Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  In Roseland, more than a mile northwest of the underground fire, the only newsworthy event in the eyes of Chicago newspapers during Barack’s first weeks was the arrest of an initial suspect in a cold-blooded killing that was all too reminiscent of Ronald Nelson’s murder just five months earlier. One Saturday evening, shortly before Barack’s arrival, forty-nine-year-old factory foreman Enos Conard and his twenty-three-year-old son were manning an ice cream truck on 105th Street, hardly five blocks from Father Tom Kaminski’s St. Helena Church. Two men in their early thirties approached and ordered ice cream before one suddenly drew a gun. As Conard reached for his own weapon, the lead assailant fired a single fatal shot into Conard’s chest. Conard left behind a widow and four children, and a fellow vendor complained to reporters that “so many people have guns.”

  A mortician from nearby Cedar Park Cemetery had drawn press attention by publicizing his offer of free funerals and burials to victims of Far South Side gun violence, and Conard’s family became the seventh to accept. In late August, police arrested L. C. Riley of Roseland as one of the assailants, and two years later both Riley and triggerman Willie Dixon, also from Roseland, were convicted of Conard’s murder. Dixon was sentenced to life in prison, and three decades later, Dixon remained in the same cellblock at Stateville Correctional Center as Nelson’s killer, Clarence Hayes.

  Also in Roseland, although invisible to Kellman and Obama, ACORN’s Madeline Talbott had hired a new organizer, Ted Aranda, who had worked previously for a year under Greg Galluzzo at UNO, to revitalize ACORN’s Far South Side presence after months of inactivity following Steuart Pittman’s departure in mid-March 1985. Unlike CCRC’s and DCP’s church-based organizing, ACORN went block by block knocking on doors to get residents together to tackle community problems. Aranda explained years later that “most of the people that I got involved in the organization were always women.” The goal was to attract enough recruits to hold a community meeting, and Aranda’s Central American heritage was a significant asset, because his dark complexion led most Roseland residents to assume he was African American. “That’s not my identity” once “you look beyond my skin color,” Ted said, but he also had an advantage in Latino neighborhoods, where “they took me for a Hispanic.”

  Aranda learned that Roseland residents were angry that the city had not provided them with garbage cans, and Pullman people were upset about a disco patronized by gang members. By early September, the Roseland group, COAR—Community Organized for Action & Reform—had drawn enough interest that Talbott convened a meeting at King Drive and 113th Street—i.e., Holy Rosary. In late October, the Pullman group, ERPCCO—East Roseland Pullman Concerned Citizens’ Organization—succeeded in closing the disco. But by the winter, Ted Aranda “became disenchanted with community organizing as a viable model for radical change,” and he resigned. By the standards of Alinsky-style organizing, Aranda’s months in Roseland had been successful, but as he explained years later, he “was more convinced than ever by the end of my short organizing stint that the political system itself was the problem.” And even though COAR and DCP were working in the very same neighborhood, “Barack Obama I never met at all.”2

  DCP’s board met on the second Tuesday evening of each month, and at the August meeting in St. Helena’s basement, Kellman introduced Obama so the members could formally ratify his hiring. Virtually everyone was taken aback by how youthful he seemed. “My first thought was ‘Gee, he is really young,’” Loretta Augustine recalled years later, and she whispered that to Yvonne Lloyd sitting next to her. Yvonne’s first reaction was just like Loretta’s: “We had children older than he was.” The always outspoken Dan Lee said aloud what they all were thinking: “Whoa, this is a baby right here.” Obama smiled and acknowledged that he looked young, but once he spoke to them about himself and responded to their questions, he quickly won them over.

  “He was very candid in his answers—straightforward,” Loretta remembered. “The impressive part was that he seemed to really understand what we were saying to him,” which she considered a marked change from both Mike and Jerry. “When we talked about certain things that he didn’t know about, he didn’t lie. He basically said, ‘You know what, I’m not really familiar with that. However, these are things that we can learn together.’” In short order, “we knew he was the right person for us,” Loretta recalled, and though “his honesty has a lot to do with it,” so did Barack’s appearance. “His color did make a difference to us, because it’s important for us and our children and everybody else to understand that people who look like us can do the job.”

  The day after that meeting, Barack wrote the letter to Genevieve that described his trip from New York—and his unforgettable conversation with Bob Elia at the Fairway Inn—as well as his first weeks in Chicago. Genevieve had called Barack several days earlier, and he began by apologizing for “my phone manner. You know I dislike the telephone. . . . Combined with the lingering pain of separation, I’m sure I sounded guarded and stand-offish. I’m better with letters . . . (yes, more control).” Barack said that Jerry “has thrown me into” several neighborhoods, including Altgeld Gardens and Roseland, “without much . . . guidance” at all. “There are some established leaders with whom I can work, but I must say that for now, I’m pretty confused and feel my inexperience acutely.” He realized that having “a trustworthy face” worked to his advantage, as did “the dearth of educated young men in the area who haven’t gone into the corporate world.” Barack was pleased with the job, but questions remained. “For all the kindness and helpfulness the communities have offered me so far, I can see the thoughts running through their heads—‘another young do-gooder.’ I know it runs through mine.” So “doubts of my effectiveness in such a setting remain, but at least I feel like I’m in one of the best settings to really test my values that I could hope to find right now.”

  Overall, “the work offers neither more nor less than I had anticipated,” which he found reassuring. He characterized Hyde Park as “a poor man’s Greenwich Village,” but he was pleased with his apartment and “the cheap prices in restaurants” though not “the disappointing newspapers.” But another contrast from New York was more striking. “Blacks seem more plentiful, and more importantly, seem to exude a sense of ownership, of comfortable dignity about who they are and where they live than do blacks” in New York. Chicago offered “a much more visible well-to-do and middle class black population who still live in a cohering black community,” and “black culture here is more closely rooted to the South; the neighborhoods have a down home feel. . . . Even the poorest black neighborhoods seem to have a stronger social fabric on which to rely than in NY” and “as a result, the young bucks, though no less surly and pained than their NY counterparts, appear to feel less need to constantly assert themselves against the respectable, and in particular, the white, world.” Obama wondered whether “these strands of self-confidence” were due to Mayor Harold Washington, whose “grizzled, handsome face shines out from many store front windows in the areas I work.”

  Barack wrote that he already had swum in Lake Michigan, but confessed “the almost daily thump in my chest, pain and longing when I think of Manhattan, and the Pakistanis, and when I think of you.” He wrote out his address and phone number and told Genevieve, “I expect you to make use of this information frequently.” He enclosed a $130 check for money he owed her, and closed by telling her about his African sister who had canceled her trip to New York ten months earlier at the last minute: “Auma did get in touch with me and will be coming through Chicago in two weeks. Very excited.”3

  By late summer 1985, Auma Obama was still in university at Heidelberg, but her closest German friend was now studying at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, a small town southeast of St. Louis, Missouri, which was far from Chicago. Auma traveled to Carbondale for two weeks, calling Barack once to update him on her plans, and then took a long train trip to Chicago, where he met her at the station and then cooked a South A
sian dinner for them in his small apartment, where Auma would bunk on the living room couch. Obama was eager to have his sister tell him about their late father, and for the next ten days—interrupted only by his work—the siblings spoke for long hours about Barack Hussein Obama Sr. One day Auma went with him to work at Holy Rosary, where she met Jerry and several parish volunteers. Back in Hyde Park, one evening Auma went beyond her somewhat-edited comments about Obama Sr. and told her brother that he had been fortunate not to have grown up in his father’s household, particularly after Obama Sr. married Ruth. Auma showed family photos to Barack, but she also spoke about Obama Sr.’s drinking problem and the suffering his older children endured as a result of his financial irresponsibility, Roy Abon’go even more than her. Auma also mentioned “the old man’s” auto accidents and job-loss experiences, and told Barack, “I think he was basically a very lonely man.” Barack generally said little in response, but he took time to show Auma Chicago’s downtown sights and museums before the Carbondale friend and her boyfriend arrived in Chicago to take Auma with them to Wisconsin. Before she left, Auma urged Barack to visit her once she returned to Kenya.

  Auma later remarked that the visit was “a very intense ten days together” and that “I was very conscious of trying to give him a full picture of who his father was.” In the immediate aftermath of her visit, Barack said little about the new and sad portrait Auma had painted of Obama Sr. to his coworkers or to his only regular outside-work acquaintance, Asif Agha. Barack and Asif had drinks and dinner almost every Thursday night at a restaurant on 55th Street in Hyde Park. “We hit it off . . . and we saw each other extremely regularly,” Agha recalled years later. “He didn’t know anyone” beyond DCP, and it was obvious that “the work was stressful, and he was discovering himself.” Barack did not talk much about DCP to Asif. “The only person he ever told me much about” was fellow Princeton graduate Mike Kruglik, whom Obama clearly liked. “He came up frequently.” Mostly the two twenty-four-year-olds talked about writing. “I used to write poetry, and he used to write short stories,” and each Thursday “we would share whatever we had been writing.” According to Asif, Barack “was very serious about writing” and regularly turned out short sketches of six to ten double-spaced typed pages, but there was no real suggestion that he would pursue writing as a career. These dinners were sometimes leavened with shots of tequila, giving Obama at least one regular outlet from the stresses and strains of being a real organizer.

  A decade later, Obama offered a sketch of Auma’s visit that had her arriving at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, not Union Station, but that did describe her telling him about their father’s tragic latter years. “Where once I’d felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all of his mistakes.” Another decade later, during the first six months of his emergence as a nationally known figure, Obama several times opened up about his recollections of Auma’s visit. “Every man is either trying to live up to his father’s expectations or making up for his mistakes,” he told one questioner. “In some ways, I still chase after his ghost a little bit.”

  In a long interview with radio journalist Dave Davies, Obama spoke more extensively about his father than at any other time in his life, stating that during Auma’s visit, he learned that his father had had “a very troubled life.” He understood that some of Obama Sr.’s employment problems had occurred “in part because he was somebody who was willing to speak out against corruption and nepotism” within the Kenyan government, but the portrait his mother had so insistently painted “of this very strong, powerful, imposing figure was suddenly balanced by this picture of a very tragic figure who had never been able to really pull all the pieces of his life together.” What Auma had told him was “a very disquieting revelation” that really “shook me up” and “forced me to grow up a little bit.” While “in some ways it was liberating” relative to the implicit expectations Ann’s glowing comments plus Obama Sr.’s own self-presentation to his ten-year-old son back in December 1971 had created, “it also made me question myself in all sorts of ways” because “you worry that there are elements of their character that have seeped into you . . . and you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to cope with those things,” particularly how Obama Sr. had behaved toward women and the offspring he sired.

  Asked on camera by Oprah Winfrey about his father, Obama said, “he ended up having an alcoholism problem and ended up leading a fairly tragic life.” When a friend asked Barack to quickly compose some uplifting advice for young black men, Obama e-mailed that “none of us have control of the circumstances into which we are born” and that some will have to “confront the failings of our own parents.” But “your life is what you make it.” A few years later, Barack admitted that “part of my life has been a deliberate attempt to not repeat mistakes of my father,” whom he acknowledged “was an alcoholic” and “a womanizer.” Obama acknowledged that Auma had revealed how their father had “treated his family shabbily” and had lived “a very tragic life.” Even though Barack did not speak about this disquieting news to Asif, Mike, or Jerry, the long-term impact of Auma’s truth telling would be profound. “This was someone who made an awful lot of mistakes in his life, but at least I understand why.”4

  In early September 1985, Chicago’s public school teachers went on a citywide strike. It was the third straight fall, and the eighth in eighteen years, that school days were lost to a labor dispute. The Chicago Teachers Union was demanding a 9 percent pay raise and the city had offered 3.5 percent; only 14 percent of union members had actually participated in the strike vote. Independent observers, such as education researcher Fred Hess, told reporters that both sides were being unreasonable, and a Chicago Sun-Times editorial described the union’s behavior as “unconscionable.” Quick intervention by Illinois governor James R. Thompson led to a 6 percent settlement and the loss of only two school days.

  That fall, Jerry Kellman was still savoring the triumph he had experienced in early July when the Illinois legislature appropriated $500,000 to fund a computerized CCRC jobs bank that would assess unemployed workers’ skills and market their résumés to potential employers. The big pot of money had been obtained by Calumet City state representative Frank Giglio, a close friend of Fred Simari, the St. Victor parishioner who had been volunteering virtually full-time for Kellman, as well as Hazel Crest state senator Richard Kelly.

  The half-million dollars would allow Governors State University (GSU) to hire twenty job-skill-assessment interviewers for ten months to create résumés for unemployed individuals. In news articles about this, Kellman said the program’s success was dependent upon “hundreds” of volunteers stepping forward and pressing employers to hire those workers. Once the funding was confirmed, Jerry made plans to shift Adrienne Jackson to help oversee the new program and began aiming for a massive public rally to kick off the enterprise. Before the end of August, he hired Sister Mary Bernstein, a forty-year-old Catholic nun and experienced organizer, and assigned her to St. Victor to handle CCRC’s Catholic parishes in the south suburbs. In tandem with Mike Kruglik and DCP, the immediate goal was to mobilize as large a crowd as possible for the kickoff rally Kellman scheduled for Monday evening, September 30, a day before the program office at GSU would open officially.

  Kellman arranged for the two most powerful individuals in Illinois—Governor “Big Jim” Thompson and Archbishop Joseph Cardinal Bernardin—to speak at the event. Choirs from Joe Bennett’s St. John de la Salle and John Calicott’s Holy Name of Mary would perform, and the invaluable Fred Simari would preside as master of ceremonies. Also featured on the podium would be Lutheran bishop Paul E. Erickson, Methodist bishop Jesse DeWitt, Presbyterian executive Gary Skinner, and the towering young Maury Richards from United Steelworkers Local 1033, whom advance press reports described as “president of the state’s largest”—they might have added “remaining”—steel workers local.

  Five days before the rally, the food processor Libby, M
cNeill & Libby announced that within the next year, it would close its Far South Side Chicago plant on 119th Street; that meant a loss of 450 good jobs. The Sunday before the rally, Leo Mahon praised his St. Victor parishioners like Fred Simari and Gloria Boyda for the time they gave to CCRC’s employment efforts and reminded his congregation that scripture teaches that “the desire for money is the root of all evil.”

  On Monday evening, CCRC vice president Rev. Thomas Knutson hosted a pre-rally dinner for the almost two hundred program participants at his First Lutheran Church of Harvey before the 8:00 P.M. rally kicked off at nearby Thornton High School. A racially diverse crowd of more than a thousand, including a watchful Barack Obama and dozens of people from DCP’s Chicago parishes, filled the gymnasium as Fred introduced the speakers, including Loretta Augustine on behalf of DCP. After Maury Richards told the audience, “we’ve lost forty thousand jobs in the past few years,” the governor came forward and began by saying, “My name is Jim Thompson. My job is jobs.” He went on to declare that “jobs are more important than mental health or law enforcement, because unless people are working and paying taxes, there won’t be any resources to pay for those services.”

  But the evening’s real star was Cardinal Joe Bernardin, who denounced racism and called for “cultural and ethnic unity in the Calumet region.” He noted how unemployment “cuts across racial and ethnic lines,” and he promised that “the church is here to help you” while stressing that “the real leadership must come from the laity.” Sounding at times like Leo Mahon, Bernardin declared that “every person has a right to a decent home” and vowed that “the cycle of poverty can be broken and community decline can be turned around.” The archbishop pledged further church support for CCRC, and the rally ended with a white female parishioner from Hazel Crest asking the crowd: “Do you want to be part of a community that controls its future?” The audience responded with lengthy applause.