Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  In the second week, Obama had another long conversation with Arnie Graf, again focused on “family and race.” But Barack also asked Arnie to talk about his experiences helping build a chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, as a college student in Buffalo in the early 1960s. The IAF wanted to add minority organizers to its staff, and Arnie suggested that Barack come work with him in Baltimore. Barack said he had moved around a lot in life and wanted to stay in Chicago: “I have to have some place where I want to be that feels like home.” Graf asked whether Barack envisioned a career as an organizer, and Obama said no. “I’d like to organize for another couple of years, because I think I need to get that under my belt. I need to understand on the ground how to relate.” Then, according to Graf, Obama said he thought he would go to a top law school and become a civil rights lawyer and perhaps a judge, a career his grandmother and mother had repeatedly mentioned to him.

  Monday was devoted to analyzing how an Alinsky organization chose an “enemy” and how it could use a confrontation in a way that leads to a relationship with someone who had been ignoring you. “It’s a relational tool, not a tactic,” Mike Gecan explained. “The purpose of polarizing is to get into a relationship and then depolarize it.” Tuesday focused on values and congregations, Wednesday on IAF as an organization. Before the training ended at midday Thursday, Obama spoke again with Arnie Graf and said he had most enjoyed the theoretical basis that underlay the world-as-it-is-versus-the-world-as-it-should-be dialectic, but that he was uncomfortable with how IAF conceptualized enemies and confrontation. Both Graf and Gecan wanted to recruit Barack to IAF, even though they worried that he seemed to grasp everything “more in the intellect than in the gut,” as Graf put it. “There’s something missing here,” Graf thought, because Barack “always seemed one step removed from himself.”24

  Thursday afternoon Obama flew back to Chicago. It had been an edifying ten days, an experience that underscored how “the key to Alinskyism is a kind of pragmatic rationality” and that an organizer “must be pragmatic and nonideological.” In Chicago, Barack was met by a Tribune front page that announced: “LTV Files for Bankruptcy.” Financial analysts said this “virtually assures” the closure or sale of the mill, and on Saturday, the news turned worse when LTV terminated the medical benefits and life insurance of its more than sixty thousand retired workers nationwide, an action that Local 1033 president Maury Richards denounced as “outrageous and inhuman.” On Tuesday, when reports circulated that U.S. Steel would soon lay off up to two-thirds of the 757 men still employed at South Works, the USW threatened to strike. In quick succession, the USW then struck LTV’s profitable Indiana Harbor mill in East Chicago, but not the East Side plant, where several retired managers who also had lost their health benefits joined Richards and hundreds of 1033 pickets while other colleagues kept the mill running. When a federal bankruptcy judge ordered LTV to restore the retirees’ benefits, the USW terminated its strike, but then two days later struck U.S. Steel, and South Works shut down. The next week LTV announced that it would lay off 1,650 of the 2,300 remaining workers at the East Side mill before the end of the year.

  This meant the end for Chicago’s last integrated steel plant. Richards told reporters that many 1033 members “feel helpless and without hope,” a familiar refrain to everyone who had witnessed Wisconsin’s closure six years earlier. Jerry Kellman said LTV’s East Side mill had no future “unless the governor takes action,” but Thompson gave no sign of doing so and Kellman’s outreach to Local 1033 lessened. “It didn’t lead to any lasting working relationship there,” Richards remembered.

  The ripple effects were everywhere. A small-business owner in south suburban Dolton who had lost $1,000 when Wisconsin closed in 1980 told the Daily Cal that LTV owed him $8,000 he was unlikely to recoup. At a 1033 meeting, with members anxious that the local would lose its union hall for nonpayment of rent, the official minutes recorded an incident in which one agitated officer “threatened M[aury] Richards with physical harm.” A Chicago Tribune feature story, referring to what had happened at Wisconsin Steel, South Works, and now LTV, described “chilling levels of alcoholism, emotional stress, and physical illness” among the unemployed and their families. There was no denying that over the past six years “the deterioration of the Southeast Side has been catastrophic.” The Daily Cal’s superb steel reporter, Larry Galica, toured the largely silent South Works and pronounced it “a modern ghost town,” and Richards blamed the steel companies’ “failure to reinvest in their facilities to modernize them” as the reason why tens of thousands of people had suffered so traumatically since March 28, 1980.25

  Amid this latest steel crisis, Harold Washington formally kicked off his reelection campaign before a crowd of four thousand supporters at a Loop hotel. Weeks earlier, in late April, Washington had reiterated his opposition to any new landfills, even though he knew there was no solution to Chicago’s garbage crisis other than finding additional landfill capacity somewhere. In late May he quietly approved what the city insisted was a “reconfiguration,” and not “an expansion,” of the huge CID landfill just east of Altgeld Gardens. Environmental purists like Hazel Johnson were understandably not happy, but a heavy majority of his administration’s Task Force on Solid Waste Management endorsed his action, including IACT’s Mary Ellen Montes.

  An even more imminent threat to what remained of the Southeast Side was the disappearance of gainful employment. Washington’s aides reported, “Stores and local businesses are closing down because the only purchases are for bare necessities. The area is becoming blighted and people’s attitudes are of hopelessness.” Additionally, “there is a great need for more police coverage,” since “there are not enough police officers on the street patrolling the neighborhoods.”26

  In August, Maria Cerda, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training (MOET), finally appeared at a community meeting in Altgeld Gardens to respond to DCP’s request that MOET open an office within reasonable travel distance of the Gardens. Obama had prepared Loretta Augustine to chair the meeting, but almost immediately, Cerda became “very aggressive and domineering,” according to Loretta. “I was supposed to introduce the issue, and she tried to take over,” and became openly patronizing, asking Loretta, “Do you even know what we do?” Then, from the back of the room, came Barack’s voice: “Let Loretta speak! We want to hear what Loretta has to say!”

  Obama was determined to avoid another breakdown like the Zirl Smith session, so he put aside his own rule about remaining quietly in the background, and this time intervened forcefully if anonymously. Loretta remembered that “people kind of picked it up,” chanting “Let Loretta speak!” In the end, Cerda agreed that MOET would open an office on South Michigan Avenue in central Roseland, a ten-minute bus ride from the Gardens, before the end of November.

  By midsummer, Greg Galluzzo and Mary Gonzales were expanding UNO’s reach by linking up with and reactivating the Gamaliel Foundation, founded in the 1960s but long dormant. Greg had been seeking funding for this new vision since early 1986, and he believed that Gamaliel could serve as a training institute that would “generate a flow of leadership for the city’s future.” Mary and Greg saw community organizing as “the way people can move from a sense of helplessness and isolation to active participation in the decisions affecting their lives.” Greg felt that Chicago’s vibrant “movement” activity in earlier years had “distracted people” from pursuing long-lasting change. “Compared to the work of real community organizations, movement activity is much less grounded in communities,” he wrote. By September Greg had raised almost $100,000 for Gamaliel, with the two largest grants—$40,000 and $30,000—coming from the Joyce Foundation and the Woods Fund.

  Within UNO, Danny Solis and Phil Mullins wanted to train the parents of Chicago public school students: “Improving the quality of education in Chicago is the city’s greatest challenge and clearest need.” Citing the research of Fred Hess on Chicago dropout rates, Gamal
iel noted how “students are simply not prepared to handle high school classes.” By 1986, that represented a bigger problem than ever before. “Ten years ago in S.E. Chicago, a student at Bowen High School could drop out of school and get a job in the steel mills making more money than their teachers.” That world was gone, and “the major obstacle” to improving outcomes for current students “is the ineptness and mismanagement at the Board of Education level.”

  Like IAF, Gamaliel would do trainings, and in early August, a one-week course for sixty community group members took place at Techny Towers, a suburban retreat center owned by the Society of the Divine Word. Obama, having the full IAF training to his credit, delivered a presentation there one day, and among those in attendance was Mary Ellen Montes. “Everyone was awed by Barack,” Lena remembered. “I was getting divorced,” and as a single mother with three children, she now had a full-time job at Fiesta Educativa, an advocacy group for disabled Hispanic students. She was immediately taken with the young man three years her junior. “Barack was extremely charismatic,” and she wanted to see more of him. “We talked quite a bit after I met him at Techny Towers,” and with Sheila Jager in California visiting her family, Barack and Lena spent a number of late-summer evenings together in Hyde Park.

  “We went out to eat a few times” and “we just enjoyed talking to each other,” Lena recounted. “He was a lot of fun to talk to and we really enjoyed each other’s company.” Obama would remember some intense making-out, while Lena explained, “I’m a passionate person.” What she termed “the relationship/friendship that we had” became a close one as Barack became part of the UNO–Gamaliel network. Greg Galluzzo believed that “the continuing development of community organizing as a profession is mandatory,” and with Gamaliel often bringing its organizers together, Barack and Lena were now professional colleagues as well as intimate friends.27

  Obama had been in Chicago for more than a year, and it had been a more challenging and instructive period than any other of his life. He had learned a great deal about others and himself. He had bonded with Mike Kruglik, Bill Stenzel, and Tom Kaminski, as well as with DCP leaders, such as Loretta Augustine, Dan Lee, and Cathy Askew. He had also made two good friends around his age: Asif Agha and Johnnie Owens. But more changes were coming.

  Jerry was shifting his focus to Gary, after being bruised by the failure of his Regional Employment Network, which could not claim to have placed even one unemployed worker in a meaningful new job. Given what was now transpiring at LTV’s East Side mill and at South Works, jobless workers on Chicago’s Far South Side faced even dimmer prospects for employment in the immediate future. Obama later wrote that Kellman had told him that CCRC’s region-wide aspirations, like DCP’s highly disparate neighborhood composition, were fundamentally ungainly and that he “should have known better.” Jerry asked Barack to come with him to Gary, but Barack said no: “I can’t just leave, Jerry. I just got here.” Kellman warned him, “Stay here and you’re bound to fail. You’ll give up organizing before you give it a real shot,” but Barack stood firm. He saw a fundamental human difference between them. Barack in twelve months had established meaningful emotional bonds with half a dozen or more colleagues, while Jerry, as Obama later wrote, had “made no particular attachments to people or place during his three years in the area.”

  Obama also made a personal decision that was unlike anything he ever suggested to Genevieve: he asked Sheila Jager to move in with him. “It all seemed to happen so fast,” she later explained. Earlier in the summer, Barack had renewed his one-year lease on his studio, but it was too small for two people. Johnnie Owens was living with his parents and looking for a place, so Barack suggested he sublet the studio. Sheila had no support apart from her graduate fellowship, but Barack offered to cover the $450-a-month cost of apartment 1-N at 5429 South Harper Avenue, a quiet, tree-lined block of three-story brick buildings.

  Sheila thought it was “really spacious,” with a living room, an open study, “a good-sized bedroom,” and a large, eat-in kitchen. “I thought it was a bit plush for a struggling couple,” but with Barack’s $20,000 salary and $100 a month from Sheila toward food and shopping, by early October the young couple had set up house. Barack continued to see both Asif and Johnnie regularly, with Barack taking Johnnie to see a fall exhibit featuring the work of French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Art Institute of Chicago.

  Soon after moving in with Sheila, Barack tardily responded to a letter and short story Phil Boerner had sent him. Barack confessed to feeling older, or at least overextended. “Where once I could party, read and write, with a whole day’s worth of activity to spare, I now feel as if I have barely enough time to read the newspaper.” He counseled Phil about writing fiction, recommending that he focus on “the key moment(s) in the story, and build tension leading to those key moments.” He also suggested that Phil “write outside your own experience,” because “I find that this works the fictive imagination harder.” Barack spoke of thinking about and missing Manhattan, “but I doubt I’ll be going back.”

  Then he introduced Sheila. “The biggest news on my end is that I have a new girlfriend, with whom I now share an apartment. She’s half-Japanese, half-Dutch, and is a Ph.D. candidate” at the University of Chicago. “Very sweet lady, as busy as I am, and so temperamentally well-suited. Not that there are no strains; I’m not really accustomed to having another person underfoot all the time, and there are moments when I miss the solitude of a bachelor’s life. On the other hand, winter’s fast approaching, and it is nice to have someone to come home to after a late night’s work. Compromises, compromises.”

  Obama’s pose that fear of cold temperatures underlay his desire that Sheila and he live together downplayed his own decision and initiative. Then he updated Phil on how DCP was now becoming a freestanding organization, “which gives me no one to directly answer to and control over my own schedule. But the downside is that I shoulder the responsibility of making something work that may not be able to work. The scope of the problems here—25 percent unemployment; 40 percent high school drop out rate; infant mortality on a par with Haiti—is daunting; and I often feel impotent to initiate anything with major impact. Nevertheless, I plan to plug away at it at least until the end of 1987. After that, I’ll have to make a judgment as to whether I’ve got the patience and determination necessary for this line of work.”28

  The breakup of CCRC, with DCP and the South Suburban Action Conference (SSAC) taking its place, coincided with Leo Mahon leaving St. Victor. He had announced seven months earlier his September departure, and he had felt his energy flagging before that. In one of his last pastoral letters, Leo addressed the LTV and South Works news in words that echoed across the previous six years. “Catholic social teaching insists that the workers have first right to the fruits of their labor,” in line with “the Christian principle that workers, not money, come first.” Corporations should put “human concerns ahead of profit and dividends,” but LTV and U.S. Steel had made “clear that power and profit are both more important than people and jobs.” Leo’s advice was the same as in 1980: “let us translate our concern and our outrage into protest and into political action.”29

  Following Kellman’s shift to Gary, Greg Galluzzo took on a formal mentoring role to Obama by becoming DCP’s “consultant.” He introduced Barack to a young tax attorney, Mary-Ann Wilson, who at no charge—“pro bono”—would handle the state and federal paperwork necessary to establish DCP, like UNO before it, as an independent, nonprofit corporation.

  Illinois, like the Internal Revenue Service, required a bevy of forms and submissions that Barack and DCP members would spend a good portion of that fall completing and signing. A set of bylaws was copied and updated from an earlier version Kellman had drafted in 1984. Illinois articles of incorporation required three directors—Dan Lee, Loretta Augustine, and Tom Kaminski were named—as well as a registered agent. Barack, as “project director,” left blank the space asking for his mi
ddle name. A separate, full-fledged board of directors listed Dan as president, Loretta as vice president, and Marlene Dillard as treasurer, along with everyone who was active in DCP: Cathy Askew, Yvonne Lloyd, Nadyne Griffin, Eva Sturgies, and Aletha Gibson, plus several women who had signed in at a meeting or two but not reappeared.

  Simultaneous to his work with Mary-Ann Wilson, Barack was conducting one-evening-a-week training for DCP members at Holy Rosary, while also drafting his own initial grant applications. The trainings, informed by what he had learned during his ten days with IAF, involved DCP veterans such as Dan Lee and Betty Garrett plus relative newcomers such as Aletha Strong Gibson. They also attracted new faces such as Loretta’s neighbor Margaret Bagby and Aletha’s close friend Ann West, a white Australian whose husband was black and president of the PTA at Turner-Drew Elementary School. Another important PTA figure, Isabella Waller, president of the regional Southwest Council, brought along her best friend, Deloris Burnam. Ernest Powell Jr., the politically savvy president of the Euclid Park neighborhood association and someone Barack had recruited over the summer, came as well. Close to twenty people attended the weekly sessions, at which Barack always took off his watch and put it on the table so he could see it during the training.

  For Obama, the grant applications were a major concern. The first would go to Ken Rolling and Jean Rudd at the Woods Fund, which he hoped would renew the $30,000 given to CCRC for DCP in 1986. The ten-page, single-spaced document offered a retrospective account of the past fourteen months, and made clear, as he had stressed previously, that the Far South Side’s “two most pressing problems” were a “lack of jobs, and lack of educational opportunity.” Obama had one especially audacious goal for 1987: a “Career Education Network to serve the entire Far South Side area—a comprehensive and coordinated system of career guidance and counseling for high school age youth” with “a centralized counseling office” augmenting in-school counselors so as to reduce the dropout rate and channel more black high school graduates into higher education. “Youth in the area,” he warned, “are slipping behind their parents in educational achievement.”