old Honda and headed west from New York into a political and social battle
zone.
When the raw, 23-year-old community organizer hit Chicago in early 1985,
the racially charged fighting between Harold Washington, the city’s first
black mayor, and white ethnic aldermen led by Ed Vrdolyak had earned the city
a bitter nickname: Beirut on the Lake.
Obama learned just how bitter on his first trip to a Hyde Park barber, who
recalled how Washington’s victory two years earlier had sent
African-Americans into the streets “like the day Joe Louis knocked out [Max]
Schmeling,” Obama writes in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.”
But Obama, the youthful outsider, brought a decidedly practical view of the
Washington-Vrdolyak bouts to the Far South Side community he was organizing.
“They’re not enemies, he used to tell us. They’re both working for their
constituents, and they have to do this,” recalled Loretta Augustine Herron, a
founding member of Obama’s Developing Communities Project. “Whoever can help
you reach your goal, that’s who you work with. . . . There are no permanent
friends, no permanent enemies.”
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That mantra of professional organizers has come to define Obama’s public
life. Even his choice of church in Chicago involved a political calculation of
sorts. Now his penchant for pragmatism could prove one of his greatest
strengths, or liabilities, on the campaign trail.
Much has been made of Obama’s ability to bridge feuding conservatives and
liberals in Illinois, and before that at the Harvard Law Review, where in 1990
he became its first black leader. As a presidential candidate, he bills
himself as a uniter who can usher in a postpartisan era where Washington
fights less and gets more done.
The path to his party’s nomination, though, runs through Democratic primary
voters still chafing from years of conservative Republican rule. And what the
junior senator from Illinois highlights as an eagerness to plow common ground
with political opposites may be seen by some voters as a sign that he lacks
firm principles or an ability to stake and hold his ground.
Obama firmly rejected that notion. “There are a set of principles that I
care about. And there are people I’m fighting for in this campaign,” he said
in a recent interview. If any Republican, or Democrat for that matter, opposes
those principles, Obama vowed to “go after them with everything that I’ve
got.”
The art of working with one’s enemies comes straight out of Community
Organizing 101, the on-the-job course in human relations and activism Obama
took in the mid-1980s alongside low-income residents in the Roseland community
and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development.
“It was in these neighborhoods that I received the best education I ever
had,” Obama said in the February speech that launched his White House run.
The work was rewarding–pushing for asbestos removal at Altgeld, pressing
for a local job-training office, even agitating to fill potholes and erect
stop signs.
Still, work on the ground floor of activism also was limited. The young
Obama yearned to do something on a bigger stage, he confided to Gerald
Kellman, the organizer who had brought him to Chicago.
Two years into Obama’s time in the city, the men attended a conference at
Harvard University. Strolling the same ivy-covered campus his father had left
his family to attend more than two decades earlier, Obama reflected on a
lesson from his father’s life.
The elder Obama had returned to his native Kenya bursting with intellect
and ambition, only to devolve into an embittered bureaucrat because he
couldn’t find a way to reconcile his ideals with political realities, Kellman
remembers Obama telling him.
Obama was determined not to follow in those footsteps. “He talked about
what happens to you if you’re not practical in finding ways to do things
effectively,” Kellman said.
Maybe he should go to law school at Harvard and prepare for a life in
politics, Kellman recalled Obama saying. Not long after, that is precisely
what Obama did.
As he said his goodbyes in Chicago, he told some acquaintances that a law
degree would allow him to return to the city and press for change more
effectively, maybe working to revitalize unions. Obama remembers thinking he
might come back to lead a non-profit group to develop affordable housing.
But to another organizer colleague, Obama confided a far more ambitious
goal–someday following Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago.
Crash course in Chicago politics
Obama arrived in Chicago a blank slate. He knew little about the city’s
then-delicate power structure, its social fabric or its ethos of “we don’t
want nobody nobody sent.” He had grown up mostly in Hawaii, far removed from
urban America’s black communities and culture.
The experience in Chicago “taught me a lot about listening to people as
opposed to coming in with a predetermined agenda,” Obama recalled.
He also got a crash course in realpolitik. “Barack had to learn real estate
and insurance and mortgage banking and all the scams of the world,” said
Kellman. “He had to learn Chicago ward politics and the relationship between
graft and public life.”
Community organizing has long intrigued young social activists with its
goal of guiding the poor and disenfranchised to exercise power. Sen. Hillary
Rodham Clinton, now a rival of Obama’s for the Democratic nomination, wrote
her undergraduate thesis at Wellesley College on the life and ideas of Saul
Alinsky, the godfather of professional organizing.
Chicago was Alinsky’s lab. He began his work in the Back of the Yards
neighborhood during the Depression, persuading hostile groups of white
ethnics to band together to pressure meatpackers and slumlords for better
working and living conditions. He later took the same tactics to Chicago’s
black neighborhoods and other cities as well.
Thanks to Alinsky, would-be organizers considered Chicago something of a
Mecca. Not Obama. After his graduation from Columbia University in 1983, he
worked briefly for a New York financial consultant and then a consumer
organization.
Restless, he read the classifieds the same way others might look for a job
as a fry cook or find a puppy to buy. On a trip to the Midtown branch of the
New York public library, Obama was scouring what he described as a “newsletter
for do-gooder jobs” when he spotted a help-wanted ad from Kellman’s Calumet
Community Religious Conference.
Based on the South Side and south suburbs, CCRC needed an African-American
organizer for the dozen black churches that made up its city branch,
preferably to work cheaply in helping residents develop the tactics to
influence politicians. In short, he was expected to turn the cloutless into
players.
The rookie organizer was half the age of those he was hired to inspire.
Behind his back, many called him “Baby Face Obama.”
It became a term of endearment. Obama’s poise quickly grabbed their
attention and respect, said many who worked with him back then. “The guy was
just totally comfortable with who he was and where he was,” said John Owens,
who Obama eventually hired as an assistant.
A whippersnapper in `the zoo’
The man who brought Obama to Chicago was a frumpy, soft-spoken New Yorker.
Gerald Kellman hoped to organize churches to fight fallout from the rapid
decline of the steel industry, the main economic engine for the South Side and
south suburbs.
But Kellman and his organizer buddy Mike Kruglik were both white and
Jewish, and some black church members couldn’t warm up to them. So Kellman
shifted Kruglik to the suburbs and found Obama to replace him.
It might not have happened at all. Kellman was looking for an
African-American, but the rsum he received in the mail was from a Hawaiian
native with a name hard to place. “What is this guy, Obama, is that Japanese?”
Kellman asked his Japanese-American wife. “Actually, it could be,” was her
answer.
Kellman had plans to visit family in New York anyway, so he called Obama
and set up an interview. They met at a coffee shop on the Upper West Side, and
Kellman quickly began testing Obama with pointed questions. Why would someone
with Obama’s potential want to go into a field as gritty and unglamorous as
organizing? If he was so interested in social change, why not do something
more practical like attach himself to a rising African-American political star
like Harold Washington?
“He said he wanted to make fundamental change,” Kellman recalled. “He
wanted to make it from the grass roots and he wanted to learn.”
Kellman hired Obama on the spot for roughly $10,000 a year. He threw in an
extra $2,000 so Obama could buy that beater of a Honda and get moved.
A month later he was at a South Side church being introduced to leaders of
CCRC’s Chicago branch, which soon would be spun off into the Developing
Communities Project.
Obama immediately acknowledged his inexperience, recalled Dan Lee, a deacon
at the now-defunct St. Catherine of Genoa Roman Catholic Church who became
DCP’s president.
“I know you all think I’m a young whippersnapper,” Obama conceded. “Let me
set your fears to rest. We’re going to learn together.”
And there was a lot to learn. On long walks through Montrose Park, Kellman
filled in the basics. To the Alinsky school of organizing, power was a
cherished concept. There were two sources of power in the world, organized
money and organized people.
Organizers weren’t supposed to set the agenda for their group. Their
fundamental role was to probe and prod to find out what made individual
members tick–unlock their self-interest in the jargon of the profession.
Obama was expected to conduct 20 to 30 in-depth interviews a week with
community members. Organizers called the process “learning who’s who in the
zoo.” In laymen’s terms, he was networking.
Politics of choosing a church
Rev. Alvin Love, pastor of Lilydale First Baptist Church at 113th and
Union Streets, was used to having strangers knock on the door and ask for
handouts. When Love opened it one day in 1985, he assumed that’s what the
lanky young man was up to. “Who is this skinny guy and what does he want?”
Love thought.
Obama was looking for Love’s thoughts, though, not his money. “He asked
what I wanted to see get done and what was important in this neighborhood,”
Love said.
Obama’s interest impressed the 28-year-old minister, who had been looking
for ways to connect his aging congregation with a surrounding neighborhood
that was getting younger and rougher. He joined DCP and now serves as its
president.
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On a crisp spring afternoon not long after he arrived, Obama made another
important contact. DCP members from St. Catherine’s had decided to stage an
old-fashioned street-corner meeting to lure people out of their homes and get
them talking about neighborhood improvements.
They started outside the church and then headed a few blocks north to the
corner of 114th and Lowe. By chance, that’s where state Sen. Emil Jones lived,
and he came out to see what the fuss was about. It was the start of a long
relationship between Obama and Jones, who helped Obama’s political rise.
Middle-age women such as Herron formed the core of Obama’s group. He had
grown up apart from his mother for much of his youth. At DCP, he was
surrounded by surrogate mothers. He coached them in the skills they would need
to effectively confront bureaucrats and politicians. They complained he ate
like a bird and needed to lighten up. Herron appointed herself fashion
adviser, coaching him on what matched and what didn’t.
“You shouldn’t be so somber and uptight and serious all the time,” Herron
once told him. “Yeah, but I’m doing serious work,” he replied.
Obama worked out of a cramped office at Holy Rosary Church at 113th Street
and Calumet Avenue. He shared it with Kellman and Kruglik, who acted as
sounding boards for the young organizer.
Obama’s hallmark at DCP was meticulous planning. Before encounters with
public officials, Obama would have members rehearse possible scenarios over
and over to minimize surprises. DCP board meetings dragged on for hours. There
was a meeting before the meeting to map out what was to be discussed. Then
there was the meeting. Then there was the meeting after the meeting to
critique how it all went.
His deliberateness–and his proclivity for calculation–played a role in
Obama’s decision about where to worship. DCP had its base in churches, and
some members grumbled about why he didn’t have a church home of his own.
Obama, whose mother treated organized religion with the distance of the
anthropologist she was, eventually found Trinity United Church of Christ, a
congregation with an activist minister.
But Obama admits part of Trinity’s appeal was that it wasn’t affiliated
with DCP. “If I joined one of the churches I was already organizing, that
might have caused some tensions,” he said. “And part of it was there was an
explicitly political aspect to the mission and message of Trinity at that time
that I found appealing.”
Wherever he went, Obama was constantly scribbling and doodling. The margins
of his notepads were filled with detailed sketches of the people he met,
Owens said. Sometimes he drew them laughing, sometimes smiling, sometimes with
pointy heads.
As part of his training, Obama was expected to take copious notes about his
interactions and file frequent reports to more seasoned organizers. But he had
another motive for jotting everything down.
“I want to be a writer,” Obama told a friend one day. “These are for a book
I plan to write.”
At night, Obama would hole up in his Hyde Park apartment and craft short
stories, basing his characters on people and situations he encountered in
Roseland. None of that fiction was ever published. The memoir, after its
reissue in 2004, became a best seller.
To Harvard in a beater
He lived sparingly. Obama’s mother teased him about having just two of
everything–two plates, two towels. The main indulgences were his books and
his cat, Max.
Owens was fascinated by Obama’s eclectic library. Volumes on black power
were stuffed next to books on Karl Marx, the writings of conservative
economist Milton Friedman, and a biography of Robert Moses, a ruthless
developer who relied on organizer-like motivating tactics to build public
works projects in New York.
Obama wasn’t a monk. He played pickup basketball with a fervor. He
gradually developed a social circle in Hyde Park. There were girlfriends,
including one he lived with for a time. But DCP remained the main focus of his
life.
The group’s territory sprawled from 95th Street to the Chicago Housing
Authority’s Altgeld Gardens on the city’s far southern edge. Altgeld was
surrounded by waste dumps and industrial brownfields. In 1986, it also was the
center of a dramatic protest over CHA foot-dragging on cleaning up asbestos in
the apartments.
In his memoir, Obama wrote extensively about how a member of DCP discovered
the asbestos problem and then the group mobilized to pressure the CHA to fix
it. But Hazel Johnson, a longtime Altgeld resident, recently accused Obama of
stealing credit for the work of the environmental group she runs.
“He wants to make himself look good,” said Johnson, who claimed Obama
assisted her group on other problems with the CHA but not the asbestos issue.
Johnson’s allegations were disputed by several members of DCP, who said
Obama was in the thick of the asbestos protests and they were right alongside.
The only inaccuracy in the book, Kellman said: It was Obama himself who
discovered the problem and not a DCP member.
The more Obama worked as an organizer, the more he became convinced that
the most serious problems he confronted couldn’t be solved on the local level.
“People were still poor, kids were out on the corner selling drugs, schools
weren’t working,” he explained.
Ironically, his frustration was amplified by Mayor Washington’s popularity
in the black community. Washington was more attentive to the needs of the
South Side than his white predecessors had been, but city services still were
lacking. Rallying people to fight City Hall is immensely difficult when the
mayor is their hero.
Then Washington died in late 1987. The fight to replace him discouraged
many in the African-American community.
Obama’s resignation months later didn’t shock DCP members. “We always
knew he was not ours to keep,” Herron said.
There were loose ends to tie up. The break-up with his girlfriend was hard.
He flew to Kenya to visit the homeland of his father, who had died years
earlier. The tiny Honda that had carried him from New York was failing and
would never make it to Boston.
A classified ad brought Obama to Chicago in the first place; another
classified helped him leave. A Glenview police officer was selling a used
Datsun 210 hatchback for $500. It was bright yellow, marred by lots of rust
spots and had a hole in the floor. But it ran.
And that’s how Obama set off for Harvard and a road that eventually would
lead to his run for the White House–in a car he thought looked like an
overripe banana, the wind rushing through the floorboard.
———-
IN THE WEB EDITION
Find videos, photo galleries and read the first two installments of the
series at chicagotribune.com/obama