The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  "I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree, and become a community organizer."

  "Why's that?" Obama said.

  "'Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate you."

  In South Side neighborhoods like Roseland, West Pullman, and Altgeld Gardens, a grimly isolated project on the far South Side, Obama tried to make inroads. Relying largely on the support of ten Catholic parishes (and their white priests), Obama hoped to organize black neighborhoods whose residents were, for the most part, Baptist or Pentecostal. He moved from church to church, trying to enlist ministers in his effort. One day he rang the doorbell at the Lilydale First Baptist Church on 113th Street. A young minister named Alvin Love answered and wondered, Who is this skinny kid?

  "I didn't know what an organizer was," Love said. "I was young and had about two hundred members. And we started talking. He gave me his spiel about his name and his background. He said his accent was Kansan and explained why." Obama asked what issues were on Love's mind, and Love talked about crime, graffiti, break-ins, gangs, the explosion of crack cocaine. "We were both young, and I was trying to figure out how to get my church involved in the community," Love said. "I saw him as a gift from Heaven." Obama explained that, until then, the organizers had been white and Catholic; he was trying to broaden things to reach all the "stakeholders" in the area.

  "So I threw in with him," Love recalled. In the months to come, Obama kept trying to widen his circle of activists in Love's parish and elsewhere, training them at weekly sessions in church basements and community rooms.

  Most of Obama's days were pure frustration. It was the norm to work for years on a project--a battle against the expansion of dangerous toxic-waste dumps, for example--and head toward a seeming victory, only to have it all be forgotten on some bureaucrat's desk downtown. But Obama was getting an education: political, racial, and sentimental. He met all kinds of people he had never encountered in Hawaii or in college: young black nationalists, full of pride, but also too willing to listen to conspiracy theories about Koreans funding the Klan and Jewish doctors injecting black babies with AIDS. He met teachers full of idealism and compassion, but also exhausted by the chaos in their classrooms. He met government officials, preachers, single mothers and their children, school principals, small-business people, all of them telling Obama their fears and frustrations. He had learned a lot from books, but there was something far more immediate, visceral, and lasting about the education he was getting now. It was the nature of his work to ask questions, to listen. He called the narratives he was collecting "sacred stories."

  Obama had read Saul Alinsky, but he did not adopt his confrontational style. He was methodical about his interviews and compiling his reports; polite, even charming, with his contacts; but reluctant to mix it up. Kellman's steely approach to organizing was not Obama's. Kellman worried that his protege was too analytical and mild. He also worried that he had asked too much of Obama, that it was easy for him to get lost on the vast South Side. There were some small victories: the creation of a drug-prevention program in the schools called Project Impact; an initiative to get the city to release promised funding for a majority-black school, the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences on 111th Street. But Kellman feared that a tide of frustration would sweep Obama away. He asked Obama to come work with him in Gary, but Obama refused. He had made a life on the South Side.

  "What I saw in Barack was caution, lots of caution," Kellman said. "I have the opposite tendency, which is impulsivity. Barack thinks. He agonizes before doing anything risky. And when you are an organizer you have to do things that are designed to get a reaction. Every time he had to gather people and bring them to someone's office, he worried: Am I being too confrontational? He didn't want to betray a relationship. That's why he wasn't Alinsky-like. There is a machismo which makes organizers afraid to admit that they are moved by ideals rather than self-interest. But most of what we do in life is, of course, a combination of both. Barack understood this, and so did I, and so the Alinsky teaching on self-interest was balanced with Dr. King's appeals to our mutuality. What he did embrace completely was the need for power to get anything done and the operating definition of power in a democracy as organized people and organized money. He thought he could fold organizing into politics and saw himself as an organizer-politician. He still does, as far as I can tell."

  In his first year in Chicago, Obama worked part of the time in Altgeld Gardens, a vast project on the far South Side. Altgeld Gardens--or "the Gardens," as residents call it--unlike towering projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes (now torn down), is a sprawl of two-story bungalows with around fifteen hundred apartments. Opened in 1945 to house returning African-American war veterans, Altgeld is the most isolated project in the city, distant from any shopping or public services, though it is not the poorest. The apartments are modest but usually well kept. By the time Obama arrived, most of the residents were single mothers living, and struggling, on public assistance. The menace of the place came from the gangs, which made it dangerous at night; from a sewage treatment plant to the north that emitted what Obama called a "heavy putrid odor"; from the grim, sour-smelling Calumet River to the west, with its rusted tankers; and from the foul, unregulated landfills all around.

  Obama spent his first months at Altgeld just talking with people in the schools and churches. He clearly did not have access to funds to improve the most obvious problems. So he asked people at school parents' meetings to fill out complaint forms.

  At around the same time, in the spring of 1986, Linda Randle, an organizer at the immense Ida B. Wells public housing project on Martin Luther King Drive, arrived at Building 534 and noticed an enormous yellow tarp and, behind it, a loud machine. As she came closer, flecks of an unknown substance hit her in the face. She asked what was going on.

  "Two guys came out in space suits," Randle recalled. "I knocked on their masks and said, 'What are you all doing?'"

  "We're removing asbestos," one of them said. Once used as insulation, asbestos, as it crumbles, can lead to lung cancer and other diseases if inhaled.

  "From the whole building?" Randle asked.

  "No, just on the first floor."

  The building was huge, and Randle wondered why the workers were limiting themselves to the administrative offices. More than ten thousand people lived at Ida B. Wells and the workers weren't touching the apartments where the residents lived. Randle stripped some insulation--asbestos--off a pipe and put it in a bag. She talked to the director of tenant services and asked what was going on: "He told me, 'Linda, there is no money to be made in this. Leave it alone.' I told him, 'O.K.,' and went out the door to another neighbor's house. I called the E.P.A. and asked them to come out and analyze it. I also pulled up loose floor tiles. And so he came out and he took the stuff to be analyzed."

  While waiting for the test results, Randle called Martha Allen, a writer for The Chicago Reporter, an investigative monthly. Some of the residents told Randle and Allen that children had been eating fallen bits of asbestos. Allen interviewed residents, doctors, officials from the E.P.A., and the city, and compiled a brilliant investigative article for The Reporter's June, 1986, issue. It concluded that thousands of people living at the Ida B. Wells Homes were living at risk. The photograph on the front page showed a seven-year-old girl named Sarah Jefferson, holding her niece, Mahaid, on her lap; next to them is a heating pipe covered with tattered asbestos insulation.

  Randle went to an organizing group called the Community Renewal Society. There she met Obama for the first time. ("He looked so young!") Obama told her that he had had a similar experience at Altgeld Gardens. Since 1979, people in the project had been trying to do something about asbestos, and recently a woman at the Gardens had pointed out a classified ad in a local paper: the Chicago Housing Authority was soliciting bids to remove asbestos--not from all the apartments but from the management office. Obama organized a delegation
of Altgeld women to go to the manager and confront him. The manager lied, saying that there was no asbestos in the residential units.

  Obama and Randle soon learned that sixteen of the nineteen public housing projects in Chicago had asbestos: Wells was the largest of them, and Altgeld the second largest. "We talked about the injustice of it," Randle said. "We knew we had to do something about this."

  In Chicago and in most cities, Kellman said, "environmental issues didn't usually lead to action in those days--people were most concerned about drugs and gangs and crime--but you could work with a sense of outrage about privilege."

  At Altgeld, Obama worked with his colleagues Yvonne Lloyd and Loretta Augustine-Herron. In 1966, Augustine-Herron, her husband, who was employed at the post office, and their children had been forced to move out of the project because they no longer met the low-income requirement. In 1967, her oldest daughter was stricken with leukemia and, two years later, died. "Altgeld is built on polluted ground and I'd read and heard rumors about pollution causing cancer," she said. "As I became more interested in this, I realized that more and more of my neighbors were getting sick with cancer and respiratory diseases. The problem was who to turn to and what to do to make things better." She found solace in talking to Obama. "Barack had the sensitivity," Augustine-Herron said. Even before the asbestos issue arose, Obama spent many hours talking with her at her kitchen table about her family, and the problems of the South Side. "Barack is six months older than my eldest child," she said. "I think I got to know him really well. And I talked a lot to him about my daughter."

  At first, Obama and the others thought that they could solve the problem by arranging a meeting with the executive director of the Chicago Housing Authority, Zirl Smith. When Obama, Randle, and about ten others arrived downtown in a rented schoolbus for an 11 a.m. meeting with Smith, he kept them waiting. Randle, however, had called reporters and told them to show up at noon. When the reporters arrived, they started asking questions about the asbestos problem at Altgeld Gardens and Ida B. Wells. A local television station filmed one of the women describing the problem and put her on the air later that day. Once Smith's secretary noticed the reporters, though, she quickly ushered the group into an empty office.

  "They offered us coffee and doughnuts and said, 'The director will be with you soon,'" Randle recalled. "Now the media couldn't see us." They waited for two more hours. Finally, Randle told Obama they should leave, and they did. While they were waiting for the bus, Randle told Obama, "Barack, this is the beginning of a long struggle for us. We can't do C.H.A. first; we have to go to H.U.D. first"--the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. "You go first to the top of the mountain." When they got back home, Obama and Randle started giving out the number of Zirl Smith to residents of the projects. "Light up the phones," they told them.

  What thrilled Obama was not so much the subsequent news coverage as the fact that the women he had helped organize and brought downtown on the bus were able to speak so clearly, if nervously, in front of the cameras. His delegation was smaller than he had hoped, but its members had banded together, wryly calling themselves Obama's Army. They had a nickname for Obama--Baby Face.

  Obama wrote that the trip to the C.H.A. with his little army changed him "in a fundamental way." It wasn't the smattering of publicity that they received, and it certainly wasn't any concrete success--the asbestos remained for years. Rather, for a young man not long out of college, it was an indication of what might be possible. But he soon saw the limits of that promise.

  When Obama and the others finally met with officials from H.U.D. and the C.H.A., they were told that they could not get both asbestos removal and basic repairs. ("I had a big hole in my bathtub!" Randle said.) The agencies tried to undermine the organizers by going to key residents and fixing their plumbing. After yet more meetings, Zirl Smith agreed to try to do better. "He didn't know where he was going to get the money for asbestos but he would try," Randle said. "I called Barack and said, I don't know if he is playing games, but we have to continue working on this."

  Martha Allen's article in The Chicago Reporter created interest in the larger, mainstream media in town. Walter Jacobson did a report on WBBM and both the Tribune and the Sun-Times began to write about the problem.

  At that point, Obama organized a mass meeting at Our Lady of the Gardens with Zirl Smith. More than seven hundred people showed up in the church's stiflingly hot gym--most of them single women, but also older people, children, and even reporters.

  Ordinarily, Obama had a penchant for organization--scripting meetings, preparing speakers and backup speakers, jotting notes on a clipboard, and then holding follow-up sessions to evaluate how they had done. But he could not lead this meeting the way he had hoped. The crowd, which was already angry, was incensed when Smith was more than an hour late. The public-address system was scratchy and weak. Kellman tried to take the lead, orchestrating a chant, but Obama quickly pulled him aside, telling him that perhaps it was not the best idea to have a white organizer leading a pep rally at Altgeld Gardens.

  "He asked me to be a little less visible," Kellman recalled. "He was very stressed. It was still his first year."

  Obama kept handing the microphone over to his activists, hoping that they could educate the crowd on the asbestos problem and kill time until Zirl Smith arrived. There was shouting and booing. At last, Smith showed up; Obama told one female activist that they should not give up the microphone lest Smith monopolize the entire discussion. Randle began by asking Smith whether he was going to address the problem--yes or no. As Smith prepared to respond, she did not hand him the microphone but, rather, pointed it toward his mouth. He began by promising to work on the problem--"We're trying to determine the severity of the asbestos...."--but made it plain that if she didn't give him the mike he was going to leave. After nearly two hours of waiting, the crowd was in a state of sweaty irritation. Someone in the crowd fell ill. Smith said that he would call an ambulance from his car. Still, no one would give him the mike. And so after ten minutes, he left the church gymnasium in a huff.

  "Chaos! Our wonderful meeting had turned to chaos!" Randle said.

  "No more rent!" some of the Altgeld tenants cried as Smith headed for his car.

  Obama was humiliated. The possibility that he had felt at the C.H.A. office in the Loop had now evaporated. Several women approached him and yelled at him for embarrassing them, for making them look like fools in front of city officials and the TV cameras.

  That night, Obama called his colleague John Owens, an African-American organizer who had gone with him that summer to a training retreat at a monastery near Malibu, California. Obama was stricken. At the retreat they had worked hard on all the fundamentals of organizing--preparation, interviews, power analysis, tactics--but now his plans had ended in a shambles. "Barack was really embarrassed," Owens said. "He thought he hadn't prepped everyone the way he should have."

  This was 1986. Most of the asbestos was not removed until 1990 and some was not removed for years after that. But the city did begin to act. The C.H.A. started more testing, established an "asbestos hotline" to answer questions about health hazards, and appealed to the federal government to pay for asbestos removal in the projects. It would take time, but by organizing standards that was a good outcome.

  Yet most of what was miserable about Altgeld Gardens in 1986 is still miserable. And over the next two years, working on issues of school reform, job banks, and public safety at the Gardens and in other neighborhoods on the South Side, Obama made far less progress.

  "It was hard for all of us," Linda Randle said. "In your struggles as an organizer, you have more losses than you have wins. It goes with the territory. You are out there all day and you talk with people and you think they are getting it but they haven't really. So you have to step back and maybe go at it from a different angle and figure out where they want to go. Over and over again."

  "Organizing is a Sisyphean endeavor," Kruglik said, recalling t
hat night in Altgeld. "The power structure in a place like Chicago is not much different than it was thirty or forty years ago. Barack was angry about how people suffered, the injustice of that kind of poverty. He knew that people suffered like that because of the decisions that people in power made."

  In those years, Obama spent a lot of time thinking about faith and religion. At every church and community center he visited, sooner or later someone asked him what church he belonged to. Obama danced around the question, changed the subject.

  "He was constantly being pressured about joining a church," Alvin Love, of Lilydale First Baptist Church, said. "I didn't push the way other ministers in D.C.P. [Developing Communities Project] did, so he was comfortable talking about it with me. He knew it was inconsistent to be a church-based organizer without being a member of any church, and he was feeling that pressure. He said, 'I believe, but I don't want to join a church for convenience' sake. I want to be serious and be comfortable wherever I join.' He would visit churches. You never knew when he was visiting whether he was doing that as an organizer or coming to worship. Over the years, I had the feeling it was to worship as much as it was for work."

  Love recommended that Obama seek the advice of an older pastor, L. K. Curry, at Emmanuel Baptist Church on Eighty-third Street. After hearing Obama talk about both his spiritual search and his interest in issues of social justice, Curry recommended that Obama pay a call on one of the best-known ministers on the South Side, Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on Ninety-fifth Street. No organizing effort would fail to gain from Wright's support--and, besides, Curry told Obama, he might like what he found inside the chapel.

  The son and grandson of pastors, Jeremiah Wright grew up in the racially mixed neighborhood of Germantown, in Philadelphia. He attended Virginia Union University from 1959 to 1961, a historically black college in Richmond, and then spent six years in the military--he was in the Marines from 1961 to 1963 and then trained as a cardiopulmonary technician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1966, the year before he left the military, he was part of a team that cared for Lyndon Johnson after he underwent heart surgery. Wright finished his bachelor's degree and got a master's in English at Howard University, and then received another master's, in the history of religions, at the University of Chicago.