Chapter 3
T H E W O R K M E N B E G A N appearing at Chicago Housing Authority buildings in the spring of 1986. Linda Randle, an organizer at the Ida B. Wells Homes, a weary complex of cruciform apartment houses on the Near South Side, first noticed the men in white jumpsuits and breathing masks when she came to work one morning. A big white machine sat in the weed-scored concrete courtyard, and a yellow tarp hung from a seven-story-high roof. Cascading pebbles struck Randle in the face. She walked over to a man wearing a hazmat suit, knocked on his mask, and asked what he was doing.
“Removing asbestos,” he told her. But he was removing it from only the first floor, where the tenant service office was located.
Every Tuesday, Randle met with her fellow organizers at the downtown offices of the Community Renewal Society, a nonprofit devoted to eliminating racism and poverty. At the next gathering, she began talking about the mysterious new project at Wells. Obama overheard the word “asbestos” and sat down next to Randle.
“We’ve got the same thing going on at Altgeld,” he said. An Altgeld resident had discovered a newspaper ad soliciting bids to remove asbestos from a single building: the office.
When the Chicago Housing Authority began building its vertical ghettoes in the 1950s, asbestos was considered the safest, most modern insulation available. Not until the 1970s did medical researchers discover that its fibers, if inhaled, clung to the lung, scarring tissue and impairing respiratory function. Asbestos exposure was the second leading cause of lung cancer, after cigarette smoking. CHA apartments were permeated with the material. Asbestos was wrapped around water pipes that ran along kitchen floors. It was in the floors themselves, as part of the tile.
Randle also shared the asbestos story with a friend named Martha Allen, who wrote for the Chicago Reporter, a muckraking urban affairs magazine. They peeled up a floor tile and took it to a laboratory, which found it contained between 30 and 50 percent chrysalite asbestos. Allen used that test as the basis for an exposé on asbestos in the CHA. Her story, which appeared in the Reporter’s June 1986 issue, included interviews with Ida B. Wells residents who told of constantly sweeping up white dust that drifted from decaying pipe insulation. One mother wrapped her pipes in plastic, because “that stuff was flying everywhere.” “I was always cleaning it off the furniture and the floor, she said. “My kids were getting it on them, and they were itching.”
Randle had lived in public housing and knew that CHA bureaucrats didn’t give a good goddamn about residents’ complaints. Their attitude was “Don’t keep bothering us or we’re going to find out what your kids are doing or what’s going on in your apartment.” But Allen’s story was picked up by big media outlets. The Chicago Tribune ran a story, and Walter Jacobson, a bombastic local anchorman, started his own investigation. That gave the tenants some leverage.
At a Community Renewal Society meeting, Obama and Randle hatched a plan: They would bus Wells and Altgeld residents downtown to CHA headquarters, to demand a meeting with the agency’s director, Zirl Smith.
This time, Obama would be dealing with a much larger, more obdurate bureaucracy than the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training. The CHA was far more than a landlord for poor black Chicagoans. It exercised a seigneurial power over its tenants. Terrified of eviction, they were reluctant to complain about even life-threatening problems. Many had waited years for an apartment. Losing it would mean moving back in with relatives or searching for a slumlord who would accept a public aid family. The projects were ruled by the Vice Lords or the Gangster Disciples, the elevators were broken, graffiti stained the stairwells, and steel mesh covered the balconies to prevent people from hurling objects into the courtyards. Still, the CHA was a step up from the cold-water flats in which many residents had been raised.
The bus trip would be pure Alinsky: the powerless using their moral authority to embarrass the powerful. Alinsky had done the same thing to Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1960s, busing a caravan of blue-collar South Siders to city hall to force a compromise on the University of Chicago’s plan to gentrify its surrounding neighborhoods.
“No one can negotiate without the power to compel negotiation,” Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals, his manual for sticking it to the Man. “This is the function of the community organizer. Anything otherwise is wishful non-thinking. To attempt to operate on a good-will rather than on a power basis would be to attempt something that has not yet been experienced.”
Obama sent out a press release and chartered a school bus from Altgeld to the Loop. Since it was an early morning trip, he even brought coffee, orange juice, and doughnuts. One of the passengers was Hazel Johnson, who had lived in Altgeld since the early 1960s. Johnson led a group of environmental activists that had battled the steel mills and a sewage treatment plant over dumping toxins in the Calumet River. She believed asbestos had contributed to her husband’s death from lung cancer seventeen years before. The ride up the Dan Ryan Expressway took an hour and forty-five minutes in rush-hour traffic, so the residents were agitated by the time they got off. They were even more agitated when they were forced to wait in a hallway for two and a half hours.
“The director is busy,” an assistant repeated, over and over.
Randle, whose Mississippi grandfather had taught her never to back down from a conflict, told Obama she wanted to bust through the doors and drag Smith out by his necktie.
“Linda, the only thing you’re doing is getting up your blood pressure,” Obama responded. “Calm down. We have to take the high road.”
(While Obama taught Randle to keep a cool head around authority figures, Randle taught Obama how to behave in the ghetto, advising him not to wear his usual preppy attire when he knocked on doors in the projects. “Wear jeans,” she advised. “No one’s going to open the door if you look like a public aid caseworker.”)
When the CHA staff realized reporters were waiting in the hallway, too, they invited the protestors inside for coffee and doughnuts.
“We want the director!” the residents shouted.
Smith never emerged, but through his aides, he agreed to attend meetings at Wells and Altgeld Gardens, where he would reveal the results of tests on pipe insulation.
The bus trip was a triumph, but Smith’s visit to the Gardens turned out to be a fiasco. Obama reserved OLG’s old, high-raftered gymnasium for the meeting and printed out leaflets, which were wedged into doors all over the housing project. More than seven hundred people crowded onto the pullout wooden bleachers, eager to hear just how bad their asbestos problem was. Obama assigned a young woman named Callie Smith to chair the meeting. Smith wasn’t a DCP board member, but she did live in the Gardens, and it’s a tenet of organizing that the powerful should be confronted by the people they’re trying to screw over.
The CHA director was half an hour late. Then he was forty-five minutes late. Then an hour late. As the gymnasium grew restless, Obama walked around the room, urging people to stay in their seats.
“We need to keep this meeting together!” he lectured into the microphone.
Seventy-five minutes after the hour announced on the flyer, Zirl Smith finally arrived in his chauffeur-driven city car and took the stage before an angry, impatient crowd. The people of Altgeld Gardens felt they were getting the brush-off. Smith only magnified the insult with his first answer.
“Do you have a plan to remove the asbestos that’s in our homes?” Callie Smith asked him.
Zirl Smith shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “We have not yet completed all the tests on the apartments. As soon as that is complete, we will start the abatement process.”
The room erupted. “No,” the residents shouted. “No! No!” The director tried to continue, but Callie Smith wrestled him for the microphone stand. Then someone in the gym suffered a seizure. The CHA director had been in the room less than fifteen minutes, but he used the medical emergency as an excuse to flee. Making a break for his car, he promised to call an ambulance on the two-way radio. But Altgeld Gardens wasn’t ready to let Zirl Smith go. It hadn’t gotten a straight answer about the asbestos in its floors and on its pipes. People leaped from the bleachers and surged out the door in pursuit, chanting “No more rent!” The crowd nearly surrounded Smith’s car before the driver made an escape. The angry mob was completely beyond Obama’s control, full of people he’d never trained to “calm down” or “stay focused.”
After Smith rode away and the residents went home to their tiny apartments, a dispirited Obama asked the DCP members to stay behind and help him clean up. He blamed himself for the meeting’s disintegration. Yvonne Lloyd convinced him that the ruckus hadn’t been his fault.
“It wasn’t us,” she said. The DCP members had stayed true to Obama’s training. They hadn’t stood up and hollered when everyone else in the gym was acting the fool. “Sometimes, you can only control your own people. When you got a lot of other people throwing in, then you got a problem.”
Even though the asbestos meeting ended in chaos, the asbestos piece was a success. The publicity from the Reporter article and the public meetings prompted the CHA to request an $8.9 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to clean up asbestos in Ida B. Wells, Altgeld, and three other housing projects. In the winter of 1988, a year and a half after the story broke, residents were shuffled into vacant units and motel rooms while the white-suited workers—some of them CHA residents—vacuumed asbestos particles from their furniture, stripped the insulation from the pipes, and retiled kitchen floors.
Even as a poorly paid organizer working in some of the city’s most obscure neighborhoods, Obama was attracting the attention of powerful mentors—a skill that would later be essential to his political rise. First, he caught the eye of Al Raby, who had run Harold Washington’s campaign for mayor and now headed the city’s Human Rights Department. Raby was always on the lookout for young talent. After meeting Obama through a DCP project, he was inviting the young man out for beer and pool, and introducing him to fellow South Side liberals. Raby squired Obama into the office of Jacky Grimshaw, director of the city’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and dropped him off there for an hour.
“Al had this habit of finding young people who he thought might amount to something, and he would bring them into my office and introduce me and then leave,” Grimshaw would recall. “I figured out my job was to talk to these folks and figure out if they were somebody of substance.”
To Grimshaw, Obama was just another of Al’s kids, “but you did get that you were talking to somebody who had a brain, who was easy to talk to. Nice sense of humor, that kind of thing, but I can’t remember substantively what we talked about.”
Raby also introduced Obama to his best friend, Stephen Perkins, who worked for the Center for Neighborhood Technology, an urban environmental group. They ate breakfast at Mellow Yellow, a Hyde Park diner, where Obama impressed Perkins as “smart and committed and strategic.” After that, they saw each other every six months or so.
Those meetings sound insignificant, but they were the beginning of one of this country’s greatest social climbs, a climb that took Obama to the pinnacle of Chicago—and then American—politics. When Obama moved to the city, he knew no one except a great-uncle who worked at the University of Chicago library. So he set out to meet anyone who could help his career. Sometimes, he cultivated relationships for years before they paid off. Raby would write Obama a letter of recommendation for Harvard Law School. After Obama returned from Harvard, Perkins would ask him to sit on his organization’s board. Jacky Grimshaw supported Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign. After Obama won the election and signed a lucrative contract to write The Audacity of Hope, he bought the $1.7 million house next door to Grimshaw’s.
As impressive as his ability to forge these friendships was the way he made influential people think they were cultivating him. John McKnight, a professor of urban studies at Northwestern University, was a cofounder of the Gamaliel Foundation, which trained community organizers. McKnight often attended the foundation’s meetings, but in fifteen years, he’d never thought of getting to know an organizer socially. Then he met Obama. The young man stood out not just because of his inquisitiveness but because, unlike most Alinsky disciples, he was interested in understanding the motivations of powerful people. Most organizers saw the world in black and white. They equated compromise with selling out. Obama thought more like a lawyer, wanting to see “all the blacks and whites and grays.” McKnight invited Obama to his house in Evanston and then his cottage in Wisconsin. In long talks, Obama told McKnight that he was beginning to think of Alinsky’s methods as “limiting,” because they focused on external institutions.
“You’re organizing people in the neighborhood to confront institutions outside the neighborhood,” Obama argued. “Shouldn’t you also be training them to come together effectively to deal with problems in the neighborhood?”
That conversation was the beginning of Obama’s decision to leave organizing for law and politics.
When Obama met Johnnie Owens, he was already thinking about finding a successor at the DCP. At the time, Owens didn’t realize that. He thought Obama just wanted to be pals. In 1987, Owens was working as a community planner for Friends of the Parks, and Obama was working to bring more facilities to Palmer Park, the grassy quadrangle across the street from Holy Rosary. Obama walked into Owens’s office, looking to do some research, and they began to talk about Roseland’s problems. Owens told Obama he’d grown up nearby, in Chatham, a neighborhood of middle-class bungalows closer to the lake. That seemed to pique Obama’s interest.
“I’m pretty new to the area,” Obama confessed.
Eager to establish a friendship, Obama suggested they continue the conversation another time. Not long after, the two men had lunch downtown. As they were walking up Michigan Avenue, Owens pointed at the Art Institute of Chicago, a block-long beaux arts museum with a pair of bronze lions flanking its stone facade. Its banners announced an exhibit by Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of Owens’s favorite photographers.
“Yeah, you know, I’m gonna go check that out one of these days,” Owens said.
“Well, let’s go right now,” Obama suggested.
They spent the afternoon in the gallery, looking at photos that Owens would always remember as astonishing.
Obama took this male courtship to the next step by inviting Owens over for Sunday dinner. It was a sign Obama was serious about the relationship; he rarely allowed anyone into his spare apartment. The walls were bare of posters, and Obama stored his James Baldwin, his Adam Smith, and his Martin Luther King biographies in an old ammunition box. Owens commented on a book that was critical of capitalism, figuring Obama agreed with the author.
“You see, Barack,” he said, “this is one of the reasons we gotta change this system.”
But as McKnight found, Obama’s reading was motivated as much by intellectual curiosity as ideology.
“Yeah, but, John,” he retorted, “if you want to be honest about it, where else can you find a system that allows you to do as much as you can do in this country?”
The whole scene—two guys sitting around after dinner, talking about ideas—was new to Owens. In his neighborhood, men drank together in taverns. They didn’t hang out like this. But Obama lived in the academic enclave of Hyde Park, where even in the mid-1980s, the heyday of the Chicago Bears, Sundays were for brainy dinner parties, not football games. While Obama seemed secure in his identity as a black man, he rarely socialized outside Hyde Park, and Owens was one of his few black friends. Even his girlfriend was white.
Six months or so after they’d met, Obama invited Owens to Los Angeles for a two-week leadership training retreat put together by the Industrial Areas Foundation, the group Alinsky had founded. Owens was skeptical. In spite of his friendship with Obama, he thought of community organizers as impractical radicals standing on street corners and shouting, “Let’s storm the Bastille!” Those two weeks changed his mind. He began to understand how an organized community, trained in the acquisition of power, could determine its own destiny. When they returned to Chicago, Obama asked Owens to come to work for the DCP, as his assistant. Owens accepted. This, he realized, was why Obama had cultivated him so avidly. The man always had an agenda, no question about it.
One of Owens’s first DCP meetings was a training session at a hotel in the south suburbs. It was memorable not because of anything Obama said that weekend, but because of what he did. It was the only time any of the DCP’s members saw their punctilious organizer cut loose.
“Barack, how did you even find this place?” Loretta Augustine asked when they pulled up in the Honda. “You musta worked really hard. This place is away from everything. Why are we here?”
“I wanted to eliminate all the distractions,” he said.
That’s Barack, Augustine thought. All business, all the time.
“However,” he added, “at the end of training on Saturday night, we’re going to have a party.”
That was not the Barack she knew. Augustine couldn’t wait to see Obama party. After the training session, Obama actually ate a full dinner, then set up a portable stereo and slotted in a tape of his beloved R&B. As soon as Obama began swaying to the bass, Owens tried to bust his chops.
“Barack, what you doin’ out there on the floor?” he chided. “You know that ain’t the place for you.”
“What?” Obama shot back. “Who said I can’t dance? I’ll bust all y’all out.”
Obama threw his hand over his head and spun it like he was twirling a lasso. Yeah, their director could write a funding grant and get a bureaucrat down to the Gardens. But he could dance, too.
As the leader of a church-based community group, Obama was attending a lot of Sunday services. Recruiting pastors was part of his job, and there’s no better way to flatter a preacher than to sit through one of his sermons. Obama had arrived in Chicago unchurched, having been raised by a family whose attitudes toward religion ranged from indifferent to hostile. When his grandparents fled Kansas for the West Coast, they left behind the stringent prairie Methodism of their youth, exchanging it for Unitarianism, a less demanding and less judgmental brand of Protestantism. Once they reached Hawaii, they were far enough from their mainland origins to quit church altogether. Obama’s mother, who married two men with Muslim backgrounds, would have fallen into the category of “spiritual, but not religious.” A compassionate, nonacquisitive woman, she tolerated all faiths but embraced none. Her son would write that she was “skeptical of organized religion.” Obama’s father rejected Islam for atheism, making him the family member with the most conviction on religious matters.
Because he’d had no religious upbringing, and because he’d never lived before in an African-American community, Obama was only vaguely aware of the role the church played in black life. He knew, from his reading, that black Christianity had provided the spiritual underpinnings of the civil rights movement. But he didn’t know that the typical black church also provided its parishioners with social services—food, clothing, and housing assistance—as well as political guidance. The pastors he met were African-American rabbis, as concerned with the temporal advancement of an oppressed people as they were with its salvation. Obama was put off by the political jealousies of some older preachers, but the more time he spent on the South Side, the more he began to see the importance of joining a church.
While Obama was determined to succeed as an organizer, it would be cynical to say he became a Christian to smooth his relations with the pastors. He was spending all his time working with religious people and seeing how churches could uplift a neighborhood. Every DCP meeting began and ended with a prayer. After a while, faith began to sink in.
Early on, Obama had several long talks about his spirituality with Reverend Alvin Love. Like his mother, he believed in God but wasn’t sure he could fit into the mold of religion.
“I pray,” he told Love, “but I haven’t made the commitment I have to make as far as accepting Jesus Christ as my savior.”
Love would have liked to have Obama as a parishioner but wasn’t surprised to see him join Trinity United Church of Christ. Trinity was east of the Calumet Expressway, outside DCP territory. Joining a DCP church might have caused resentment among the other pastors. Also, Trinity’s pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., was more cosmopolitan and intellectual than the Baptist and Church of God in Christ preachers Obama dealt with in his daily work. Their roots were in Southern gospel services. Wright was from Philadelphia, read Greek and Latin, and had studied at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His mother held a Ph.D. in mathematics. He planted a FREE SOUTH AFRICA sign on his lawn and welcomed gays and lesbians. That was common among white churches on the North Side, but most black churches were so traditional they still preached the epistle lesson “Wives, submit to your husbands.”
Trinity’s programs—it offered classes in financial management and counseled parishioners who were drinking too much or going through divorces—were a model of how a church could serve its community. The congregation appealed to both Obama’s background and his aspirations. It was a magnet for well-educated strivers—the crowd W. E. B. DuBois had called the black community’s “Talented Tenth.” An offshoot of Congregationalism, the United Church of Christ had always occupied a high position on the social ladder. Trinity’s members were seen as “very middle-class, stable” by other Chicago blacks. Obama was too cool and cerebral to feel at home in a storefront church with a name like True Vine of Holiness Church of God in Christ or Greater True Love Missionary Baptist. An Afrocentric minister, Wright dressed in a kente-trimmed robe and flattered his flock by preaching that Jesus was African. He appealed to its nostalgia for the down-home with such vernacular sermons as “Ain’t Nobody Right but Us.” But he also published a brochure called “A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.” As so many pastors do, he preached against his flock’s greatest weakness.
Wright’s sermon “The Audacity to Hope” would inspire the title of Obama’s second book. The biblical passage that was the sermon’s subject, from 1 Samuel, was about Hannah, the barren wife of Elkanah, who continued to pray although God refused to bless her with children. But the message was about black America, which only advanced out of slavery, poverty, and ignorance because its people had hope.
“In order for a race despised because of its color to turn out a Martin Luther King and a Malcolm X, a Paul Giddings and a Pauli Murray, a James Baldwin and a Toni Morrison, and a preacher named Jesse, and in order to claim its lineage from a preacher named Jesus, somebody had to have the audacity to hope,” Wright growled. “In order for Martin to hang in there when God gave him a vision of America that one day would take its people as seriously as it had taken its politics and its military power; in order for him to hang in and keep working and keep on preaching even when all the black leaders turned against him because he had the courage to call the sin of Vietnam exactly what it was—an abomination before God—he had to have the audacity to hope.”
On the Sunday morning Wright delivered that sermon, Obama listened with tears streaming down his cheeks, never imagining that one day his name would have a place in that list of African-American pioneers.
By Obama’s third year in Chicago, the DCP was thriving. With more than a dozen churches paying dues, Obama was earning $27,500 a year and employing Owens as a full-time assistant. So he decided to pursue a project that reached beyond Altgeld and Roseland: school reform. It fit perfectly into his mission of community empowerment. There was a move afoot in Springfield to establish local school councils—boards composed of parents who would have a say in hiring and firing the principals at their children’s schools. The plan was adamantly opposed by Machine Democrats, who feared the councils would become training grounds for amateur politicians who might get the big idea of running for alderman. Obama organized a bus trip to the state capitol—another time-honored lobbying tactic—and conducted a teach-in on the three-hour ride down Interstate 55. The parents, who had grown up in Richard J. Daley’s segregated Chicago, were skeptical that any politician would hear them out.
“They’re not gonna listen to us,” they told Obama. “They’re elected officials.”
“They’ll listen to you,” Obama assured them. Then he said, “This is what you do.”
He split the parents into groups and gave each the name of a legislator. They were to write notes and hand them to the uniformed doorkeepers outside the house and senate chambers. It was intimidating just to walk into the capitol, past bronze statues of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Mayor Daley, then climb three flights of marble stairs, past the two-story mural of George Rogers Clark parleying with the Indians, and stand in front of the ceiling-high wooden doors, among a crowd of professional lobbyists in suits and smart dresses. But the doorkeepers took the notes onto the floor. The legislators came out. To the parents’ surprise, they listened and even asked questions. On the ride home, the parents, who had gone to Springfield glumly expecting to be ignored, were feeling sky-high—“energized, like we could do anything,” one would later say. The school reform bill passed.
In the late 1980s, the Chicago schools were so decrepit, so indifferent to the task of guiding teenagers toward college, that Secretary of Education William Bennett condemned them as “the worst in the nation.” No mayor in recent memory had sent a son or daughter to public school. Daley, Bilandic, and Byrne were Catholic, so their children were educated by the archdiocese, and Washington’s brief marriage had been childless. At some inner-city schools, fewer than half the freshmen ended up graduating.
The Career Education Network, which aimed to prevent kids from dropping out of high school, was Obama’s most ambitious piece yet. Obama wanted to recruit tutors for an after-school program at four South Side high schools. The tutors would help the kids study, but they’d also teach job skills and act as mentors. In a sign he was already maturing from organizer to politician, Obama wanted Mayor Washington to sign on.
“We can either partner with downtown or challenge downtown,” he told Owens.
This time, he wanted to partner. It would fulfill his dream of working with Harold, and the mayor’s endorsement would bring in other players. Obama got as far as a meeting with Joe Washington, the mayor’s education adviser. It didn’t go well.
Joe Washington (no relation to the mayor) was unimpressed with the young organizer from out of town. They got into a heated argument about the community’s role in the schools. “He doesn’t know shit about Roseland,” Washington later told a friend. “Or Chicago.”
Undeterred, Obama approached his state senator, Emil Jones Jr. As president of the Illinois state senate, Jones would become Obama’s political godfather. In the 1980s, though, Jones was just a backbencher. Obama wrote a proposal asking for half a million dollars in state aid. Jones could only deliver $150,000. That was enough to hire a director and four part-time tutors, and rent space in a Lutheran church. It wasn’t enough, however, to spin off the Career Education Network into an independent organization that could eventually work in schools throughout the city, as Obama had envisioned.
Obama was frustrated. Owens thought he saw the wind go out of his boss’s sails. After three years, he was beginning to see there was only so much he could accomplish from the outside, as an organizer going cup-in-hand to politicians. One weekend, he visited McKnight in Wisconsin, where he told the professor he wanted to quit organizing and go to law school.
“I’ve learned what I can from this, and I’ve seen its possibilities and its limits, and I want to go into public life,” Obama said.
Obama asked McKnight to write him a letter of recommendation to Harvard. McKnight agreed but warned Obama that most organizers were unhappy in law and politics.
“The most important thing is what would you be satisfied with, because you have to do it every day,” he told his twenty-six-year-old protégé. “To do something that’s unsatisfying is a waste of life.”
Lawyering, McKnight said, was nothing like organizing, “where you take the right position and fight for it to the end.” And the essence of an elected official’s job was compromise. That’s why Alinsky had discouraged his pupils from getting involved in lawsuits or partisan causes.
“Most people I know who are organizers would not be satisfied with politics,” McKnight concluded.
Obama understood, but he was still determined to follow his new course. McKnight wrote the letter, and Obama sent his application to Harvard.
After three years, Obama had not only learned all he could learn, he had also taught all he could teach. Thanks to Obama’s training, the women of the DCP were starting to feel confident enough to undertake projects on their own. Waste Management Inc., America’s largest trash hauler, operated the enormous landfill on 130th Street. The dump was a neighborhood blight. The tainted extract of sodden garbage leached into the groundwater through its porous clay lining. The gulls who perched on the Gardens’ ziggurat rooflines were strays drawn away from the lake by the feast inside the dump. Word got out that Waste Management planned to expand into land abutting the O’Brien Lock, which allows river-going barges to enter Lake Michigan—the source of Chicago’s drinking water. Alarmed, the DCP and the United Neighborhood Organization—a Latino group that goes by the acronym UNO—held a rally at Saints Peter and Paul Church in the South Chicago neighborhood. Two hundred people attended. That same night, Waste Management officials were meeting with community leaders in a conference room at South Chicago Bank, trying to win approval for the expansion. At seven o’clock, all two hundred demonstrators left the church and walked silently toward the bank. Once inside, they marched up the stairs and filed into the conference room without saying a word. The president of UNO read a statement about meeting behind closed doors to cut deals that would damage the far South Side. Then everyone left, as silently as they had entered.
Another rally, at the same church, was attended by the city’s new mayor, Eugene Sawyer. Sawyer had been appointed to replace Harold Washington, who died of a heart attack on the day before Thanksgiving in 1987. DCP and UNO wanted a task force to debate the dump’s expansion. Augustine prepared a speech. Since it was a bilingual crowd, she would have an interpreter. But she was asked to deliver one phrase in Spanish: vamos a decide. We will decide. Obama walked her through the presentation, including the pronunciation of those three words. When Augustine recited “vamos a decide” the room burst into cheers and chants of “We will decide!” For that performance, Augustine was appointed to cochair the task force, which succeeded in blocking Waste Management’s plans. Obama, she believed, had given her the confidence to speak before a crowd.
“I wanted to follow him,” Augustine would say years later. “I wanted to be part of the things that I felt he could make happen, and I really wanted to learn. He brought out something in me. I was never that outgoing before. I would feel like something needed to be said but I was afraid to say it. He changed that dynamic to the [point] that when I would be at these meetings, and I knew something needed to be said, it was something inside of me that overcame that fear of speaking up and out that went from ‘Needs to be said, but I’m afraid’ to ‘It needs to be said, and if I don’t say it, even though I’m afraid, I’m gonna die. I have to say it.’ ”
Johnnie Owens was surprised to hear Obama was quitting the DCP, even more surprised to hear he was quitting for Harvard Law School. Obama gave his assistant the news in a roundabout way that emphasized it would be a change for Owens, too.
“Are you ready to lead?” Obama asked Owens one day at the rectory.
“Lead?” Owens responded. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been accepted at Harvard.”
“What?”
Owens was thrilled for his boss. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he was ready to take over a community organization. He was going to have to run the fledgling Career Education Network and deal with two dozen pastors. And he’d be succeeding a leader who, in three years, had become beloved by his followers. Loretta Augustine, Yvonne Lloyd, and Margaret Bagby were as loyal to Obama as they were to the DCP.
To make the change easier, Obama took Owens around to all the DCP churches.
“I’m leaving,” he told his priests, bishops, and reverends. “John’s gonna take over. I have complete confidence in him. If you like what I did, you’ll like what he does even better.”
Some did. Owens ended up serving six years as the DCP’s director, twice as long as Obama. Alvin Love, who eventually became president of the group, thought Owens was the best community organizer he’d ever met. But, he always added, Obama had trained him.
It was different for the women of the DCP. None of them had expected Obama to stay forever—he was too smart, too talented, to spend his life driving them to church-basement meetings in a decaying Honda. They wanted to see Obama go to Harvard, but when they lost him, they also lost some of their devotion to community organizing.
“We continued working, but I guess, I don’t know, I dwindled away,” Margaret Bagby would say. “I just got tired, I guess.”
Eventually, all three women left Chicago. Bagby found a house in the suburbs, Augustine moved to Mississippi with her second husband, and Lloyd, by then widowed, went home to Nashville.
Just before Obama left for Harvard, he wrote an article about organizing for Illinois Issues, a statewide political journal. Entitled “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” it was later reprinted in the anthology After Alinsky.
Despite the success of the civil rights movement, the election of black mayors, and the Buy Black campaign, the inner city still suffered, Obama argued. In some ways, it was worse off, because middle-class blacks, who had once been bound there by restrictive covenants, were now free to leave, taking their money and education with them. Politicians and businesses couldn’t transform the ghetto “unless undergirded by a systematic approach to community organizing.”
“Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement those solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership—and not one or two charismatic leaders—can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions,” Obama wrote.
Alinsky’s disciples still believed an organizer’s task was to wrest money and resources from powers outside the neighborhood. Why not, Obama suggested, build power within the neighborhood?
“Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.”
That could have been a manifesto for Obama’s next Chicago endeavor, which he undertook the year after he came back from Harvard.