Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  In Roseland, significant economic development news came from the low-profile Chicago Roseland Coalition for Community Control (CRCCC), a twelve-year-old organization that had successfully followed through on the interdenominational protests against Beverly Bank that Alonzo Pruitt and Al Sampson had mounted seven months earlier. When the bank announced plans to open a new branch in suburban Oak Lawn, the little-known Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 allowed CRCCC to petition the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC) to block that expansion. Three years earlier Beverly Bank had stopped making home mortgage loans, leaving it vulnerable to FDIC enforcement of the CRA’s community service requirements that proscribed disinvestment in older neighborhoods. Advising and guiding CRCCC’s strategy was the similarly low-profile Woodstock Institute, a nonprofit fair-lending organization created in 1973 by five founders, three of whom were John McKnight, Al Raby, and Stan Hallett. Woodstock vice president Josh Hoyt, an organizer who previously had worked under Greg Galluzzo and Mary Gonzales at UNO’s Back of the Yards and Pilsen affiliates, brought the Beverly situation to the attention of U.S. Senate Banking Committee chairman William Proxmire’s staff, and Proxmire wrote to FDIC chairman William Seidman. Soon Beverly Bank was in negotiations with CRCCC president Willie Lomax, and the national American Banker publicized the tussle. By mid-September Beverly had agreed to commit $20 million worth of loans to low-income Far South Side neighborhoods over the next four years and to open central Roseland’s first ATM. “We made use of some tools of the law to get the bank here,” the courageous Lomax told the weekly Chicago Reader’s excellent political reporter Ben Joravsky. “We had to play hardball.”59

  The “tools of the law” were increasingly on Barack’s mind by October 1987. Going to law school had been a possibility for years, ever since his graduation from Columbia. His grandmother more than once had spoken of a career in law and then a judgeship, and Barack had never seen his work as a community organizer as something long term. He had mentioned going to law school in passing to several people in recent years—IAF’s Arnie Graf being one—and early in 1987 Barack had heard a National Public Radio interview with Supreme Court justice William J. Brennan Jr. Brennan told NPR’s Nina Totenberg that the guarantees in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights are “there to protect all of us” and to “protect the minority from being overwhelmed by the majority.” Barack would later recall what he termed “the wisdom and conviction” of Brennan’s words.

  Barack’s embrace of his “destiny,” as he described it to Sheila, had quickened his thinking for the last six months. Kellman’s move to Gary had left DCP entirely in Barack’s hands until he had been able to hire Johnnie Owens, but once Johnnie was on board, Barack’s references to law school—to Sheila, to his close friend Asif Agha, to Asif’s friend Doug Glick on their long drives up to Madison and back—became far more frequent. Early that fall Bobby Titcomb, Barack’s closest Hawaii friend, passed through Chicago, and he remembers Barack talking then about wanting to get a law degree. Asif left Chicago in early November for six months in Nepal, and one October evening, not long before he left, he went to Barack and Sheila’s apartment on South Harper. “We used to cook dinner for each other a lot,” said Asif, and that evening Barack was out on one of his several-days-a-week runs along Hyde Park’s lakeshore. “I was sitting with Sheila in the kitchen, and he walked in all sweaty,” wearing shorts, and “I remember him saying something about his law school essay, and that he had been mulling it over for many days, maybe weeks.” Mary Bernstein remembered Barack mentioning it to her as well. He had cited Harvard in particular to Asif—“his dad went to Harvard,” Asif remembered, “so he had some interest in Harvard” and “that was his first choice.” Asif had not heard what Barack had told Sheila about a “destiny,” but after two years of weekly conversations, he knew Barack “was an ambitious person.”

  Several weeks earlier, Jerry Kellman told Obama about a conference titled “The Disadvantaged Among the Disadvantaged: Responsibility of the Black Churches to the Underclass.” It would be held in late October at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Barack agreed they should go. The weekend of “study, reflection, and worship,” as the divinity school’s dean termed it, for the two hundred attendees began on Friday evening with a sermon by Samuel D. Proctor, pastor of New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church and one of the most famous living black preachers. Proctor’s sermon “chilled us,” one listener recounted, with its description of “the ordinary terrors of normal life in Harlem.”

  Saturday morning featured a powerful and provocative lecture by Philadelphia congressman and clergyman William H. Gray. “Will we have a two-tiered society of the haves and the have-nots . . . or will we have a society . . . that allows people to move from the underclass on up?” Gray asked. For black Americans, “education is an absolute essential,” as the record was clear: “no education, no advancement,” and “blacks with no education have very little hope” of bettering their lives. Gray did not shy from naming other ills. “The leading cause of death among young black males is black-on-black crime. That’s us. Superfly selling drugs and coke in our community is not someone else. It’s us. Those who are mugging us, raping us, and robbing us are not coming from somewhere outside. It’s us. The teenage pregnancy problem is not the white man’s problem, it’s our problem. . . . You cannot ever escape poverty with children having children.”

  Two sets of four concurrent workshops bracketed a lunchtime lecture by sociologist William Julius Wilson. After the workshops ended, Jerry and Barack took a walk around the Harvard campus. “We didn’t spend a lot of time with other people at the conference,” Kellman recalled, “just with each other.” During their stroll, Barack told him that he was applying to law schools. Kellman remembers Barack saying, “‘I owe it to you to let you know as soon as I can,’” and Kellman recalls being “very surprised.” Kellman also remembers Barack saying he did not think that community organizing was an effective means for attaining large-scale change or a practical method for influencing elected officials who potentially could. Years later Obama described his thoughts similarly, saying that “many of the problems the communities were facing were not really local,” and that he needed a better understanding of how America’s economy worked “and how the legal structure shaped that economy.” He also “wanted to find out how the private sector works, how it thinks.” By “working at such a local level” he had learned that problems like joblessness and bad public schools were “citywide issues, statewide issues, national issues” and he wanted to “potentially have more power to shape the decisions that were affecting those issues.” In a subsequent interview he would specifically cite decisions that “were being made downtown in City Hall or . . . at the state level.” He had been able to get “outside of myself by becoming a community organizer,” but the experience also had taught him that “community organizing was too localized and too small” to offer significant promise to those it sought to empower.

  Saturday night’s dinner speaker was Children’s Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelman, who one listener said presented a “terrifying analysis” and emphasized the need for “an ethic of achievement and self-esteem in poor and middle-class black children.” Sunday morning the symposium concluded with a sermon by Harvard professor and pastor Peter J. Gomes, who worried that after two days of “some pretty depressing statistics, some very grim predictions, some very sobering analyses” the discussion had become “so intimidating, so daunting as to lead to paralysis rather than action. With more conferences like this, one will be terrified of thinking about any form of response.” But Gomes believed the weekend’s clear message was that “money, programs, and advocacy alone will not solve the problems of the underclass.” Instead, a consensus had identified “despair as the root and fundamental disease: despair, the loss of hope, the loss of any sense of purpose, or worth, or direction, or place,” an analysis all too true to someone familiar not only with Altgeld Gardens but also
Chicago’s Far South Side high schools.60

  Back in Chicago on Monday, Barack wrote a congratulatory postcard to Phil Boerner, who had announced his upcoming marriage to his longtime girlfriend Karen McCraw. “Life in Chicago is pretty good,” Barack wrote. “I remain the director of a community organization here, and I’m now considering going to law school. Makes for a busy life: not as much time to read and write as there used to be. Seeing a good woman, a doctoral student at Univ. of Chicago.”

  The next weekend was the beginning of Gamaliel’s third weeklong training at suburban Techny Towers, with about sixty trainees joining the network’s usual roster of trainers: Greg, Mary, Peter Martinez, Mike Kruglik, Phil Mullins, Danny Solis, and Barack. David Kindler now worked under Mike at SSAC in Cook County’s south suburbs, and Kindler brought his Quad Cities friend Kevin Jokisch to the early November training. “Who you brought to training was a reflection of your ability as an organizer,” Kindler explained, and Jokisch already had hands-on experience.

  “Barack was always a great trainer,” Danny Solis remembered. “He had a presence.” After sitting in on two of Obama’s sessions, Jokisch agreed. “Barack was totally in control without appearing to be in control. . . . His sessions flowed, were all lively, and engaged participants. He drew people out, had them tell their stories in the context of the session he was leading. His style was different than many of the other trainers. Most of the trainers were aggressive, in-your-face types.” In contrast, “Barack and Mary Gonzales had a very similar way of moving, speaking, drawing people out, utilizing humor, and probably most importantly being trusted by those in the room.”

  Most nights some of the trainers adjourned to an Italian restaurant and bar just down the road. “Obama showed up twice to have beers with us. The after-hours sessions were very lively,” Jokisch recalled. “Most of the debates were around politics and politicians,” with Barack jumping in. Phil Mullins remembers how Barack “saw the limitations of just pure community organization” and asked, “How do you get at these bigger issues?” Given Gamaliel’s IAF worldview, that meant Barack “was kind of out there on his own,” and he was “constantly asking himself what he actually thinks about something,” another colleague recalled. Phil, like Kindler, also knew that among all the organizers, Barack’s real relationship was with Kruglik. “That’s the tighter person-to-person relationship” for Obama, more so than Jerry or even Greg, Mullins recounted. It was “more personal,” because as everyone could see, “Kruglik’s a warmer personality.” Given his Princeton undergraduate education, plus his graduate school history background, Kruglik’s intellectual depth and acumen were unique among the Gamaliel network. He also possessed an uncommonly superb memory.

  By November 1987, Mike and Barack had known each other well for more than two years, and with Mike Barack could be spontaneous and frank to a degree he rarely was with other organizing colleagues. Even a quarter century later, Mike remembered some of what Barack said to him that week. Barack’s time in Roseland had placed him “in the armpit of the region, as far away from the center of power as you can get,” and he saw a prestigious law degree as the first step on the road to true power. Mike disagreed, telling Barack not to leave organizing and instead to commit himself to building a citywide network of organizations broader than UNO’s set of community groups, a network so sweeping that it would represent the fulfillment of what King and Al Raby had hoped the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement would become.

  Barack demurred. A top law school would give him entrée to the corridors of power. “I can learn from these people what they know about power,” and a legal education would allow him to understand “financial strategies and banks and how money flows and how power flows. Then I can come back to Chicago and use that knowledge to build power for ordinary people.” But Barack was imagining more than just building a powerful network of community groups, Mike recalled. “He said to me, ‘I’m going to become mayor of Chicago. I’m thinking I should run for mayor of Chicago.’”

  Barack believed that Chicago’s mayor was the most powerful of any U.S. city’s, one who with widespread grassroots support could begin the rebirth of neighborhoods like Roseland. “‘At the end of the day, the question is, How do we lift people out of poverty? How do we change the lives of poor people, in the most profound manner?’ That’s what he was interested in,” Kruglik recounted.

  And by November 1987, Barack had a specific political template in mind. “Harold was the inspiration,” Mike recalls. “Obama saw himself in a very specific way as following in the footsteps of Harold Washington . . . following the path to power of Harold Washington.” Ever since the mayor’s appearance at the opening of the Roseland jobs center, Barack’s attempts to win direct access to Washington had foundered. “It’s almost like he was saying to himself . . . ‘I’m limited by the power of Harold Washington the mayor. Therefore the answer is, I’ll be Harold Washington.’ That’s what happened,” Kruglick explains. “The Harold path was to become a lawyer, become a state legislator, become a congressman, then become mayor. That’s the Harold path.”

  Barack was “fascinated with Washington,” Mike believed, and “replicating Washington step by step” was his game plan. “That was in his mind. He talked about that.” Barack “was constantly thinking about his path to significance and power,” and “Harold Washington inspired him to think about becoming a politician.”61

  The next Thursday was the launch of what Barack and DCP were now calling the Career Education Network’s “Partnership for Educational Progress,” a label borrowed at least in part from Chicago United’s blueprint for improving the employment skills of public high school graduates. Ever since DCP’s May decision to make education and particularly high school anti-dropout efforts a priority, Barack, Johnnie, and top DCP education volunteers like Aletha Strong Gibson, Ann West, and Carolyn Wortham had been in contact with Far South Side high school principals and guidance counselors and with officials at both Olive-Harvey College and Chicago State University. Thanks to Al Raby, who had just left his city human relations post so he could work for school reform at a newly founded consultancy called the Haymarket Group, Barack had recently met reform proponents Patrick Keleher, of Chicago United, and Sokoni Karanja.

  In a fall proposal Obama would submit to multiple funders, he wrote that “the condition of the secondary school system called for a wider and more intensive campaign than we originally envisioned.” But beyond the initial $25,000 that Emil Jones had obtained from the state board of education, CEN’s only other support would be an additional $25,000 that the Woods Fund would soon officially announce.

  Ever since early summer, Obama had met ambivalence among DCP’s congregations about forcefully targeting the sorry state of Chicago’s public schools. He later acknowledged that “every one of our churches was filled with teachers, principals, and district superintendents,” or, as UNO’s Phil Mullins more pungently yet properly put it, “if you removed every education bureaucrat from Reverend Wright’s church, it would go under.” Barack spent much of the last months of 1987 trying to expand DCP’s base by approaching the pastors of largely Protestant, and mainly Baptist, Greater Roseland churches. He realized that these congregations “have had no direct involvement in the issues surrounding the public school system,” and DCP wanted to enlighten them about “the need for broader reform in the school system.” Jerry Kellman knew that Mary Bernstein’s father, a senior Teamsters official, was a close colleague of Robert Healey, a former Chicago Teachers Union president who was now head of both the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Mary arranged for Obama to meet with Healey, but Healey had no interest in aiding a movement that would empower parents.

  Roseland’s five high schools were in sorry shape. One study revealed, “High school students in Roseland are testing more than ten percent below the city-wide average,” and that average was more than 30 percent below grade-level norms. The dropout rates at the two weakest schools, Harlan a
nd Corliss, were rapidly increasing. Corliss’s principal published an essay in the Journal of Negro Education describing her efforts to combat “gang activity and vandalism,” “low teacher morale,” “disrespectful attitude and behavior of students,” and “student apathy and high failure rate” at her school. Julian, named after the pioneering black chemist Percy Julian, was considered to be the best of the five, but the principal there, Edward H. Oliver, still had a serious problem with ganglike female “social clubs.”

  A crowd of three hundred showed up for CEN’s November 17 kickoff rally at Tyrone Partee’s Reformation Lutheran Church. The Defender covered the event, where DCP announced it would begin offering tutorial and counseling services at both Holy Rosary and Reformation in early 1988 to students referred by Carver, Fenger, and Julian high schools. Olive-Harvey College president Homer Franklin as well as Chicago State University vice president Johnny Hill pledged their institutions’ assistance, and Chicago United policy director Patrick Keleher said that his organization would arrange for employment internships.62

  Barack was also keeping up with the city’s landfill crisis. When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a report attributing the South Side’s poor air quality to highway traffic and wood-burning stoves without mentioning landfills, the Tribune said that UNO’s Mary Ellen Montes “laughed when told of the EPA’s findings. ‘That’s crazy. Wood-burning stoves? Are there any left?’” Then the Sun-Times revealed that the Paxton Landfill had been operating without the necessary permits since 1983. The newspapers had a field day at the Washington administration’s expense, but mayoral aide Howard Stanback remained focused on the O’Brien Locks issue.