by David Garrow
Over a meal at a Thai restaurant the trio discussed how local reformers could pursue some of the Annenberg funds. By May the Chicagoans had met with officials from Brown, and by late summer they submitted a draft proposal written by Hallett. The response from Brown’s Robert McCarthy was encouraging, and in early November, they submitted a final proposal to Gregorian requesting $49.2 million. The sum was not outlandish—proposals from New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles were requesting $50 to $53 million—and Annenberg would structure them all as challenge grants, with local recipients expected to raise two times as much in local matching funds. With that requirement looming and formal approval pending, Hallett and Ayers reached out to Patricia Graham at Spencer, a former dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education now at an education-focused foundation.
A Chicago entity would be needed to administer the Annenberg grant and raise the matching funds, and Graham in turn asked her fellow foundation presidents Adele Simmons and Debbie Leff to join her. The three women met for breakfast in mid-December, and then held several more meetings with Hallett and Ayers in early January, by which time the Annenberg commitment was firm and scheduled for public announcement two weeks hence. A local board for the new organization would have to be chosen, and Debbie strongly recommended Barack, whose name Pat recognized when Debbie cited his Harvard Law Review presidency. For board chair, “we did not want someone whose career was education,” Adele explained, yet they had to be “smart enough to understand what was going on and what the issues were.” Anne Hallett knew Barack well from when Wieboldt had funded DCP, “and all of us thought he was very impressive.” Pat Graham agreed to ask Barack, and invited him to meet her for a mid-February dinner at a well-known Italian restaurant, Avanzare.
During the first part of the evening, Barack spoke about his book, as prepublication galleys had arrived just days earlier from Times Books. He recounted the Poseidon cancellation and “talked about the perils of publishing this book,” Pat remembered. Barack also “had just learned that his mother had very serious ovarian cancer, and he was very concerned that the book was more about his father and should have included more about his mother.”
Six months earlier Ann Dunham had returned to Jakarta and a new job with her old employer Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI) after becoming deeply dissatisfied with her Women’s World Banking post in New York. In late January she had found herself in such serious pain that she had flown to Honolulu. Ann had felt increasingly unwell since her return to Indonesia, and a diagnosis of appendicitis and surgery to remove her appendix had not alleviated her discomfort. Only in Hawaii did an oncologist discover she had stage 3 uterine and ovarian cancer, and on February 14, she would undergo a total hysterectomy and begin recuperation under her mother’s care in the same small bedroom that for so many years had been her son’s. Maya had just returned to New York to start a master’s degree at NYU, and Ann would begin monthly chemotherapy treatment in an attempt to prevent her cancer from spreading further.
At dinner that night with Barack, Pat Graham “was so impressed with how articulate he was” and they talked long into the evening. “I’ve never closed a restaurant before,” Pat recalled. Toward the end, she finally popped the question, explaining how she, Debbie, and Adele all wanted him to chair the new Chicago Annenberg Challenge board. “I will if you’ll be the vice chair,” Barack responded. “Done,” Pat replied, and at another breakfast meeting, Pat, Debbie, and Anne introduced Barack and Bill Ayers to each other, the first time the two men had met. The fifty-year-old Ayers was well known in Chicago for the dedication to school reform he had demonstrated since he joined UIC’s education faculty in 1987. His father, Thomas G. Ayers, who was then eighty years old, had for years been one of the city’s most respected business titans as the longtime head of Commonwealth Edison, and Bill’s earlier life as a student radical had been chronicled in a 1990 Chicago Reader profile, while Barack was at Harvard, and in a 1993 Chicago Tribune story.
The Annenberg organizers would have to recruit “a board of Chicago worthies,” as Pat put it, a much “broader-based group” than Anne and Bill’s band of reformers. That group was already busily outlining how Chicago public schools would have to band together in small groups, and find a local organizational partner, before applying for Annenberg funds to support innovative new initiatives. That informal group, calling themselves the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, would design the entire Chicago Annenberg program prior to an actual executive director being selected.
In a coauthored Chicago Tribune essay, Ayers, Hallett, and Chapman highlighted “the unworkable size of large schools and classrooms” as a crucial problem. In a massive school system like Chicago’s, the Annenberg millions “will not produce miracles,” but “the reinvented schools we envision will be places that provide a personalized, more intense and flexible learning experience for students.” By mid-March a board that included retiring University of Illinois president Stanley Ikenberry, whom Bill Ayers had strongly pushed, and former Northwestern University president Arnold Weber was in place, and at its first meeting, Pat Graham’s motion to elect Barack as their chair was unanimously adopted.27
Beyond his new Joyce and Chicago Annenberg Challenge roles, Barack was immersed in four cases in his workday life at Davis Miner. He also needed to round up prepublication blurbs from well-known individuals for use on his book’s dust jacket and in whatever print advertising Times Books placed. Davis Miner senior partner Allison Davis took a few copies of the 564-page bound typescript and contacted his friends Vernon Jordan and Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Barack asked the well-known author Alex Kotlowitz, whom Davis Miner represented, to read one, and Barack mailed another copy to Derrick Bell along with an apologetic cover letter. “It’s been a long time since we last spoke,” but Barack had read Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester, which had appeared four months earlier. “I enjoyed your new book very much—inspiring, in fact.” Barack mentioned his Davis Miner work and his law school course, plus this “book that I’ve been writing, on again, off again, for the past two years. Originally, the book (called Dreams of My Father) was going to be a series of essays on issues of race and class, but as it has evolved, it’s become a memoir of my family and my experiences as an organizer.” Now it was “finally finished,” and Barack hoped Bell could read it and pen a brief endorsement. Six weeks later Bell did just that, and Barack again wrote him to say thank you “for the wonderful blurb. It’s both eloquent and generous.”
At Davis Miner, Barack in early January had filed suit in federal court against Illinois governor Jim Edgar on behalf of ACORN, over the state’s refusal to obey the new National Voter Registration Act. Three parallel actions—by the League of Women Voters, a trio of Hispanic groups, and the U.S. Justice Department—were also filed, and the district judge assigned the cases, Milton Shadur, wasted no time in dismissing Illinois’s argument as a “sleight of hand” and ruling that the “motor voter” mandate “plainly passes constitutional muster.” The state appealed, and the Seventh Circuit scheduled oral argument within weeks.
One party plaintiff remembered that “Barack was tremendously lazy on that case: half the time didn’t show up when he was supposed to, was never prepared on the briefs,” and that caused “a lot of frustration amongst the other attorneys.” At the appellate hearing, three plaintiff attorneys spoke—those representing the League, the Hispanic organizations, and the Justice Department, with ACORN relegated to fourth-place status. The appeals court quickly affirmed Judge Shadur’s ruling, and a month later at their annual Independents’ Day Dinner, Illinois’s top group of non-organization Democrats, the Independent Voters of Illinois–Independent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO), gave their Legal Eagle Awards to four attorneys who had worked on the cases, including Barack. Senator Paul Simon and U.S. judge Abner Mikva were the guest speakers, and the plaintiff underwhelmed by Barack’s previous contributions remembered the scene: “he’s there for the press conferences!”
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Judd Miner failed to win reinstatement of the first of the two St. Louis aldermanic redistricting challenges that Barack was helping him with. However, an employment discrimination case that Judd, Barack, and Jeff Cummings filed in federal court in late January against Comdisco, a highly profitable computer leasing company, on behalf of a black former employee was hugely successful within less than nine months. William Donnell had worked for more than a decade as the only black individual on Comdisco’s 150-person sales force. The company was well known among business journalists for its “locker-room atmosphere,” and Comdisco strenuously fought discovery requests to compel deposition answers from one executive who Donnell said knew how he had been racially targeted.
Forbes magazine reported that Donnell had identified Comdisco CEO Jack Slevin, whom one colleague called “an equal opportunity insulter,” as a primary offender, and Forbes warned that “a trial could be embarrassing.” Soon after, Judge Suzanne Conlon ordered that the deposition answers be given, because they may “provide evidence of Comdisco’s racial animus and hostile work environment.” Within a few weeks of that order, Comdisco agreed to settle the case under seal. Jeff Cummings recalled that the depositions documented “a very strong case of discrimination,” and Barack later publicly recounted how Slevin in Donnell’s presence had told a customer, “I don’t have to worry about the EEOC, I’ve got my nigger in the window.”
Judd Miner said the damages paid by Comdisco represented “a very successful settlement,” and affirmed that Barack had carried “most of the load” on the case, “from the research and drafting of the initial complaint, through all phases of discovery.” Barack ended up working almost six hundred hours on Donnell v. Comdisco Inc., and at Barack’s billing rate of $165 an hour—an unremarkable number, as Judd’s was $285—Comdisco paid almost $100,000 to Davis Miner for the time Barack spent suing them on behalf of William Donnell.
Judd, Jeff, and Barack also joined Chicago attorney Fay Clayton, who previously had worked at Davis Miner, in litigating a class action “redlining” suit against Citibank on behalf of almost eight hundred African American mortgage loan applicants. Federal district judge Ruben Castillo was unimpressed with Citibank’s defense claims, writing in one order that “once again, Citibank misses the point” and ruling in another that “Citibank’s contentions are meritless.” He soon appointed a retired federal judge as a special master to handle the heavy burden of loan application evidence, and eventually this case too settled, with Citibank paying far more in plaintiffs’ legal fees—$950,000—than in money damages—a total of $360,000—to the black loan applicants. Judge Castillo nonetheless termed the settlement “a significant legal victory,” called the fees “eminently reasonable,” and commended Miner, Clayton, and the other plaintiffs’ attorneys for their “professionalism and sacrifice in this case.”
Barack invested 138 hours of work in Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, a modest $23,000 of Citibank’s settlement tab, but by far the most memorable moment of that case or any other occurred during a deposition in which Barack and Jeff Cummings were participating by phone from Davis Miner’s basement conference room. In addition to the SRO hotel and its unpredictable residents, Davis Miner’s immediate neighbors also included a restaurant that “didn’t tend to their garbage so well,” Jeff explained, and the rodents who enjoyed that opportunity also burrowed into Davis Miner’s basement, making rat traps a necessity in the modest conference room. Barack was holding the phone when one rat emerged into the light of day and “runs and jumps” onto Barack’s pants leg, briefly grabbing hold. Barack “calmly shook the rat off his leg” and “kept right on talking” as Jeff watched in amazement. No one on the call knew what had occurred, and there was no question Barack “always kept his cool,” Jeff commented.
Judd Miner was twenty years Barack’s senior, and although no one called their relationship paternal, there also was no question that Barack enjoyed favored son status in Judd’s eyes right from the moment he arrived at Davis Miner. Judd and the firm’s longtime data analyst, Whitman Soule, had for years played golf on Thursday afternoons, and Judd soon invited Barack to join them. “It was kind of a cheeky thing that he was playing golf with us,” Whit explained, given how junior Barack was, but Whit had heard Judd say that “this guy is special” even before first meeting him. Barack “wasn’t that good,” but “he knew how to play golf. He learned how to play golf from his grandfather.”
Madison-based partner Chuck Barnhill viewed Barack as “a mediocre golfer” but “a great trash talker,” and Barack’s proclivity for improving the lie of his balls would become what Whit termed “a subject of derision.” Barack also “always seemed to want a little action” on their games, small bets of a quarter on one or another shot. Whit worked with Barack on Donnell v. Comdisco, analyzing the company’s personnel records and sitting in when Barack deposed Comdisco officials.
It was immediately obvious that Barack did not enjoy litigation. “Barack had to go through one of these depositions, and you could just see this was so painful” for him, even though he was just posing the questions. Whit also served as the firm’s IT guru, visiting East View to set up Barack’s home computer, and he was repeatedly struck by how “preternaturally calm” Barack was, sometimes in a seemingly “lonely” way. “He always seemed alone, and he always seemed to be focused on the very long term.”
After every golf game, Barack would “smoke a cigarette or two,” which Whit found surprising. “I always thought it odd that somebody with this level of control was smoking cigarettes,” especially because Barack “was very aware that it was becoming unacceptable” to do so, as the reactions of Michelle’s young Public Allies colleagues and his UC law students also reflected.28
In late March 1995, Barack began teaching Current Issues in Racism and the Law for the third time. His now two years of experience as a practicing lawyer informed his classroom style, with students finding him “an engaging professor” who was “down to earth and practical.” His syllabus remained unchanged, with “a considerable amount of reading” across the first four weeks and group presentations during the last half of the eight-week spring quarter. Some students were excited to encounter “a real practitioner” who was “a practical and straightforward teacher who encouraged us to think about real world problems and scenarios,” including “some that perhaps could not be addressed by laws.”
Marni Willenson’s group tackled inequitable school funding, and even though Barack challenged students to consider all perspectives, “you would not have walked out knowing what his position” was on that or any other subject. “He was very respectful of our views, listened to all of our ideas,” but did not “share many of his own personal views on the topics we discussed,” Susannah Baruch agreed. Students wanted to hear “what this smart young lawyer from a civil rights boutique law firm had to say,” and many students found the discussions compelling. Tiffanie Cason, one of the few black women students at the law school, had been upset when her young Constitutional Law III professor, Elena Kagan, had asked Cason to address the question of whether affirmative action personally harmed its supposed beneficiaries. Dismayed by that classroom experience, “I wrote a paper about it in the Obama class,” Tiffanie recalled, “how do we talk about race.” Marni Willenson remembered it as “a great class,” and course evaluation responses bore that out: on a 10 point scale, the twenty-one respondents gave Barack’s teaching a 9.38, up from 9.1 a year earlier, and their overall mark for the course was a resounding 9.71.29
In early April, the two trade periodicals that published advance reviews of forthcoming books both praised Barack’s. Since his letter to Derrick Bell two months earlier, however, one small but significant change had been made: the book was now titled Dreams From My Father. The initiative for this change had come, as had so many things, from Rob Fisher, who recalled “Barack going through a lot of different names for the book. He and I chatted about it quite a bit on the phone,” and in the end “he and I came u
p with the title” during “quite a long conversation” after Rob had seen the bound galley. Rob suggested “shifting from Dreams of My Father—which seems kind of trite to me—to Dreams From My Father, which better suited the story of him aspiring to construct his dad, and those dreams, from what he had.”
Otherwise, the final run-up to actual publication was uneventful. Ruth Fecych, who had inherited Barack from Henry Ferris yet never met him, remembered Barack as “accessible” and “articulate” on the phone. Jacket designer Robbin Schiff recalled Barack’s enthusiastic reaction to her idea of using a pair of old family photos on the book’s cover, one picturing young newlyweds Stan and Madelyn Dunham during World War II and the other showing a young Barack Sr. in the lap of his mother, Habiba Akumu. Times Books’ own catalog called Dreams a “compelling autobiography” of “startling emotional and intellectual clarity” and described Barack as “a thrilling new voice.” Production editor Benjamin Dreyer recalled that the lengthy manuscript “went through copyediting and proofreading virtually without incident.” Publishers Weekly, the industry bible, called Dreams “a resonant book,” while noting that “his mother is virtually absent.” Kirkus Reviews was even more enthusiastic, saying the “honest, often poetic memoir” was an “affecting study of self-definition” that “records his interior struggle with precision and clarity.”
The publication date for Dreams was still several months away, and in early April Chicago mayor Richard Daley was reelected to another four-year term. Daley’s increasing dominance of city politics easily smothered two conflicting black efforts to mount credible challenges against his new machine. Former Project VOTE! chairman Joe Gardner had launched a Democratic primary run, but exiting attorney general Roland Burris announced he would oppose Daley in the subsequent April 4 general election. The Tribune’s front-page story on Daley’s formal announcement that he was seeking reelection stated that “violent crime remains at epidemic proportions” across Chicago. Yet proof that neither challenger would gain any meaningful traction against the mayor came when U.S. senator Carol Moseley Braun gave Daley’s candidacy “a ringing endorsement.”
