by David Garrow
Others remember “moving around to the other side of the porch just to be able to talk.” It “was a long weekend” and “an incredibly unpleasant one,” one person recalled. “It was so stressed and tense.” Barack tried “to be more social about it,” and “they came down a few times to grab a beer, to eat,” but “then they went back up to scream or fight.” Sheila was “a very sweet person . . . very mild-mannered,” and “certainly exotic” in her looks, but “shy and withdrawn” that “extremely emotional” weekend.
“They called truces here and there, but it kept popping back up” that Saturday afternoon, as “she screamed and they fought.” Sheila’s voice came through loud and clear: “That’s wrong! That’s wrong! That’s not a reason,” she was heard saying. As the others talked quietly, the explanation of what they were hearing was shared: Barack’s political destiny meant that he and Sheila could not have a long-term future together, no matter how deeply they loved each other. But she refused to accept his rationale: “the fact that it was her race.” It was clear—audibly clear—that “she was unbelievably in love with him,” that “the sex for her was the way to bring it back.” Barack “was very drawn to her, they were very close,” yet he felt trapped between the woman he loved and the destiny he knew was his. According to one friend, Barack “wasn’t black enough to pull that off and to rise up” with a white wife.
Sunday afternoon Barack drove them south to Chicago, with Sheila again napping in the back seat. “Thank god it’s a crappy car that made a lot of noise!” A quarter century later, Sheila had almost no recollection of going with Barack to Madison, but she unhesitatingly characterized their relationship as “a very tumultuous love affair.” No matter how others saw Obama, “the Barack I knew was not emotionally detached, in control, and cool,” she stressed. Instead, Barack was “a very passionate, sentimental” and “deeply emotional person,” indeed “the most overwhelmingly passionate and caring person I ever knew.”
In Barack’s workday world, Cathy Askew, the white single mother of two half-black daughters, witnessed most starkly Barack’s newly articulated racial identity. With a new school year about to begin, Cathy told Barack about what she considered a perplexing and offensive racial conundrum: although the Chicago Board of Health said her daughters were black, their school in West Pullman wanted to count them as white. Cathy rejected this binary view of racial identity—“50-50 is a good term”—and expected biracial Barack to agree. She was astounded when he rejected any middle ground, especially since he had spent most of his childhood in a predominantly “hapa” world. But he did. “He said, ‘Well, there comes a time when you have to pick a side, you have to choose a side,’” Cathy remembered him saying. And Barack repeated it: “You have to choose.”
More than a decade later, Barack again gave voice to the sentiment he had expressed to Cathy. “For persons of mixed race to spend a lot of time insisting on their mixed race status touches on a fear” that a darker complexion is innately inferior to a lighter one, and too many nonwhite people are “color-struck. . . . There’s a history among African Americans . . . that somehow if you’re whitened a little bit that somehow makes you better, and that’s always been a distasteful notion to me,” perhaps ever since seeing that magazine story one day in Jakarta. “To me, defining myself as African American already acknowledges my hybrid status,” and “I don’t have to go around advertising that I’m of mixed race to acknowledge those aspects of myself that are European . . . they’re already self-apparent, and they’re in the definition of me being a black American.” Any other mind-set intimated racism. “I’m suspicious of . . . attitudes that would deny our blackness.”55
Fred Hess knew well ahead of time that September 1987 would witness a train wreck of historic proportions for Chicago Public Schools. The board of education needed to negotiate new contracts with multiple unions, most important the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), and in midsummer, Hess had told the board that it could afford to offer a pay increase of 3.5 percent to teachers. Instead, the board announced a three-day reduction in the upcoming school year, thereby cutting teachers’ pay by 1.7 percent. The CTU demanded a 10 percent salary increase, and Superintendent Manford Byrd asserted that CPS could afford no raise at all. Hess labeled that claim “a bunch of bull,” and on September 4, four days before schools were to open, more than 90 percent of CTU members voted to strike.
The strike began on September 8, with Hess warning the Sun-Times that “it’s going to be a long strike because it looks like it has turned into a question of principle,” especially for Byrd. In a subsequent op-ed in the Tribune, Hess denounced “an administration that insists on adding central office administrators while cutting other employees’ salaries.” More than 430,000 students were out of school, and on September 11 a large group of parents and students from sixteen community groups picketed CPS headquarters, with the group’s spokesman, Sokoni Karanja, telling the news media that “our children are victims of a school system that is failing to educate them.”
Karanja was a forty-seven-year-old African American native of Topeka, Kansas, who had earned a Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1971 before moving to Chicago’s historic Bronzeville neighborhood, joining Trinity UCC, and founding a family-aid organization he christened the Centers for New Horizons. Nine months earlier, Karanja had become the Woods Fund’s first black board member, but this September 11 was significant because it illuminated the deepest social and political chasm in black Chicago: African American families with children in heavily minority public schools were fighting against a system made up of 41.6 percent black administrators and 47 percent black teachers.
Those numbers explained why Harold Washington had been so ambivalent four months earlier when he seemingly embraced school reform. The city’s public schools provided middle-class salaries and middle-class status to thousands of black Chicago families, while at the same time they were shortchanging tens of thousands of black students. The human toll was staggering: more than 40 percent of African American men in Chicago in their early twenties and 35 percent of young African American women were unemployed, many of them lacking basic job skills because the CPS had not offered them real schooling.
“Our education system is in shambles,” Rob Mier, Washington’s economic development commissioner, publicly acknowledged. “We’re producing a legion of functional illiterates.” Some critics described “a vicious circle of incompetence,” with CPS hiring teachers who had graduated from weak nearby state universities, which enrolled mainly ill-prepared graduates of Chicago high schools. As Fred Hess kept emphasizing, the abysmal state of public education in Chicago was the result not of a lack of resources, but instead of their dramatic misallocation: during the 1980s, “the number of central office administrators rose by 29 percent while the number of staff members in the schools rose by 2 percent.” By 1987, CPS’s central bureaucracy had reached an astonishing thirteen thousand employees.
On Thursday, September 17, two hundred angry parents picketed outside Harold Washington’s Hyde Park apartment building while others targeted the homes of Governor Jim Thompson, new board of education president Frank Gardner, and CTU president Jacqueline Vaughn. The next morning more than a thousand parents and children picketed outside CPS headquarters, but as the strike moved into its third week, neither the board nor the union were showing any signs of compromise. Superintendent Manford Byrd, furious at Fred Hess’s disparagement of CPS’s central administration, wrote his own op-ed for the Tribune, claiming that the system’s fundamental problem was “the extraordinary special needs of most Chicago public school students.”
That remarkable assertion—a school superintendent labeling the majority of his system’s children as “special needs” students—laid bare the deep class divide within black Chicago between middle-class professionals and “those people.” As Hess later explained, again echoing John McKnight’s analysis, Byrd’s explicit articulation of a “deficit model of ‘at-risk’” children revealed the attit
udes of administrators “whose jobs depend on the existence of a pool of ‘at-risk’ students as clients.” Unable to see that students might bring strengths to school, CPS bureaucrats could not imagine that Chicago’s schools, “rather than the students themselves, might be to blame for students’ lack of success,” Hess explained. Only by reallocating power from CPS headquarters to local schools so as to “reemphasize local communities rather than large, hierarchical bureaucracies” could meaningful educational improvement be attained.
While most parents and community groups were angry with the CTU as well as the board, UNO simply backed the teachers’ demands. As the strike entered its third week, the parents’ groups, with support from Anne Hallett at Wieboldt and input from Al Raby, came together as the People’s Coalition for Educational Reform (PCER). On Thursday, October 1, in what the Tribune called a “dramatic confrontation,” a predominantly black group of PCER representatives, many of whom were close allies of Harold Washington, told both the board and the CTU that a 3 percent raise must be agreed upon to end the strike. First the board, overruling Byrd, and then a reluctant CTU, bowed to the coalition’s demand, and on Saturday morning it was announced that schools would reopen on Monday. Nineteen days of classroom time had been lost in “the longest public employee strike in Illinois history.”
On Sunday, Harold Washington summoned Casey Banas, the Tribune’s education reporter, to his Hyde Park home. The mayor wanted everyone to know he understood the significance of the parents’ protests. “Never have I seen such tremendous anger and never have I seen a stronger commitment on the part of people” to make Chicago a better city. But Washington also did not want to alienate the black educators Manford Byrd represented. “There’s no discipline in many homes. There’s no stimulus in many homes. And even though the educational structure is a poor substitute to supply what the family is not supplying, it must be done,” the mayor declared. He said he would personally lead a new, far more inclusive iteration of his Education Summit to reform Chicago’s public schools. It would begin the next Sunday at the University of Illinois’s Chicago Circle campus (UICC). “We’re going to have a massive forum,” Washington promised.56
Obama and DCP had remained entirely on the sidelines throughout the protests against the shutdown. On the Monday of the strike’s final week, and after three months of trying, Barack finally had an appointment with Harold Washington’s top policy adviser, Hal Baron, to pitch his Career Education Network plan to the mayor. It was entirely thanks to John McKnight that Baron consented to see Obama, despite education aide and Roseland native Joe Washington’s negative attitude. “I did it purely as a favor to John McKnight,” Baron recalled. “John was just so high on him. . . . I think John wanted me to get him a meeting with the mayor, but he pestered me and I finally did a meeting with him myself.” Joe Washington joined Baron in Hal’s City Hall office, but Barack’s presentation was anything but persuasive. Baron remembers it as “cocky standard Alinsky bullshit” and “very glib.” He also recalls Obama saying, “‘We’ve got Roseland organized.’” After Barack left empty-handed, Joe Washington told Baron what he thought: “That guy doesn’t know shit about Roseland.”
Far more fruitful for Obama was his relationship with John McKnight. Barack’s reactions to now two years of immersion in the macho, conflict-seeking world of Alinskyite organizing—including his first year with Jerry Kellman, dozens of hours with Greg Galluzzo, and his warm, almost brotherly relationship with fifteen-years-older Mike Kruglik—had drawn him toward McKnight’s alternative vision of human communities. At least twice Barack drove up to McKnight’s second home in Spring Green, Wisconsin, west of Madison, for weekend-long discussions. He was the only young organizer other than Bob Moriarty with whom McKnight had developed a truly personal relationship, and one weekend Barack brought Sheila along with him. Jerry, Greg, Johnnie, Mary Bernstein, Bruce Orenstein, and Linda Randle would all remember meeting Sheila a time or two, usually by chance in Hyde Park or at her and Barack’s apartment on South Harper. “She’s a cutie,” Bruce remembered, but virtually never did Barack seek for anyone in his workday world to meet or know the woman with whom he lived. Mike Kruglik never laid eyes on her.
But one Friday Barack drove north with Sheila, and McKnight remembered Barack calling him from the Penguin, a working-class bar in nearby Sauk City, to say that his shabby Honda had broken down. John drove in to pick them up, and Barack introduced him to Sheila, whom McKnight thought was “absolutely stunning.” The regulars at the Penguin “must have been pretty surprised when that couple walked in,” McKnight suggested.
That weekend, like others, was spent mostly “talking about ideas,” McKnight recounted. Barack had a “set of things he was concerned about that he didn’t think he could talk with Kellman or Greg about that was outside the true faith.” McKnight, as a longtime Gamaliel board member, knew how “absolutely rigid” Greg was about the Alinsky model’s view that the way to make people “feel powerful was their anger,” instead of feeling “powerful because of their contributions.” Barack was deeply averse to anger and confrontation, and therein lay his difficulty with the attitude that Alinsky organizing sought to inculcate in its young initiates. McKnight remembered these discussions were “mostly my . . . responding to him about questions he had,” with McKnight talking about how his asset orientation differed from the “really true faith people” like Greg. McKnight had just written a powerful new paper, “The Future of Low-Income Neighborhoods and the People Who Reside There,” addressing what he termed “client neighborhoods.” Anyone who had spent time in Altgeld Gardens would have appreciated McKnight’s analysis. Such areas are “places of residence for people who are not a part of the productive process” and “have no hopeful future.” What was needed was “a new vision of neighborhood that focuses every available resource upon production.” In a sentence that reached directly back to the quintessential lesson of the 1960s’ southern freedom movement, McKnight insisted that for a group like DCP, “it is the identification of leadership capacities in every citizen that is the basis for effective community organization.”
As McKnight and Obama continued to talk throughout 1987, what became “very clear to me was that I was talking to a young man who had not bought the true faith,” McKnight remembered, one who had come to realize that Alinskyism “is ultimately parochial” and offered no prospects whatsoever for attaining large-scale social change. As the best historian of Chicago racism, Beryl Satter, would incisively note, Alinskyism’s “insistence on fighting only for winnable ends guaranteed that” community organizing “would never truly confront the powerful forces devastating racially changing and black neighborhoods.”
McKnight’s long-term impact on Obama would be profound, irrespective of how much Barack later remembered of their conversations or how few commentators were knowledgeable enough to hear the readily detectable echos. “If you want to see an intellectual influence on Obama’s thinking, it’s John McKnight,” citizenship scholar Harry Boyte told one Washington audience two decades later. “A lot of things started in part through John McKnight,” observed Harvey Lyon, a Gamaliel board colleague whose political roots also reached back to the 1960s. Stanley Hallett, an influential urban development pioneer, a onetime theology school classmate of Martin Luther King Jr., and the husband of Wieboldt’s Anne Hallett, was also deeply influenced by McKnight. For Hallett, directing public funds to service poor people’s professionally identified needs is “money spent to maintain people in a condition of dependency,” Hallett told one interviewer. Progressive public officials needed to stop “looking at people in terms of their problems instead of their capabilities.”57
The People’s Coalition for Educational Reform issued its demands in advance of the mayor’s Sunday, October 11, summit. Calling for local school-based management, greater parental involvement in schools, a requirement that 80 percent of students perform at or above grade-level standards, and deep cuts in CPS’s huge central bureaucracy, PCER mad
e clear its student-centered focus: “We do not want cuts to affect anyone providing direct service to students.” On Sunday, almost a thousand people packed UICC’s Pavilion as the mayor slowly made his way through the crowd. The Tribune described the almost four-hour program as having a “town-meeting atmosphere,” and called it “the most remarkable gathering to focus on the Chicago public schools in at least 25 years.” Washington proclaimed that “a thorough and complete overhaul of the system is necessary,” promised to appoint a fifty-member parent/community advisory council within two weeks, and pledged to present a unified reform plan within four months.
Washington soon convened the first meeting of his Parent Community Council, promising it would begin holding neighborhood forums before the end of November. The city’s most influential biracial coalition of business leaders, Chicago United, also shared its own school reform plan with the Tribune. Angry at Manford Byrd for his arrogance and disinterest in meaningful change, Chicago United had adopted the belief of Fred Hess and Don Moore that the best path toward improved student performance was through parental and community control of local schools. Patrick J. Keleher Jr., Chicago United’s public policy director, said, “we think the leadership could be found” and that organizations such as UNO could recruit and train interested parents.58
At the same time, Barack’s DCP work remained often frustrating. Some Saturday mornings he met with the Congregation Involvement Committee at Rev. Rick Williams’s biracial Pullman Christian Reformed Church, while he and Johnnie Owens also met with two Chicago State University (CSU) professors who had just started a Neighborhood Assistance Center. The only result of that was Barack being invited to join a CSU-sponsored panel at a mid-October conference on “Developing Illinois’ Economy.” One of his fellow panelists, CSU’s Mark Bouman, addressed “the spectacular fall of big steel,” and another speaker was Chicago Tribune business editor Richard Longworth, who had written so forcefully about Frank Lumpkin’s efforts on behalf of Wisconsin Steel’s former workers. Whatever Barack contributed to the session was unmemorable, for Longworth, looking two decades later at a photograph of himself and Obama sitting side by side, had no recollection of the event whatsoever.
