The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Back in Chicago, Obama took part in various panels and discussions. Between 1997 and 2000, he also took part in the Saguaro Seminars, on civic engagement, held every few months and led by Robert Putnam, a professor at the Kennedy School, at Harvard. Putnam, who was best known for a book on the decline of community called Bowling Alone, assembled a diverse group of scholars (William Julius Wilson, Martha Minow, Glenn Loury, and Amy Gutmann), evangelicals (Ralph Reed and Kirbyjon Caldwell), journalists (E. J. Dionne, George Stephanopoulos), artists (Liz Lerman), and conservative politicians (Vin Weber) to discuss everything from the lessons of the Progressive Era to religion and ways of increasing civic engagement in modern life. "We had a giant jigsaw puzzle in putting together the group--left, right, white, brown--and Obama fell in the category of young, urban, black, community organizer," Putnam said. "My son was on the Law Review and played basketball with him. He came home to say he had met the most impressive person he had ever met in his life."

  Obama was among the least well-known people in the seminar but he immediately attracted attention. "Obama is the same person all the time. When we see him in public, it is not a face he is putting on--it's him," Putnam said. "There is no mask, or at least the mask is so well integrated in his life that it's disappeared. He was thoughtful, but not self-revealing. People who think they know him well are never unaware that he is restrained in self-revelation. The striking feature was his style in the discussion of hot topics with a lot of big egos. His style was to step back and listen. There were some important people who looked pretty bored; he was not, he was following. He carefully listened. Bill Clinton is also a power listener, but Obama, who has this capacity, is less forward than Clinton in letting you know what he thinks. But then he would say, 'I hear Joe Smith saying X, and Nancy saying Y, but I think Joe and Nancy actually agree on Z.' And it wouldn't be pabulum. It is not a trivial thing to listen for a whole day and see common themes in the midst of an arguing bunch. It's a personal skill or a personality trait. I don't think I have ever seen that same ability in anyone else." Putnam said that Obama seemed to the group "endearingly ambitious" as a politician, and they were soon referring to him as "the governor" and asking him what he was going to run for next.

  By 1999, Obama was looking hard at his options on the South Side. The congressman in his district, Bobby Rush, had decided to challenge Mayor Daley for the Democratic nomination. Rush thought of himself as the second coming of Harold Washington, an authentic man of the streets poised to break a leader of the old machine; he was convinced that he could repeat the triumphs of 1983 and 1987 by drawing a record black vote, along with the Lakefront liberals. He barely got the black vote. Daley won by more than forty per cent. Suddenly, Bobby Rush seemed vulnerable and his congressional seat was up in 2000. Perhaps, Obama thought, the door to Washington was opening.

  Chapter Eight

  Black Enough

  By 1966, the nonviolent tactics and the churchly aura of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference no longer had a singular hold on the movement for black liberation. Stokely Carmichael, speaking the language of Black Power, had radicalized SNCC, and more militant organizations grabbed the attention of young black men and women. Martin Luther King, Jr., himself had ignored the advice of many of his closest advisers and deepened his critique of American society, denouncing the war in Vietnam; in the last year of his life he spoke out for a redistribution of American wealth that he referred to as democratic socialism.

  In October, 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who met as students at Merritt College in Oakland, California, formed the Black Panther Party. Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana; his father was a sharecropper and a minister. In college, Newton read Marx, Lenin, and, especially, Malcolm X, studied the slave revolts of Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser, and helped campaign for a black-history course--a rarity in those days. Seale, who was born in Dallas, served four years in the Air Force and worked in a sheet-metal plant. Both young men were enraged by frequent cases of police abuse in Oakland and conceived the Panthers, initially, as an armed self-defense patrol to protect black neighborhoods in the city. They had been inspired by Carmichael--not only by the brazen style of his rhetoric but by his leadership of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which was registering voters in Alabama. The L.C.F.O.'s symbol was the black panther, and Newton and Seale adopted it.

  Seale was the chairman of the Party, Newton was minister of defense; together they drafted a ten-point political manifesto calling for self-determination of black communities, full employment, restitution for slavery, and the release of black prisoners. Their brand of black nationalism, Newton said, "was structured after the Black Muslim program--minus the religion." The Panthers adopted the uniform of black leather jackets, starched blue shirts, and black berets--berets, Newton explained, "because they were used by just about every struggler in the Third World. They're sort of an international hat for the revolutionary."

  As part of an ongoing counter-intelligence program known as COINTELPRO, the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover had been investigating the civil-rights movement and seeking to discredit Martin Luther King. The program was a well-funded symptom of government paranoia. In August, 1967, Hoover initiated a more comprehensive effort. "The purpose of this counterintelligence endeavor," Hoover wrote in a confidential memorandum, "is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black Nationalist, hate-type organizations...." Hoover was out to "prevent the rise of a 'messiah' who would unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a 'messiah'; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position." Hoover added the Panthers to his list. In September, 1968, five months after King's assassination in Memphis, Hoover called the Black Panther Party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."

  The Panthers were not to be mistaken for the S.C.L.C. By the 1968 Presidential election, Newton was in jail--charged with the voluntary manslaughter of an Oakland police officer. He was also on the ballot for a California congressional seat. Kathleen Cleaver and Seale ran for seats in the California legislature. Eldridge Cleaver ran for President on the Peace and Freedom Party line and received thirty thousand votes. Symbolic runs all, but they infuriated the F.B.I. "This was all at a time when the F.B.I. was committed to wiping us out," Seale said. "Hoover knew we didn't care if they kept dragging us into court--we loved going to court, we had lots of bail funds--so they were committed to undermining us and killing us if necessary."

  After the 1968 election, a charismatic young man named Fred Hampton helped open the Illinois chapter of the Panthers on the West Side of Chicago. As a teenager, Hampton had been president of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council in Maywood, an integrated suburb west of the city. He won a measure of local fame when he campaigned for the town to build a new swimming pool, since blacks were denied access to pools in white communities.

  Hampton's closest allies in the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party were Bob Brown, a former SNCC organizer, and a young man named Bobby Rush. Born in Albany, Georgia, Rush moved with his family to Chicago, in 1953, when he was seven years old. His mother, a part-time teacher, opened a beauty salon on the South Side, and moved into an apartment near the Cabrini-Green public-housing complex. A Boy Scout as a child, Bobby dropped out of high school when he was seventeen and enlisted in the Army. He married two years later and moved with his wife to the Hilliard Homes, on the South Side. In 1968, deeply affected by the King assassination and disgusted with his superior officers, Rush joined SNCC and, when Stokely Carmichael encouraged him and others to organize a branch of the Black Panthers in Chicago, he responded immediately.

  Under Fred Hampton's leadership, the Panthers in Chicago forged links with both street gangs and a range of multi-ethnic groups on the left: the Young Lords, the Young Patriots, S.D.S., and the Red Guard Party. In Chicago, the Panthers staged weekly demonstrations. They tr
ied to win credibility among the working-class communities on the South and West Sides, setting up free breakfast programs, medical clinics, and political-education seminars. Armed and always ready to advertise their capacity for violence, the Panthers were not mistaken for a social welfare program, but they were, for the most part, welcomed in those neighborhoods.

  "Being a Panther was a search for self-expression, an identity in a big world, a search for a relevant life--that's why I went to certain extremes," Rush recalled. "I read all these philosophical works by Nietzsche, Erik Erikson--who else did Huey have us read?--Hegel, Marx. Huey had us reading all this stuff and it satisfied my search for knowledge."

  Everyone in the Illinois branch of the Black Panthers was in Hampton's thrall. He was handsome, brash, and physically brave. His speeches were not nearly as sophisticated as King's or Malcolm's---they were filled with invective against the "motherfuckers" and the "pigs" and laced with half-digested clumps of Third-World revolutionary cliches--but he had a visceral presence that appealed to many young black men and women who, after witnessing so many incidents of brutality on their streets, after living through so many assassinations of their leaders and heroes, were receptive to a message of self-assertion, dignity, and armed defense. "Fred Hampton was, for me, the most dynamic person I'd ever known," Rush said. "He personified strength, maleness, life, and love."

  As Black Panther organizations across the country marched in demonstrations, got into battles with the police, and served up militant rhetoric on the evening news, Hoover commanded the F.B.I. to step up its efforts to infiltrate the local chapters. On November 25, 1968, he ordered his men "to exploit all avenues of creating further dissension in the ranks of the B.P.P."

  The F.B.I. tapped Hampton's mother's phone and put him high up on the agency's "agitator index." But what the bureau really needed was a spy, a snitch. In Chicago, police identified an African-American teenager named William O'Neal who had stolen a car and gone on an extended joyride. Roy Mitchell, an agent working in the Racial Matters division of the Chicago field office, recruited O'Neal as an informer. In exchange for dropping the felony charge and paying him a small monthly salary, Mitchell persuaded O'Neal to infiltrate the Panthers office and report to the bureau.

  O'Neal became Hampton's bodyguard and he described for the F.B.I. details about the membership, their conversations and plans, their evening political-education sessions on Marx, Mao, Fanon, Malcolm X. "We'd go through political orientation, and we would read certain paragraphs, and then Fred Hampton and Bobby Rush would explain to us, the new membership, basically what it meant and what was happening," O'Neal said. "And they'd draw parallels to what was going on in the past revolutions in the various countries, for instance China or Russia."

  In May, 1969, Hampton was convicted of stealing seventy-one dollars' worth of ice-cream bars from a Good Humor truck in Maywood. The judge denied him an appeal bond because he was deemed a supporter of "armed revolution." And, in November, two Chicago police officers were killed; the suspect was a Black Panther named Jake Winters. At this point, O'Neal said, law-enforcement officials were determined to crush the Panthers. At the same time, other dramas were playing out in Chicago: the trial of the Chicago 8 defendants--including Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Bobby Seale--who had been charged with trying to incite riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the Days of Rage, an attempt by the Weather Underground to "bring the war home" and accelerate the uprising against the American presence in Vietnam.

  On December 3, 1969, the Panthers held a political-education meeting at a church on the West Side that went late into the night. Afterward, Hampton; his pregnant girlfriend, Deborah Johnson; Mark Clark, the twenty-two-year-old head of the Panthers branch in Peoria; and a small group of friends and comrades went to Hampton's apartment on West Monroe Street. Weeks earlier, O'Neal had provided the F.B.I. with a detailed layout of the apartment.

  Sometime after 4 A.M. on December 4th, a fifteen-man contingent of the Chicago police encircled Hampton's house. The pretext for the raid, organized by the Cook County state's attorney, Edward Hanrahan, an ally of Mayor Daley's who had been groomed as a potential successor or as a potential governor, was to serve a search warrant for illegal weapons. At around 4:45 A.M., the officers stormed the apartment from the front door and the back, spraying automatic weapon fire. Mark Clark, who had been sitting with a shotgun in the front room, got off one errant shot; he was killed instantly. The officers headed to Hampton's bedroom. Deborah Johnson tried to shake Hampton awake.

  "Chairman, chairman, wake up!" someone shouted out. "The pigs are vamping! The pigs are vamping!"

  The officers shot their way into the bedroom and wounded Hampton. Later, a Panther named Harold Bell testified that after the officers came through the door they found Hampton in his bed, bleeding from the shoulder. He said the following exchange between officers took place:

  "That's Fred Hampton."

  "Is he dead? Bring him out."

  "He's barely alive. He'll make it."

  Then, Bell said, two shots went off.

  "He's good and dead now," one of them said.

  The police held a press conference later that day and spoke of the arsenal in the apartment and, with self-admiration, their restraint in not killing all the Panthers present. At the Maxwell Street District lockup, some of the surviving Panthers told their lawyer Flint Taylor that they overheard police officers saying, "Rush is next."

  Police officers raided Rush's apartment, in the Hilliard Homes complex, only to find it abandoned. Rush had been hiding in a Catholic church. He then went to the regular Saturday meeting of Jesse Jackson's group, Operation Breadbasket, the forerunner of Operation PUSH. In front of five thousand people and protected by members of the Afro-American Patrolmen's League, Rush turned himself in.

  "You see this man?" Jackson told the crowd as he stood next to Bobby Rush. "We're turning him over with no scars, no marks, and we expect to get him back that way." Two black police officers quietly took Rush to the local precinct house.

  After he was released, Rush led reporters on a tour of Hampton's house, which the police had failed to seal. Rush claimed that "a look at the holes in the walls would show anyone that all the shots were made by persons who entered the apartment and then went from room to room firing in an attempt to kill everyone there." Only the most loyal defenders of the police believed that the Panthers had engaged them in a firefight. The columnist Mike Royko wrote, "The Panthers' bullets must have dissolved in the air before they hit anybody or anything. Either that or the Panthers were shooting in the wrong direction--namely, at themselves."

  In the eyes of the African-American community, Fred Hampton became a martyr and Bobby Rush a living symbol of black resistance. Thousands filed past Hampton's coffin at the Rayner Funeral Home on the South Side. Among the mourners at his funeral in the First Baptist Church of Melrose Park were Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, Benjamin Spock, and leaders of various left-wing groups in the city including the Black Disciples, the Latin American Defense Organization, and the Young Lords. The church was crowded with people and overflowing with anger and grief--people shouted out slogans against the government, some fainted. Bobby Rush said, "Hampton had the power to make people see that the power structure has genocide in their minds." The service ended with the singing of "We Shall Overcome" while members of the Panthers chanted, "All power to the people."

  A few weeks later, the F.B.I. gave William O'Neal a bonus for "uniquely valuable services, which he rendered over the past several months." It was a check for three hundred dollars.

  The killing of Fred Hampton initiated the decline of the Black Panthers but became an emblematic moment in the history of race relations in Chicago. The murder thrust Bobby Rush, a far more awkward speaker than Hampton, into the leadership role of the Chicago Black Panthers. "Bobby is a good leader, but a quiet one," Seale said. Rush, who had worked hard to overcome a childhood stammer, did manage to express his insistence on b
earing arms. At a speech to Chicago college students, he said, "I don't go around saying 'We shall overcome' unless I have a gun in my hand." In 1971, he served a six-month prison term for weapons possession.

  The last real triumph of the Panthers before they left the political stage was the political defeat, in 1972, of Ed Hanrahan, who was running for re-election as state's attorney. The Panthers joined the conventional political campaign to throw him out of office. Hanrahan's defeat was hardly the only consequence of the police violence.

  Hampton's murder was such a galvanizing event, Rush said, that it "laid the foundation" for Harold Washington's election as mayor. By 1974, though, the Panthers had played themselves out as a political force. "We'd gone from five thousand members to a few hundred at most," Seale said. In Chicago, at least, martyrdom was their most effective legacy. Rush quit the Black Panther Party to enroll at Roosevelt University, where he studied political science. He failed in an attempt to win a seat on the City Council and for a while he sold insurance to make a living. In 1983, the year of Washington's transformative victory, Rush, riding his coattails, was elected alderman from the Second Ward. On the City Council, Rush was a loyal Washington supporter in the endless "Council Wars," in which resentful white aldermen like "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak blocked Washington's initiatives at nearly every turn.

  In 1992, Rush decided to run for Congress, in Illinois's First Congressional District, challenging Charles Hayes, who had succeeded Washington after he was elected mayor. Hayes had been a founding member of Operation PUSH with Jesse Jackson and a supporter of King. The First District has long been a seat of great importance in black politics, and, in addition to Washington, Oscar De Priest, William Dawson, and Ralph Metcalfe were among those who had held it. More than seventy per cent of the district's residents are black, and it has been represented by an African-American politician longer than any other district in the country. It includes portions of Englewood, Woodlawn, Douglas, Oakland, Avalon Park, Chatham, Beverly, South Shore, and Hyde Park, along with suburban Oak Forest, Evergreen Park, and Blue Island. Rush was able to beat Hayes by reminding voters of his role in the Black Panthers and of a banking scandal involving Hayes, who had been discovered to have more than seven hundred overdrafts on his House checking account. It was a contest of racial bona fides and authenticity, and it got national attention. Soon after entering Congress, Rush said of his colleagues, "Some were amazed I didn't have bandoliers or a gun." Once he took office, it seemed that he would win re-election, term after term, without serious challenge. "Bobby Rush went from being the vice-chairman of the Illinois Black Panther party to the vice-chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party," Clarence Page, the veteran Tribune columnist, said. "Only in America."