During November and December, Maury Richards from USW Local 1033 and Jerry Kellman from CCRC met four times with Chicago’s economic development commissioner, Rob Mier, one of Washington’s most influential aides, to determine how they should react to the loss of a thousand or more jobs if there were even a partial shutdown of LTV’s East Side mill. Mier knew that this would be “a severe blow” to the city because a majority of the steelworkers lived in Chicago, and the mill paid $18 million a year in city and state taxes while contributing $300 million to the city’s economy. The union, CCRC, and Mier agreed that everything possible had to be done to convince LTV to invest $250 million to rebuild a blast furnace and acquire a continuous caster, or alternatively to sell the aging plant to a company that would. “Most of the discussants seem to realize that neither of these outcomes may be possible,” Mier told the mayor. Noting that LTV held defense contracts worth $1.3 billion, Mier reported that “both CCRC and Local 1033 are committed to coordinating a corporate campaign against LTV if LTV refuses” to invest or sell.
Obama, Loretta Augustine, and Marlene Dillard went with Jerry to one or more of his meetings with 1033’s officers and city officials, though no one except Jerry spoke on CCRC’s behalf. On December 19 Kellman and Richards sent a formal letter to the mayor, copied to Mier, asking Washington to “provide the leadership,” in coordination with local congressmen, that would pull together a package of city, state, and federal financial incentives for LTV. The Christmas holidays stalled these actions, but in the press, LTV called its Chicago mill “more vulnerable” than its remaining ones in Ohio and cited its massive $2.6 billion debt burden, intimating that bankruptcy was far likelier than any investment of capital in the East Side plant.11
Over the holidays, Barack took off almost two weeks, flying first to Washington, D.C., to meet his—and Auma’s—older brother Roy Abon’go, who had married an African American Peace Corps volunteer named Mary. Before leaving Chicago, Barack told Tom Kaminski how apprehensive he was about seeing Roy, and the visit got off to a bad start when Roy failed to meet him at the airport. When Barack telephoned, Roy said a marital argument meant that Barack should find a hotel room rather than stay with Roy. The two brothers did have a long dinner that night, plus breakfast in the morning, before Barack headed to New York, where he would rendezvous with his mother and sister and where Beenu Mahmood and Hasan Chandoo were happy to offer free lodging and renew their close acquaintances.
Maya was now a tenth grader at Punahou, and Ann was still living in Honolulu, trying to finish her Ph.D. dissertation. Two months earlier, the Internal Revenue Service had levied a $17,600 assessment against her for unpaid taxes on her 1979 and 1980 income from USAID contractor DAI, but Ann would leave the levy unpaid for years to come. Barack ended up spending more time with Hasan, Beenu, and Wahid Hamid than with his mother and sister, and though he did not see Genevieve in person, a letter he wrote to her soon after New Year’s recounted an emotional phone conversation they had had, albeit one she would be unable to recall in any detail years later.
Hard guy that I am, I’ve managed to stay embittered and sullen towards you for a whole week and a half. But that’s about it. I won’t try to analyze whether what I did was correct or incorrect, right or wrong, for you or for me. I do know that I had to vent my feelings fully; otherwise I would have choked off something important inside me, permanently. Had to get my head and heart in better communication with each other, in better balance. The consensus seems to be that the whole episode was good for me. My mother and Maya enjoyed comforting me for a change. Asif, my linguist friend in Chicago, says I need the humility.
Whatever had transpired, Barack wrote, “reminded me of the rare, fleeting nature of things. My own dispensability,” and “perhaps I’m more apt to believe now something you seem to have understood better than I—when happiness presents itself . . . grab it with both hands.” But “I still feel some frustration at the fact that you seemed to have wrapped me up in a neat package in our conversations. Stiff, routinized, controlled. The man in the grey flannel suit. A stock figure. It felt like you had forgotten who I was.”
Friends, Barack wrote, “recognize who you are . . . even when you’re acting out of character,” as Barack apparently had. “I hope I haven’t lost that with you. I hope I remain as complicated and confusing and various and surprising in your mind as you are in mine.” He closed by saying that “phone calls will still be tough on me for the time being, but cards or letters are welcome.” He hoped to get back to New York in the summer to see the child whom Wahid and his wife Filly were expecting, and “hopefully we can spend some time more productively than this last time out. Some fun, maybe. Laughter. Ambivalently yours. But w/ unconditional love—Barack.”
More than six months since they had parted, the depth of Barack’s emotional tie to Genevieve remained powerful indeed.12
While Obama was away, two major developments upended Chicago politics. The Chicago Sun-Times gave Harold Washington a stinker of a Christmas morning gift by revealing that an undercover FBI informant, working at the behest of the local U.S. attorney, had made cash payoffs to several city officials and aldermen. As the story played out over the coming weeks, Michael Burnett, aka Michael Raymond, had been introduced to his targets by a “friendly, easy-going” young lobbyist, Raymond Akers, whose car sported a personalized license tag: LNDFLL. Akers was the city council lobbyist for Waste Management Incorporated (WMI), which had 1985 revenues totaling $1.63 billion.
Four months earlier two administration appointees had accepted as much as $10,000 in cash from Burnett, and on December 20, FBI agents had confronted 9th Ward alderman Perry Hutchinson at his Roseland home. On two occasions in early October, Hutchinson had accepted a total of $17,200 from Akers in a lakefront apartment near Chicago’s Navy Pier. Unbeknownst to Hutchinson, FBI agents in the apartment next door filmed the encounters with a camera inserted through the common wall. A week later Hutchinson accepted another $5,000 from Akers in Roseland. All told, Hutchinson had received $28,500, and he told journalists, “I figured as long as the guy was dumb enough to give me all of that money, I’d be smart enough to take it.” Hutchinson claimed he used $8,500 to hire an additional staffer and had distributed the remaining $20,000 to schools and community groups in Roseland. Reporters were unable to identify any recipients.
Soon it was revealed that a second black alderman and mayoral supporter, Clifford Kelley, who had led a city council effort to discredit a top WMI competitor, had accepted cash bribes too. Then news broke that city corporation counsel James Montgomery allegedly had been aware of at least one of these payoffs months before Washington first learned of the bribes on Christmas morning. The Chicago Tribune described this as “a widening scandal that some believe could cost [Washington] re-election” a year later. Montgomery quickly resigned, but several weeks later a Tribune story headlined “Lobbyist Paid for City Aide’s Vacation” showed that a year earlier, Akers had given a travel agent $4,200 in cash to cover a weeklong trip to Acapulco for Montgomery and his family. No charges ensued.
Independent white voters who loathed Chicago’s long history of public corruption had been essential to Washington’s 1983 triumph, and they would be needed for his reelection in 1987. Ironically, as the controversy built, mayoral opponents like Ed Vrdolyak remained largely silent. One opposing alderman explained to the Tribune: “If we do nothing, the mayor might ultimately bury himself.”
Despite Washington’s huge popularity among African Americans, his first three years in office had been anything but successful. Some months earlier, Chicago Magazine—not a bastion of Vrdolyak supporters—had published a thoroughly negative report on Washington’s record to date. He “has been miserably inept at communicating his ideas to the city” and “his administration is plagued by excessive disorganization,” Chicago reported. Washington had “gained 30 pounds” and looked “physically run-down.” One black activist who had championed his election back in 1983, Lu Palmer, complai
ned that Washington was relying upon “apolitical technocrats” who were “barricaded on the fifth floor of City Hall. The people aren’t part of it.” The magazine also said Washington “may be the least powerful Chicago mayor in recent history” and singled out the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) as a “full-fledged disaster.” Politically, Washington’s agenda was “to a great extent, stalled,” primarily because Vrdolyak’s city council majority kept the mayor largely “on the defensive.”
When the bribery scandal broke, Washington’s administration was already besieged. Yet a federal appeals court ruling in August 1984 that black and Hispanic voters were so underrepresented by the city’s existing ward map that the Voting Rights Act was being violated seemed to provide an opening for Washington, because new elections could overturn Vrdolyak’s 29–21 council majority. In June 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the appellate finding, and the case was sent to a district judge who instructed the opposing lawyers to redraw seven wards, all of which were represented by Washington opponents. On December 30, the court ordered new elections in those wards to be held on March 18. In the interim, Washington announced that Judson H. Miner, the forty-four-year-old civil rights lawyer who had litigated the redistricting challenge, would be his new corporation counsel.13
But on the Far South Side, the fate of LTV Republic’s East Side steel mill was still in question. In early January, a front-page Wall Street Journal story described the company’s prospects as “dim at best,” and a week later Crain’s Chicago Business published a long report that the Daily Calumet said “sent shock waves through the Southeast Side.” Jerry Kellman told the local paper that LTV should put the mill up for sale, but Maury Richards said that the 1033 union understood that the East Side facility was “losing between $5 million and $8 million every month.”
In mid-January Obama attended a three-day training event in Milwaukee for minority organizers sponsored by the Campaign for Human Development and the Industrial Areas Foundation. Soon after he returned, Chicago headlines confirmed Jerry and Maury’s fears: “LTV Announces 775 Layoffs” plus the closing of the East Side mill’s most modern blast furnace. Kellman told reporters that Illinois officials had “written off the steel industry” and GSU’s Regional Employment Network immediately scheduled four days of skills-assessment interviews at Local 1033’s office in an effort to find new jobs for laid-off workers. Yet everything Frank Lumpkin and his colleagues had experienced in the years since Wisconsin Steel’s sudden closure told them how scarce jobs were on the Far South Side and in the south suburbs.
Loretta Augustine and Yvonne Lloyd encouraged Barack to focus on the sprawling Altgeld Gardens public housing project, just east of where they lived. They introduced him to their pastor at Our Lady of the Gardens, Father Dominic Carmon, and Obama also met with parents whose children attended Our Lady’s small Catholic grade school. He was introduced to Dr. Alma Jones, the feisty principal of Carver Primary School and its adjoining Wheatley Child-Parent Center, virtually all of whose students came from within Altgeld. Jones was immediately impressed with Barack. “Talking to him, he was so much older than he was. It was like talking to your peers rather than somebody the age of your children.” In a community where few people could imagine meaningful change, Jones stood out as an important voice of encouragement for a young organizer venturing into unfamiliar territory.
Despite Altgeld residents’ letters to Mayor Washington complaining about “heavy drug traffic” seven days a week, no city residents were more completely ignored and forgotten than the tenants of Altgeld Gardens. Dr. Gloria Jackson Bacon, who almost single-handedly provided medical care to Altgeld residents for decades, explained that by the 1980s “many of them did not venture outside. Many of them lived almost like insular lives inside of Altgeld.” Bacon recalled others speaking pejoratively of “‘those people out there, those people out there,’ and I’d say, ‘These are your people.’” Loretta Augustine remembered once taking some Altgeld schoolchildren to the zoo and realizing that “one or two of the kids had never been downtown before.” Loretta referred to Lake Michigan, and “the kid responded, ‘Chicago has a lake?’” As Alma Jones told one reporter who visited her school, “Altgeld Gardens is an isolated, enclosed island. We have no stores, no jobs and one traffic signal.”14
Barack continued his weekly get-togethers with Asif Agha, but his social life was so meager that Kellman and Mary Bernstein discussed ways to help him meet more people his own age. “He felt to me like a nephew,” Mary remembered, with Barack calling her “Sistah,” and she calling him simply “Obama.” In her eyes, Barack “was always serious,” indeed “driven,” but above all “he was very solitary.” Bernstein recalled that Barack once asked her, “How am I going to get a date?” working in Roseland and spending his evenings at meetings or visiting DCP parishioners. “You don’t want to date any of the women I know,” Mary humorously replied. “They’re all old, and they’re all nuns.”
Loretta Augustine, Yvonne Lloyd, and Nadyne Griffin were all looking out for the young man’s welfare. “I felt very protective, very motherly towards him,” Loretta later told journalist Sasha Abramsky. “We were worried that he wasn’t eating enough,” Yvonne Lloyd recalled. “We were always trying to make him eat more.” Loretta could see that Barack was “very focused” and “very serious,” and more than once she suggested he lighten up. “You shouldn’t be so somber and uptight and serious all the time.” Obama later said he was indeed “very serious about the work that I was trying to do.” Marlene Dillard’s strong interest in jobs had her spending as much time with Barack as anyone, and though she found him “very dynamic” and “very sincere,” his maturity meant she “never looked at him as a son.” But Nadyne Griffin felt just like Loretta did: “He was just like a son to me,” and Tom Kaminski found the church ladies’ solicitude heartwarming: “Everyone wanted to be his mother, everyone thought she was his mother,” and “I felt like an uncle.”
Barack stayed in touch through regular long-distance phone calls with old friends like Hasan Chandoo, Wahid Hamid, and Andy Roth, and in late February, he sent Andy a long letter that was similar to the one he had written Phil Boerner three months earlier:
As I may have told you on the phone, when you’re alone in a new city, the fullness or emptiness of the mailbox can set the tone for the entire day.
Work continues to kick my ass. A lot of responsibility has been dumped on me: I’m to organize an area of about 70,000–100,000 folks and bring the local churches and unions into the action. I confront the standard stuff: the turpitude of established leaders (i.e. aldermen, preachers); the lassitude of the masses; the “we’ve seen middle class folks come in here before and make promises and ain’t nothin’ happened” attitude, which is true; my own inhibitions about playing for power and manipulating folks, even when it’s for what I perceive to be their own good. At least once a day I think about what I’m doing out here, and think about the pleasures of the upwardly mobile (though still liberal Democratic) lifestyle, and consider chucking all this. Fortunately, one of two things invariably snap me out of my brooding: 1) I see such squalor or degradation or corruption going on that I get damned angry and pour the energy into work; or 2) I see a sign of progress—one of my leaders, a shy housewife, dressing down some evasive bureaucrat, or a young man who’s unemployed volunteering to help distribute some flyers—and the small spark will keep me rolling for a whole day or two.
Who would have ever believed that I’d be the sucker who’d believed all that crap we talked about in the Oxy cooler and keep on believing despite all the evidence to the contrary. Speaking of contrary, I’m in such a state for lack of female companionship, but that will require a whole separate exegesis.
A few weeks later, Barack sent a postcard to his brother Roy and his wife Mary, and a longer message to Phil Boerner. He thanked Phil for his encouraging comments about the short story Barack had sent him, but he emphasized what a “discouraging time” he was having:
No one in mid-1980s Chicagoland had anywhere near the degree of success Jerry Kellman did in winning major grants from the Campaign for Human Development, the Woods Fund, the Joyce Foundation, and Tom Joyce’s small but always-pioneering Claretian Social Development Fund. Grant makers regularly visited the organizations they supported, and by early 1986, Jerry had been introducing Barack as a new mainstay in DCP’s Far South Side organizing work. Archdiocesan CHD staffers Ken Brucks and Mary Yu met Barack through Kellman, but the two most influential funders Barack got to know that winter were Woods Fund director Jean Rudd and program officer Ken Rolling. Jean had become Woods’s first staffer five years earlier. Ken, like Greg Galluzzo, was a former Catholic priest who had spent more than half a dozen years in organizing before joining Jean at Woods in 1985. Woods’s commitment to organizing was reaching full flower just as Jerry and then Barack arrived on the scene. As Jean deeply believed, “community organizing is intended to be transformational for ‘ordinary’ people. Through its training and actions, people recognize their worthiness, their legitimacy, their place in a democracy, their power, their voice.” That was the work, and the teaching, that she and Ken wanted to support and champion.
Decades later Jean remembered when Jerry first brought Barack to meet them. “In that first meeting, I was very, very impressed. . . . He was very, very reflective, very candid . . . very winningly . . . humble about what he had to catch up on” about organizing and about Chicago. “I believe I said to my husband, ‘I’ve really met the most amazing person today.’” But most of Woods’s actual contact with DCP, CCRC, and other grantees like Madeline Talbott’s ACORN was handled by Ken Rolling, who was even more impressed upon first meeting Barack. “I’ve just met the first African American president,” he told his wife Rochelle Davis that evening. Ken said much the same thing to CHD staffer Sharon Jacobson, who a quarter century later remembered it just as Ken and Rochelle had: “I want you to watch this guy, Sharon. He’s going to be president of the United States one day.”
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