Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Meanwhile, “the marriage discussion dragged on and on,” but it was affected by what Sheila describes as Barack’s “torment over this central issue of his life,” the question of his own “race and identity.” The “resolution of his ‘black’ identity was directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career,” and to the crystallization of the “drive and desire to become the most powerful person in the world.”

  Eight years later, Obama would say that through organizing “I think I really grew into myself in terms of my identity,” and that his community work “represented the best of my legacy as an African American.” It had allowed him to feel that his “own life would be vindicated in some fashion,” and his immersion in black Chicago gave him “a sense of self-understanding and empowerment and connection.” Obama’s daily experiences on the Far South Side had reshaped him. “I came home in Chicago. I began to see my identity and my individual struggles were one with the struggles that folks face in Chicago. My identity problems began to mesh once I started working on behalf of something larger than myself.” He also explained that organizing had “rooted me in a specific community of African Americans whose values and stories I soaked up and found an affinity with.” And most specifically, “by the second year,” he told one interviewer, “I just really felt deeply connected to those people that I was working with.”

  Sheila was convinced that “something fundamentally changed” inside Barack during the first half of 1987 that had transformed him into a “powerfully ambitious person” right before her eyes. “We lived so cut off from everyone else” that no one else was privy to her perspective, and Barack’s ability to “compartmentalize his work and home life, to the extent that the two worlds were never brought together physically” or in any social setting, meant that their increasingly stressed and intense relationship existed as “an island unto ourselves.”

  In later years, Obama once said that his experiences in Chicago had “converged to give me a sense of strength.” At an expressly religious event, he cited Roseland as where “I first heard God’s spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose.” Sheila caviled at that, saying she “would not call him religious. Perhaps spiritual is a better description” of the man she lived with. “Barack was definitely not religious in the conventional sense. He talked about God in the abstract, but it was mostly in terms of his destiny and/or some spiritual force.”

  Early in the summer, Barack’s older brother Roy visited Chicago and met Sheila briefly, but Barack went alone to the Chicago home of his maternal uncle Charles Payne for his nephew Richard’s high school graduation. His sister Maya had just completed her junior year at Punahou, and she wanted to visit a number of mainland colleges before submitting her applications. Ann Dunham was attending the Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute being held at Northern Illinois University, west of Chicago in DeKalb, so she and Maya arrived in Chicago before Sheila left to see her parents in California and make a brief initial research trip to South Korea.

  This was the first time Barack and Ann had seen each other in eighteen months, and Ann had gained a tremendous amount of weight and now seemed “very matronly.” She had not made much headway on her Ph.D. dissertation, in part because she had spent half of 1986 in the Punjab, working as a consultant for the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan. But her analysis was coming together, and one of her closest academic colleagues described her conclusions in words that echoed what her son had learned from John McKnight. “Anti-poverty programs . . . only reinforce the power of elites” and “it is resources and not motivation that poor villagers lack,” in Indonesia as elsewhere. Once Ann’s summer institute was complete, she would return to Pakistan for three more months of work. Barack’s close friend Asif Agha recalled playing volleyball out at Indiana Dunes during Maya’s visit, and Jerry Kellman remembers Barack bringing Maya along to a barbecue at Jerry’s home. During this trip, Maya wanted to see the campuses of the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin, where Asif spent much of the summer studying Tibetan.

  Early in the summer Barack decided that he and Sheila should acquire a new Macintosh SE computer, which had debuted just three months earlier. “It was the latest model and very fancy,” Sheila remembered, and as with their rent, Barack happily footed the bill. “Barack said we both needed it,” and they each used it a lot, but when it first arrived, Barack had no idea how to operate the mouse. A call to Asif resulted in the dispatch of Asif’s other best friend, Doug Glick, a fellow linguistic anthropology graduate student who quickly showed Barack that you do not hold the mouse up in the air.

  By the end of June, with Sheila away from Chicago and Asif up in Madison, Barack and Doug on several weekends made the three-hour drive up to where Asif was housesitting in some Wisconsin professor’s lakefront home. Obama years later would publicly joke that he had had “some fun times, which I can’t discuss in detail,” on those visits and “some good memories,” but Glick clearly remembered the long drives in Barack’s noisy Honda. Barack was “just a regular guy,” an “incredibly friendly guy” with “a great sense of humor.” During the road trips, Barack talked “about wanting to write the great American novel. . . . I spent an awful lot of time in the car with him. These are long drives, he can talk,” and “he doesn’t shut up.” At least once Obama mentioned an interest in law school, but he rarely talked about his DCP work. “I never heard him talking about community work and public service as the driving force of who he was.” Sometimes “I’m making fun of him,” asking, “‘If I whisper “shut up,” will you hear it with those ears?’” But Barack clearly had “tremendous intelligence, tremendous charisma,” and indeed “a certain kind of aura to him,” Glick thought. Doug, like Asif, felt that “Barack is not that black,” but it also seemed as if “he was ideologically loaded a little.”

  During one drive, Glick recounted, “we had a god moment. The strangest thing that has ever happened to me in my life happened with him.” Every trip included a pit stop to get gas and pick up something to drink, and on one occasion Barack was “sitting in the car in the driver’s seat” with the window open as Doug returned carrying snacks and bottles. “I tripped. The Snapple goes flying. . . . We both watch as it hits the ground, breaks like an egg, goes up through the air, goes through the window and both of the things land on his legs face up.” Yet somehow Obama was completely dry. “We’re never going to forget that,” Barack said to Doug. “Religions start at moments like that.”52

  In Chicago, the battling intensified over the Southeast Side landfills and their toxic impact on nearby residents. The Sun-Times published a six-part, front-page series of stories titled “Our Toxic Trap” which focused on CID, the Metropolitan Sanitary District’s (MSD) “shit farm” just north of Altgeld Gardens, and older, more mysterious dumps like the Paxton Landfill. Hazel Johnson was quoted on the “nauseating stench” of sewage sludge permeating Altgeld and said, “it smells just like dead bodies.” In response, the state legislature created a special joint committee to investigate the problems, and the MSD’s board pledged its own study after an angry public meeting during which Johnson called one African American MSD commissioner an “Uncle Tom.” After a large illegal dump was discovered in a remote corner of Auburn Gresham, four city sanitation workers who were excavating the waste for transfer were “overcome by noxious garbage fumes” and hospitalized.

  On June 30, WMI’s Mary Ryan proposed to Chicago’s city council that if the city would set aside its existing moratorium on landfill growth, WMI would move forward with an “economic and community development assistance program” that could be a huge “‘catalyst’ toward revitalizing” the entire Southeast Side. But Ryan’s proposal only intensified the fury of local activists like Marian Byrnes, Vi Czachorski, and Hazel Johnson over a possible deal between the city and WMI to expand landfill capacity. “Perhaps Washington is Vrdolyak in disguise on dump issues,” James Landing, the chairman of the Lake Calumet Study Committee (LCSC
), told his fellow allies.

  With a new and energetic Chicago chapter of the international environmental group Greenpeace eagerly joining in, Southeast Side activists prepared for a July 29 blockade of all dumping at CID. A large rally drew media coverage, and a dozen or more Greenpeace members and local activists would chain themselves together to CID’s entrance gate to block waste trucks from entering the landfill. By the morning of the twenty-ninth, DCP’s Dan Lee, Cathy Askew, Margaret Bagby, Loretta Augustine, Betty Garrett, and Obama joined the protesters. Cathy recalled years later, “He led that. He led that in the background. He had to be there to bail them out.”

  The day was “beastly hot,” one young Greenpeace member remembered, and “wearing a media-friendly buttoned-down shirt” became a sweaty mistake. But the blockade was a grand success. The Daily Calumet reported that a crowd of 150 people gathered and said it was “the largest environmental protest in years.” As many as a hundred waste trucks were backed up on the nearby expressway and unable to enter CID, as protesters chanted, “Take it back!” They blocked the entry gate from 10:00 A.M. until midafternoon. One photo caption said: “Wearing a gas mask, Deacon Daniel Lee of the Developing Communities Project . . . makes a point about odors and toxic wastes.”

  Some reporters lost interest as the day dragged on, and the next morning’s Sun-Times erroneously reported that “there were no arrests.” Leonard Lamkin, an East Side activist who joined the chain-in, said that “when the media went away, that’s when they made the arrests.” Hazel Johnson and Marian Byrnes were among the sixteen participants taken into custody, and the women remained jailed for six hours even though the men were released in less than two. Scott Sederstrom, the young, overdressed Greenpeacer, thought “it was almost an act of mercy by the Chicago police to take us into their air-conditioned precinct house for booking. . . . The Cubs game was on TV in the station” and comments about baseball leavened the fingerprinting process. “As a further act of generosity, they let me stay in the air-conditioned area watching a little more of the game” instead of moving Sederstrom to a holding cell. Given the Cubs’ all-too-typical performance, though—they were trailing 10–0 by the seventh-inning stretch—interest in the game understandably waned. Weeks later the charges were dropped against defendants who agreed not to enter any WMI properties for one year.53

  Before the summer ended, Hazel Johnson and Marian Byrnes staged three more protests near the CID entrance, taking care not to get arrested. They also testified before the special joint legislative committee, chaired by Emil Jones. Assisting Hazel was a thirty-five-year-old black man who had just returned to Chicago after working toward a master’s degree at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and who had earlier won a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University in England. Like Jones, Melvin J. “Mel” Reynolds was eyeing a challenge against incumbent U.S. congressman Gus Savage in the spring 1988 Democratic primary, and both men—like Savage—were eager to raise their profiles among district residents angry over authorities’ inability to take meaningful action against the Southeast Side’s multiple toxic threats.

  Several months earlier, Harold Washington had elevated Howard Stanback to an influential post as his assistant in charge of the city’s infrastructure. An African American economist, Stanback had taught at New York’s New School for Social Research until he came to Chicago as Maria Cerda’s deputy at MOET. His new appointment made him the mayor’s primary adviser on Chicago’s landfill crisis, and in late summer 1987, Stanback gave Washington a memo that laid out the city’s options. Chicago had done “very little towards developing and implementing alternatives to dumping,” making the city almost completely dependent on landfill availability. The only solution was “the O’Brien Locks property currently owned by the Metropolitan Sanitary District,” but using that property would mean lifting the moratorium and incurring a huge uproar from Southeast Chicago.

  Stanback gave the mayor two options for how to proceed. One would be to convey the land to WMI, to whom “the site is probably worth $1 billion,” and in order “to neutralize opposition to lifting the moratorium,” WMI would contribute sufficient funds to the surrounding neighborhoods, just as Mary Ryan’s outreach efforts envisioned. Stanback believed that this could succeed, even with WMI’s “negative image,” and that this was superior to the second option, which would involve the city itself operating a landfill on the O’Brien Locks property. Stanback believed political opposition would be higher to this scenario because it would not include WMI’s contributing to community revitalization projects. “Operating a landfill is not a business the City should enter,” Stanback recommended.

  One Saturday, Stanback drove to South Chicago to meet Bruce Orenstein at UNO’s East 91st Street office. Also there that morning was DCP’s Barack Obama, whom Bruce had asked to join them. Stanback described the city’s thinking regarding the landfill and WMI’s proposal, but he also explained that Washington wanted to be sure that WMI’s big gift would not be controlled by the Southeast Side’s traditional power brokers, particularly South Chicago Savings Bank president James A. Fitch, a longtime backer of mayoral rival Ed Vrdolyak and the dominant figure in the four-year-old Southeast Chicago Development Commission (SEDCOM). If a deal could be cut with WMI, the mayor wanted his allies—such as UNO, with whom Washington had worked in close alliance for four years—to take charge of the windfall.

  “Barack in particular, his eyes got so bright,” Stanback remembered. “He said, ‘This can be one of the biggest community development coups of all time.’ I said, ‘You’re right,’” but UNO at present had no development capacity. “We agreed that nothing was going to happen anytime soon,” Stanback recalled, but “we agreed in principle” that UNO, DCP, and the city would closely coordinate as discussions moved forward. When Fitch then wrote to another Washington aide, budget director Sharon Gist Gilliam, to initiate a discussion of lifting the moratorium to allow for WMI’s use of the O’Brien parcel, Gilliam waited twelve days before sending Fitch a cold, rude reply stating that she had given his letter to Stanback.54

  For Obama, the late summer of 1987 was a busy and intense time. Throughout July, his hourly consultations with Greg Galluzzo were more than weekly, but from August forward the two men met only twice monthly, as Greg began having ninety-minute or longer sessions with Johnnie Owens almost weekly. One weekend, Barack met Ann and Maya in New York, where Maya was looking at Barnard College and Ann was visiting friends before returning to Pakistan via London. A rooftop photograph shows Ann and Barack with several of her anthropologist friends, including Tim Jessup, who had first met Barack in Jakarta four years earlier and had seen him again in Brooklyn in 1985 with Genevieve. Barack stayed with Hasan and Raazia Chandoo in Brooklyn Heights, playing basketball nearby with Hasan and walking across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan.

  Hasan recalled that “by that time he knows for sure he wants to be a political person,” and Beenu Mahmood, then a lawyer in Sidley & Austin’s New York office, remembered the visit similarly. “By that time he was very clear that he was going into politics” and “it was very clear that law would be the vehicle for getting into politics for him.” Several nights Raazia cooked dinner, but one thing had most definitely changed: by 1987 Barack never again “partied” as he had so many times in 1984 and 1985. Hasan recalled Barack mentioning how brutally cold Chicago winters were and also remembers him describing the time he and Johnnie had to duck behind a car when they heard gunfire nearby in Palmer Park. Raazia, five years younger, found “Barack a little bit arrogant”—just “intellectually arrogant,” Hasan interjected—“so I didn’t want much to do with him.”

  Obama was back in Chicago by the end of the second week in August, and he may or may not have seen a prominent headline in the Defender that would have reminded him of an influential relationship from earlier in his life: “Frank Davis Dead at 81.” During Sheila’s midsummer visit home, she told her mother much of what Barack had said to her in recent months, and Shi
nko Jager in turn recounted Sheila’s comments to Mike Dees, the family’s closest friend, who had met Barack months earlier during the Christmas holiday. Barack’s marriage proposal still loomed, and “if Sheila went with Barack, she would have to follow his lead. He wanted to be president.” Shinko remained opposed to the marriage, “but she never gave a reason,” Mike recounted. “I was against it because I thought they were two ambitious people, and I knew they wanted their own separate careers, and he was talking about being president, which I thought was a little strange” for a twenty-five-year-old community organizer. But there was also something more, something Barack had begun to articulate to Sheila. “There was a problem there,” Mike recalled. “He was concerned if he was going to take the steps to the presidency with a white wife.”

  One August Friday, Sheila joined Barack for the trip to Asif’s summer house in Madison. Sheila was “very quiet” and slept in the back of the car most of the drive, but an unusual tension was present. By Saturday morning, the problem broke into the open, and Barack and Sheila kept pretty much to themselves upstairs. But according to someone there that weekend, “it’s the summer . . . these houses are old. You’d die if you closed windows. Everything is open.” From morning onward “they went back and forth, having sex, screaming yelling, having sex, screaming yelling.” It continued all day. “That whole afternoon they went back and forth between having sex and fighting.”