questi
on when he tried to hail a taxi in New York. Now he was a black community organizer in a black community with the purpose of creating an organization to give black people a voice. There was a synthesis of how he identified himself culturally and being a community organizer. Being a community organizer helped him create a black community. Before that, he'd had a romantic idea of a black community and found that there really was no community as he'd imagined it: the community was fragmented and largely destroyed. He had to re-create that community. I heard a lot of those things coming out of his mouth. There was this organic feeling about him, of being a serious young man helping people fight for their community. And he willed himself to be part of the community and then defend it."
One of his black colleagues in organizing, John Owens, had grown up in Chatham on the South Side, and he was fascinated by how "open-minded" Obama was about questions of race. "He was concerned about being fair about whites as well as about blacks, whereas the average African-American who grows up in the community, the concern with being fair is usually with your own. He always wanted to be even-handed in his analysis of things. In that regard, he was able to have stronger relationships with whites more than the average African-American."
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 18