The Bridge_The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

Part Two
In my body were many bloods, some dark blood, all blended in the fire of six or more generations. I was, then, either a new type of man or the very oldest. In any case I was inescapably myself.
--Jean Toomer



Chapter Four
Black Metropolis
In 1968, Saul Alinsky, the inventor of community organizing and one of the most original radical democrats America has ever produced, met an earnest young woman from Wellesley College named Hillary Rodham. Like many college students of the time, Rodham was in the midst of a political transformation--in her case, from Goldwater Republican to Rockefeller Republican and then to Eugene McCarthy supporter all in the space of a few years. It was the summer before her senior year and she was spending it as a kind of political tourist. In June and July, she worked in the Washington office of Melvin Laird, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin who became Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense. Then, as a pro-Rockefeller volunteer, she went to the Republican National Convention in Miami, where she stayed at the Fontainebleau Hotel, shook hands with Frank Sinatra, and saw Nixon win the nomination. Finally, she spent a few weeks with her parents, in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge; at night, with her friend Betsy Ebeling, she went downtown to the edges of Grant Park and, from a distance, witnessed Mayor Richard J. Daley's police beating up antiwar demonstrators. In Chicago, Rodham heard more and more about Saul Alinsky, who was always on the lookout for new recruits.
Alinsky had made his mark three decades earlier, in Chicago's Back of the Yards, a poor neighborhood of meatpackers and stockyards that formed the landscape of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's documentary novel. A native Chicagoan and already a veteran of union organizing, the young Alinsky set out to organize in the Yards. "People were crushed and demoralized, either jobless or getting starvation wages, diseased, living in filthy, rotting unheated shanties, with barely enough food and clothing to keep alive," Alinsky recalled. "It was a cesspool of hate; the Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Negroes, Mexicans and Lithuanians all hated each other and all of them hated the Irish, who returned the sentiment in spades."
Alinsky had his own enemies in the Yards, including not just the ward heelers of City Hall, who resisted outside interference, but also the purveyors of racial hatred: Father Coughlin's National Union for Social Justice and William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts, who railed about the influence of international bankers and rapacious Jews. His main ally was the Catholic Church; at the time, Chicago had one of the most liberal archdioceses in the country. Alinsky thought of himself as a man of action, committed but unsentimental, a keen student of what made the world go around: power. He loathed do-gooders and moral abstractions; he valued concrete victories over dogma and talk. To combat the defeatism and apathy of the meatpackers, he appealed to their self-interest. He came to understand their most concrete grievances and went about organizing them to fight for themselves.
Alinsky staged rent strikes against slumlords and picketed exploitative shop owners. He arranged sit-ins in front of the offices of Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly, whose political machine was so ruthless and encompassing that, in Alinsky's words, it made Daley's version "look like the League of Women Voters." Alinsky was not only a democratic revolutionary but a consummate tactician. He was more than willing to exploit Kelly's vanity and innermost anxieties, as long as it brought results. Although Kelly was associated with the Memorial Day massacre of 1937, in which Chicago police opened fire on unarmed striking steelworkers, he still craved acceptance by the liberal, and pro-labor, President, Franklin Roosevelt. There was nothing Kelly would not do, according to Alinsky, to get an invitation to the White House. Alinsky, who had been an acolyte and biographer of John L. Lewis, the powerful head of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, told Kelly that if he would close a reasonable deal with the meatpackers' union, he would deliver the C.I.O.'s endorsement. Such an endorsement, he assured Kelly, would magically transform him into a "true friend of the workingman" and thus make him acceptable to F.D.R. Alinsky had found the avenue to Kelly's self-interest. A deal was struck.
As a pragmatist, the aging but still vigorous Alinsky disdained the leaders of the youth movement who were streaming into Chicago in August of 1968 for the Democratic Convention. He had little patience for these kids. What did they understand about power, about what real Americans wanted and needed? They were, in his view, dilettantes--spoiled Yippies who smoked pot, dropped acid, and had never met a working person in their lives. "Shit," Alinsky said, "Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin couldn't organize a successful luncheon, much less a revolution."
Hillary Rodham was hardly a revolutionary. When she arrived at Wellesley in 1965, her ambition was to become head of the campus Young Republicans. She fulfilled it. But, in time, as she gave increasing attention to the civil-rights movement and the war in Vietnam, her views began to shift. Not that she ever joined the radicals of S.D.S. She was elected head of the student government, and in that role she tolerated, even enjoyed, interminable committee meetings; she was a practical-minded liberal, concerned with easing dress codes, ending parietals, and reforming outdated academic curricula. She certainly thought about national issues--particularly Vietnam, race, and the growing women's movement--but, unlike some of her classmates, she focused mainly on problems that she could actually solve. And so there was something about Alinsky that appealed to her.
After his success in the Back of the Yards, Alinsky organized other communities on the South Side of Chicago, in the barrios of Southern California, in the slums of Kansas City, Detroit, and Rochester, New York. He carried out his work with an absurdist flair. In 1964, he threatened Mayor Daley, who seemed to be backing out of a series of agreed-upon concessions to poor blacks on the South Side, with a prolonged "shit-in" at O'Hare Airport. The airport had been a cherished project of the Daley machine--its glass-and-concrete embodiment--and Alinsky threatened to bring its operations to a standstill by calling on a few thousand volunteers to occupy all the urinals and toilets at his signal. Daley made the concessions. And when Alinsky was working in Rochester's black community in the mid-sixties, he threatened to organize a "fart-in" at the Rochester Philharmonic in order to get Kodak to hire more blacks and engage with black community leaders. After a pre-concert dinner featuring "huge portions of baked beans," a hundred of Alinsky's people would take their seats among Rochester's elite. "Can you imagine the inevitable consequences?" he said, envisioning the ensuing "flatulent blitzkrieg."
Alinsky may not have been a theoretician, but his view of what was ailing post-war America influenced generations of community organizers. When an interviewer asked him if he agreed with Nixon that there was a conservative "silent majority" that disdained everything about the sixties, he dismissed the idea, but said that the country was in a state of terrible disruption and likely to move either toward "a native American fascism" or toward radical social change.
Right now they're frozen, festering in apathy, leading what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation." They're oppressed by taxation and inflation, poisoned by pollution, terrorized by urban crime, frightened by the new youth culture, baffled by the computerized world around them. They've worked all their lives to get their own little house in the suburbs, their color TV, their two cars, and now the good life seems to have turned to ashes in their mouths. Their personal lives are generally unfulfilling, their jobs unsatisfying, they've succumbed to tranquilizers and pep pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped in long-term endurance marriages or escape into guilt-ridden divorces. They're losing their kids and they're losing their dreams. They're alienated, depersonalized, without any feeling of participation in the political process, and they feel rejected and hopeless.... All their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in a sea of social chaos. Believe me, this is good organizational material.
Alinsky declared that his job was to seize on the despair, to "go in and rub raw the sores of discontent," to galvanize people for radical social change: "We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy." That was as good a definition of community organizing as any.
Alinsky came to his conclusions about the state of American society via first-hand experience. His parents were Orthodox Jews who emigrated from Russia at the turn of the century to the slums of the South Side. His father started out as a tailor, ended up running a sweatshop, and then left the family. At sixteen, Alinsky himself was "shackin' up with some old broad of twenty-two." When his father died in 1950 or 1951, he left an estate of a hundred and forty thousand dollars--fifty dollars of it for Saul.
As a graduate student in criminology at the University of Chicago in the early nineteen-thirties, Alinsky decided to do research on the Outfit, Al Capone's gang, which dominated the city and City Hall. He used to hang out at the Lexington Hotel where Capone's men spent their evenings. Because Alinsky presented no threat to these invulnerable gangsters--he was a source of amusement to them--he was able to spend hours listening to Big Ed Stash, one of Capone's executioners, and Frank (The Enforcer) Nitti, a leading deputy, tell stories about bootlegging, women, gambling, and killing. "I was their one-man student body and they were anxious to teach me," Alinsky recalled. "It probably appealed to their egos." Alinsky never wrote his dissertation. Instead, he gathered up his understanding of the way power worked in Chicago and launched into progressive politics, raising money for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, the Newspaper Guild, Southern sharecroppers, and various labor constituencies.
In the late nineteen-fifties, Alinsky was approached by some black leaders in Chicago about Woodlawn--a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, he said, that "made Harlem look like Grosse Pointe." In 1960, working with a young white organizer named Nicholas von Hoffman, who later became a prominent journalist, a black organizer named Robert Squires, and clergymen like Arthur Brazier, a Pentecostal minister who turned a storefront church into one of the largest congregations on the South Side, Alinsky formed what became known as the Woodlawn Organization, or TWO, whose goal was to head off the kind of deterioration and discrimination that had already laid waste to neighborhoods like Lawndale, on the West Side. "Those were the days of what was called urban renewal, which we saw as Negro removal," said Brazier.
Nick von Hoffman said, "There were no idealists around then. It was a wasteland, particularly because we were tiptoeing on the question of race relations. Any white person fooling around with that stuff was tagged as a Red. Two or three years earlier, we had made our first attempt to organize on the question of race on the southwest side of Chicago. We had money from the Roman Catholic Church. It was a boundary area between the white and black worlds that was in flames. The situation was, if a black family moved into the white area and their house were to catch fire, the fire engines would not come. The local banks formed a union with the local real-estate people to buy up empty houses that might be bought by black people."
Alinsky and von Hoffman, working with neighborhood activists and clergy, scored a series of improbable successes, going after the Board of Education for maintaining de-facto segregation, department stores for refusing to hire blacks, merchants for selling their wares at inflated prices, and the University of Chicago for trying to push out poor local residents to make room for new buildings. Von Hoffman haunted the Walnut Room of the Bismarck Hotel, where he met the heads of the Cook County Board of Supervisors and the Chicago Board of Realtors. Over lunch--"an ice cream soda and three Martinis"--he tried to cut deals with them. The Woodlawn Organization became a legendary paradigm of community organizing. Besides fighting the University of Chicago, it ran voter-registration drives, won better policing, and forced improvements in housing, sanitation facilities, and school conditions.
Hillary Rodham became so interested in what she was hearing about Saul Alinsky that when she returned to Wellesley for her senior year, she decided, together with her faculty adviser, Alan Schecter, to write her thesis on Alinsky and American poverty programs. Relying on both wide reading and her own interviews with Alinsky, Rodham produced a paper that probes beneath Alinsky's legend to consider his successes and his limitations as an organizer. She wrote of Alinsky as existing in a "peculiarly American" group of radical democrats who set aside high-flown rhetoric: "Much of what Alinsky professes does not sound 'radical.' His are the words used in our schools and churches, by our parents and their friends, by our peers. The difference is that Alinsky really believes in them and recognizes the necessity of changing the present structures of our lives in order to realize them."
Rodham's thesis is sometimes knotty with undergraduate display, but it is also a judicious analysis. She was prescient about the all-too-essential role that Alinsky played in his own movement. Without him, the movement would flounder, she warned. Alinsky's personality was large, distinct, and, likely, irreplaceable. Community organizing after his death--and it came soon, in 1972--would suffer the same internal debates and drift as psychoanalysis after Freud. While Rodham praised Alinsky for his cool-eyed methodology, she expressed concern about his reluctance to enter mainstream politics to effect change on a far broader scale.
"In spite of his being featured in the Sunday New York Times, and living a comfortable, expenses-paid life, he considers himself a revolutionary," she wrote in conclusion. "In a very important way he is. If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, the result would be a social revolution." She placed Alinsky in the lineage of Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman, and Martin Luther King, all of whom, she wrote, were "feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths--democracy."
Alinsky wrote to Rodham offering her a place at his Industrial Areas Foundation Institute, where she would learn to be a community organizer. "Keeping in mind that three-fourths of America is middle class, a new and long overdue emphasis of the Institute will be placed on the development of organizers for middle class society," Alinsky wrote. Rodham, an honors student and a speaker at the Wellesley commencement, had a sparkling range of options for life after graduation: law school acceptances from both Harvard and Yale and Alinsky's invitation to train and work as a community organizer. She decided on law school, and Yale seemed more intellectually flexible than Harvard. In the endnotes to her senior thesis, she wrote that Alinsky's offer had been "tempting, but after spending a year trying to make sense out of his inconsistency, I need three years of legal rigor."
Sixteen years later, Barack Obama was in the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street, leafing through newspapers, searching for the work he wanted most. He picked up a copy of Community Jobs, a small paper that carried ads for public-service work. In Chicago, an organizer named Jerry Kellman, a follower (more or less) of the Alinsky tradition, was looking for someone to work with him on the far South Side where the steel mills were closing and thousands of people were facing unemployment and a blistered landscape of deteriorating housing, toxic-waste dumps, bad schools, gangs, drugs, and violent crime. Kellman, who led the Calumet Community Religious Conference, a coalition of churches designed to help the people in the area, was especially desperate for an African-American organizer. The neighborhoods on the far South Side were nearly all black and he, as a wiry-haired white Jewish guy from New York, needed help.
For white organizers in those neighborhoods, "getting any traction was like selling burgers in India," Gregory Galluzzo, one of Kellman's colleagues, said. "Jerry had to hire a black organizer." Yvonne Lloyd, a South Side resident who worked closely with Kellman, said that African-Americans in the area were unreceptive to white organizers. "Black people are very leery when you come into their community and they don't know you," she said. Lloyd and another black activist who worked with Kellman, Loretta Augustine-Herron, pressed him hard to hire an African-American.
The ad in Community Jobs was long and descriptive. "I figured if I could paint a picture of the devastation and show it as a multiracial but mainly black area, it would interest someone," Kellman said. The address at the bottom of the ad was 351 East 113th Street, Father Bill Stenzel's rectory at Holy Rosary, a Catholic church on the far South Side. Kellman was using a couple of rooms there as his base of operations.
Obama sent Kellman his resume.
"When I got it with the cover letter signed 'Barack Obama,' I thought, What the hell is this? And Honolulu? I thought, well, he's Japanese," Kellman said. "My wife was Japanese-American and so I asked her about it. She figured there was a good chance he was Japanese, too."
Like many young people of promise and ambition, especially ones with absent parents, Barack Obama had a hunger for mentors. He had the gift of winning over his elders and getting them to teach him about worlds that were alien to him. More than many of his peers, he sensed that there was much to learn from older people who had special knowledge of the way things worked, and his eagerness to learn brought out their eagerness to teach. In years to come, Obama befriended and absorbed all he could from elders like Laurence Tribe, at Harvard Law School; Jeremiah Wright, at Trinity United Church of Christ; Emil Jones, in the Illinois State Senate; Valerie Jarrett, Judson Miner, Abner Mikva, Newton Minow, David Axelrod, Penny Pritzker, Bettylu Saltzman, and many others in the worlds of politics and business in Chicago; Pete Rouse, Richard Lugar, and Richard Durbin in the U.S. Senate.
Jerry Kellman was the first of these mentors. And in the formation of Obama's ideas about community, effective political change, storytelling, and forming relationships, Kellman may well have played the most influential role in Obama's life outside of his family. Kellman was born in 1950 in New Rochelle, New York, a large and diverse suburb in Westchester County. When he was in seventh grade, the Supreme Court ordered the integration of New Rochelle's school system, the first such case in the North. When he was in junior high and high school, his political passions were Israel--he was so active in Jewish youth groups that he was selected to introduce David Ben-Gurion at an Israel Bonds dinner--and the civil-rights movement. In high school he helped run a black candidate's campaign for student-council president and then organized a series of discussion groups among white and black students. Kellman and his friends mourned the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.; the day after King's death, they launched a campaign to get the school board to stop using Little Black Sambo readers in the schools attended by kids in local projects. At graduation, he helped lead a walk-out to protest the war in Vietnam.
In August, 1968, Kellman enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and it was clear from the start that he would be majoring in student protest. A regular at antiwar meetings and demonstrations, he helped organize a march of a thousand students to ban mandatory R.O.T.C. a week before he even began classes. The demonstration was a success and the policy was changed. In his freshman year, the Milwaukee Journal ran an article on the new breed of radical; Kellman was featured. But, despite a growing reputation on campus for political commitment, he thought that S.D.S., the dominant radical group on campus, was "nuts," its rhetoric of revolution comically impractical and dangerously violent. The next year, 1970, Kellman transferred to Reed College, in Oregon; not long afterward, a group of antiwar extremists bombed the math building at Wisconsin, killing a physicist named Robert Fassnacht and injuring several others. At Reed, a group of professors, tired of the traditional academic structure, set out to start a "commune-college." With a grant from the Carnegie Endowment, they started a "learning community" in a series of farmhouses and the inner city. Kellman spent most of his time there counseling people on the draft.
In the summer of 1971, Kellman went to Chicago, long acknowledged as the national center of community organizing. ("It was either that or going to live on a kibbutz.") He slept on people's floors and took jobs in restaurants; for a while, he chopped onions and grilled hot dogs at Tasty Pup. But mostly he learned organizing and the realities of Chicago: the isolation and dismal conditions in the poor black communities of the South and West Sides; the machine structure of political power; the discriminatory tactics of local mortgage bankers and real-estate developers. In such a grim and ironclad political culture, Kellman discovered, ordinary people go about their lives with little sense of community, cohesion, or possibility. They do not express their self-interest because they automatically relinquish any hope of fulfilling it. "What was drummed into us was self-interest," Kellman said. "That's Alinsky. It's all self-interest. Very hard-nosed. What is their self-interest and how to use it to organize."
In Austin, a neighborhood on the far West Side, he spent nights drinking with church and neighborhood leaders, learning people's life stories and the details of their disenfranchisement. He was no longer trying to end a war. He was trying to stop a bank from leaving the neighborhood, trying to get a pothole filled, a local drug dealer arrested, a stop sign replaced. He arranged meetings with priests to gain their support, with ordinary people to build up an energized community, with politicians to get them to do the right thing.
Like so many young organizers, Kellman became obsessive about his work. He did not stay long in any one place. He bounced from Austin to suburban DuPage County, from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Philadelphia. To slow down, and to please his wife, and maybe earn a decent living, he studied for a while at the University of Chicago, but it wasn't for him.
In 1982, Kellman trained organizers for the church-based group the United Neighborhood Organization, converted to Catholicism a couple of years later, and then joined the Calumet Community Religious Conference, which worked with black churches, and started organizing in the most poverty-stricken areas of the South Side. He and colleagues like Greg Galluzzo, an Alinsky apostle who had extensive organizing experience, and Mike Kruglik, a barrel-chested Chicagoan, took stock of the devastation in the wake of all the mill closings in the Calumet region, which ranged from the far South Side into Indiana. With thirty thousand workers in a single industry, Calumet was a kind of local Detroit; it had once produced more steel than Pittsburgh. But now, because of foreign competition and the cost of retooling plants, the men were out of work, the plants were rusting shells.
Kellman's early attempt to organize church leaders in the area got a boost when Cardinal Joseph Bernardin signaled that if local priests didn't join the effort they should rush to confession. Father Stenzel at Holy Rosary helped Kellman pull together ten parishes, which kicked in a thousand dollars apiece and promised to help organize willing parishioners. Kellman knew that he couldn't sustain an organization that tried to yoke together the white neighborhoods of Indiana and the black areas of the South Side; to deal with the South Side and gain access to greater funding, he conceived the Developing Communities Project for Chicago. He told his board of local activists, all of whom were black, that he would find an African-American organizer. What he could offer was a miserable salary, a resistant public, and only a slender hope of success.
"It was easier to promise than it was to deliver," Kellman said. "The logic is that you need someone very smart, but if you are smart enough to be an organizer you should be smart enough not to do it. And if you are black and the pride of the family, why become downwardly mobile? It doesn't make a lot of sense. It was hard. I got no one I liked. The heat was beginning to build. I procrastinated. I scrambled. Meantime, I kept taking out ads and looking at resumes. The Tribune. The Times. The Detroit Free Press. But also that one in Community Jobs."
Kellman read Obama's resume and called him in New York. They spoke for two hours. ("Over the phone I figured out he wasn't Japanese.") A couple of weeks later, Kellman, in New York to visit his parents, met Obama at a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue. He looked very young to him. Obama was twenty-four. What concerned Kellman about very bright, very young candidates was the possibility of early burnout. Community organizing is isolating, tedious, and deeply frustrating work. More often than not, battles drag on, and then fizzle out without a satisfying result. A young person with some options is likely to leave at the first hint of boredom or defeat. Kellman had already known a young organizer who was so psychologically distressed by the work that he'd had to let the person go and find psychiatric help.
The terms for a training organizer like Obama were less than modest--a ten-thousand-dollar salary and a couple of thousand more for a car. "But preposterous propositions are what being an organizer is like," Kellman said. "So we went over Barack's story, and it was clear to me that he was never very long anywhere and he was different wherever he goes." Even in that early conversation, Kellman saw Obama as someone looking for himself and for a place to call home.
"He kept asking, 'What will you teach me, and how will you teach me?'" Kellman recalled. "I thought of him as an outsider, and he wanted to work with the poor, with people who have faced racial discrimination. His heroes were in the civil-rights movement, but that was over. This was as close as he could get. And he needed to live in a black community."
Kellman quizzed Obama about his background and, like most people, found the flood of details hard to absorb on first hearing. Kellman tried to push him: Why didn't he go to graduate school? Didn't he want to make money? Obama had said that he was excited by the election, in 1983, of a black mayor in Chicago, Harold Washington. So why not go work for him? Kellman asked. Why organize? But Obama kept repeating how inspired he was by the civil-rights movement and his desire to work on a grassroots level.
Obama admitted to Kellman that he had another motivation for wanting to be an organizer on the South Side. He was thinking about being a novelist. "He told me that he had trouble writing, he had to force himself to write," Kellman said. He was looking not only for experience, an identity, and a community; he was also in search of material.
Before Kellman could hire him officially, Obama had to be confirmed by a small board of directors, which met at St. Helena of the Cross, a Catholic church on the South Side. Many of the community activists on the South Side were middle-aged black women, and they were more eager than ever for Kellman to settle on an African-American organizer. "We interviewed three other people before Barack. Nobody really fit the bill of what we needed," one board member, Loretta Augustine-Herron, said. "We did want someone to look like us, but that wasn't the only thing. If Barack hadn't had the ability to understand our needs, it wouldn't have worked. He had the sensitivity. He was honest to a fault. He told us what he knew and what he didn't. When we described our plight, he understood. He didn't have a cockamamie idea to resolve some problem we didn't have." Augustine-Herron and the others had only one concern: "He was so young. Was he going to be up for this?"
Obama decided to move to Hyde Park, an integrated neighborhood and home of the University of Chicago. Obama found himself a cheap first-floor apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street and Harper Avenue. As he had in New York, he outfitted the apartment for monkish living: a bed, a bridge table, a couple of chairs, and some books. Eventually he went out and got a gray cat which he named Max. Hyde Park was the logical neighborhood for Obama from the start. The area was mainly black, but integrated, and, because of the presence of the University of Chicago, salted with intellectuals. From Hyde Park it was a short trip to the neighborhoods where he would be working, including Roseland and West Pullman on the far South Side.
During his first weeks in Chicago, Obama spent many hours with Kellman, touring the South Side and talking. "He was very idealistic--naive only in his lack of experience," Kellman recalled. "He had no experience of Chicago ward committeemen and graft and the rest. We talked a lot about race, how to deal with it. We were trying to organize blacks with white priests. Barack has always had to deal with the way people react to him, which has nothing to do with him, but, rather, with the fact that he is black or looks black. A lot of the struggle for him was to figure out who he was independent of how people reacted to him. He was working on it. He had been in school all his life, which is not a very real environment in terms of race. This was the first time when he would be in one neighborhood and identified in one way. He had never encountered a place where race was so determinative."
Kellman drove Obama around to see the abandoned mills, the rusted ships in the abandoned port, and to meet with community leaders. "It was like going to an exotic country for him," Kellman said. "He had so much learning to do about how people live their lives, but he learned almost effortlessly. He had gifts. He was comfortable with people and talked easily with people."
The standard books for beginning organizers are Alinsky's two theoretical tracts: Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. Kellman thought those were trivial and glib and recommended Alinsky's biography of John L. Lewis and Robert Caro's The Power Broker, a titanic biography of the unelected master builder of New York, Robert Moses. The books were intended to give him a short course in the way cities and power really work. "Decisions in Chicago are not made where they are supposed to be," Kellman said. "Aldermen and state representatives make no decisions; ward committeemen do, and they are making a lot of those decisions because of their second professions as funeral-parlor directors, insurance salesmen, attorneys."
Obama spent most of his time methodically compiling lists of priests, ministers, and community leaders and arranging to interview them. The idea is that the organizer does not barrel into a neighborhood like some sort of Moses in a black leather jacket, ready to lead; first he listens and only then tries to engage enough people to form an effective leadership group. He helps them learn to analyze power and even speak in public. That group then goes on to confront elected officials and city bureaucrats and take power into its own hands.
At night, Obama wrote long meticulous reports about what he had learned in his interviews. He often drew sketches of his subjects in the margins to help him remember names and faces.
"He was very disciplined in the way he lived," Kellman said. "In the first few months when he was an organizer, he had no social life and I was worried that I was going to lose him. He wasn't dating. He was doing his interviews, doing his reports, reading--and on the weekends he was visiting black churches and writing short stories. He was very focused and disciplined, monkish not in the sense of being a celibate but of holing up and reading." To relax, Obama played basketball or took long runs by the lakefront, stopping only to reward himself with a cigarette--his most glaring vice. He ate sparingly. If his friend and fellow organizer John Owens ordered dessert, Obama would say, like a particularly ironic cleric, "Did you deserve that?"
"I don't think he had much of a life outside of work," Loretta Augustine-Herron said. "I used to worry about that! He worked seven days a week most weeks. Early-morning meetings and then meetings till ten that night. He went to places that I told him not to let the sun go down on you there, but he went anyway."
The more Obama got to know the South Side and the people who lived there, the more his writing became about what he was seeing and hearing. Occasionally, he sent drafts of his stories to old friends like Phil Boerner or gave them to Kellman and Kruglik.
"He gave me two or three of his short stories," Kruglik recalled. "They were about the streets of the South Side of Chicago, what they looked and felt like to him, the dreariness of the landscape in winter. One was about a pastor who is overwhelmed by his problems but he still wants to build a strong congregation and take care of himself, too. Something shines through the pastor's spirit that allows him to do that. The stories were very descriptive. At first, I wondered, how does he have the energy to do all this? I figured he must have copied it somehow from someone. But they were about people I knew." Obama was meeting, and becoming friends with, black church people on the South Side like Dan Lee, a deacon at St. Catherine's Church in West Pullman, and the Reverend Alvin Love, the young minister at Lilydale First Baptist Church. Obama's fellow organizers had no problem identifying them in his fiction.
Kellman remembers reading a story about a small church: "Barack had the experience of being in a foreign land for the first time. The storefront church was as foreign as could be. At that point in his life, Indonesia was more familiar to him. But he was writing about what he was seeing." (Kellman says he probably should have kept copies of Obama's stories. "I would have made a killing on eBay.") Another story, "A Man of Small Graces," describes a character on the South Side who seemed to be based on Obama's stepfather, Lolo Soetoro.
When Obama did have free time he usually liked to spend it alone. Sometimes Kruglik would drag him out to a blues or jazz club--Obama was a fan of the Jazz Showcase downtown--or have him come over to watch a ballgame: the Bears, the Bulls, the White Sox. ("It was amazing how fast he became a Chicago partisan," Kruglik said. "I mean who else was he supposed to root for? Honolulu? Jakarta? It was all part of integrating himself into Chicago and making it home.") On summer afternoons, Kellman was occasionally able to lure Obama out for a walk at Montrose Harbor or to his house in Beverly, an Irish and black neighborhood on the South Side, for a backyard barbecue. "One thing I understood personally is that he wanted to be around us simply because we had a family," Kellman said.
One of Obama's organizing colleagues, Sister Mary Bernstein--"my father was Jewish and my mother won"--often teased him about his social life. "One morning," Sister Mary said, "I came in the office and he was sitting at his desk and stirring his tea and he said, 'How's it going, Sis-tuh?' He always called me 'Sis-tuh' and I called him 'O-bama.' And he said, 'Sis-tuh, how am I going to find a date?' And I said, 'Barack, everyone I know is too old for you, and they're all nuns. I'm the last person you should ask.'"
Kellman and many other of Obama's friends agree that, as engaging as Obama was, he was, at least for a long time, wary about revealing information about himself--his past and his emotions. But as he and Kellman spent more and more time together, it became clear that Obama was still thinking through questions about his family and his identity, about politics and his own future. One thing that struck Obama's friends and colleagues in Chicago was how much he admired his mother for her independence and her social idealism. His father was quite another story. "He didn't want to repeat his father's life," Kellman said. Observing Obama's seriousness, his cool, and his modest way of living, Kellman couldn't help but think that the younger man had cast himself in stark contrast to the bitter, brilliant, volatile, and wholly unreliable man who was his father.
Obama and Kellman took their walks in the park, ate lunch at a McDonald's near the old steel mills, and sometimes the talk drifted away from work. "Dating was a challenge," Kellman said. "How do you live in two worlds? Could he marry a white woman? Where would he live? Was it even right to ask? Is love all that matters? He thought a lot about marriage, his long-range plans, and how to handle the questions that arose out of it. Then there was money: How can you do what you believe in and still live decently? What degree of sacrifice? Or should I just be smart and make a lot of money? We would talk about all of this. Or politicians. How much should we work with them and how much in opposition? Were they enemies or were they allies? Should you work within the system or stand outside of it, advocating? Can you join the system and not lose your sense of what is just?"
Obama dated various women--in that department, Kellman said, "He was more than capable of taking care of himself." Toward the end of his time as an organizer, Obama had a steady girlfriend, a white University of Chicago student who was studying anthropology. Even though he knew that the relationship would come to an end, Kellman said, "They were both committed to paths that would lead to some dedication. They parted for geographic reasons. They both had commitments that would take them out of Chicago. Long term, in general, Barack wanted kids and he wanted a house. He wanted a family--even young and single and not having met Michelle and being in a relationship that he felt wasn't going to last."
By the time Obama came to Chicago, he had become comfortable not only with his given name but with his racial identity in particular. What his work on the South Side was bringing him was something larger--a deepening connection to an African-American community. He was no longer a student trying to make friends in the Black Students Association. This was life, daily and natural contact, whether at home in Hyde Park--a more middle-class, integrated, university-town environment--or farther south, among the poor and the dispossessed.
"Barack simply believed that he'd been black all of his life," Mike Kruglik said. "Part of it was, as he told me, that while all these people were thinking about his being biracial or asking was he black enough--all that stuff--when he walked down the streets of the South Side no one asked that question. No one asked that question when he tried to hail a taxi in New York. Now he was a black community organizer in a black community with the purpose of creating an organization to give black people a voice. There was a synthesis of how he identified himself culturally and being a community organizer. Being a community organizer helped him create a black community. Before that, he'd had a romantic idea of a black community and found that there really was no community as he'd imagined it: the community was fragmented and largely destroyed. He had to re-create that community. I heard a lot of those things coming out of his mouth. There was this organic feeling about him, of being a serious young man helping people fight for their community. And he willed himself to be part of the community and then defend it."
One of his black colleagues in organizing, John Owens, had grown up in Chatham on the South Side, and he was fascinated by how "open-minded" Obama was about questions of race. "He was concerned about being fair about whites as well as about blacks, whereas the average African-American who grows up in the community, the concern with being fair is usually with your own. He always wanted to be even-handed in his analysis of things. In that regard, he was able to have stronger relationships with whites more than the average African-American."
Obama's early impressions of Chicago were best expressed in a long, handwritten letter to his old friend Phil Boerner:
Phil--
My humblest apologies for the lack of communications these past months. Work has taken up much of my time and the free margins I devoted mostly to catching my breath. Things have begun to settle into coherence of late, however, so hopefully you'll be hearing more from me in the future.
Now, what's your excuse?
Chicago--a handsome town, wide streets, lush parks, broad, lovingly crafted buildings, Lake Michigan forming its whole East side, as big and mutable as an ocean. Though it's a big city with big city problems, the scale and impact of the place is nothing like NY, mainly because of its dispersion, lack of congestion. Imagine Manhattan shrunk by half, then merged with the boroughs into a single stretch of land, and you've got some idea of what it's like. Five minutes drive out of the Loop (the downtown area) and you're in the middle of single story frame houses with backyards and tall elms.
The layout influences the people here. They're not as uptight, neurotic, as Manhattanites, but they're also not as quick on the pick-up. You still see country in a lot of folks' ways--the secretary in a skyscraper still has the expression of a farm girl; the sound of crickets on a hot Southern night lies just below the surface of the young black girl's words at a check-out counter. Chicago's also a town of neighborhoods, and to a much greater degree than NY, the various tribes remain discrete, within their own turf, carving out the various neighborhoods and replicating the feel of their native lands. You can go to the Polish section of town and not hear a word of English spoken, walk along the Indian section of town, colorful as a bazaar, and you'd swear you might be in a section of New Delhi.
Of course, the most pertinent division here is that between the black tribe and the white tribe. The friction doesn't appear to be any greater than in NY, but it's more manifest since there's a black mayor in power and a white City Council. And the races are spatially very separate; where I work, in the South Side, you go ten miles in any direction and will not see a single white face. There are exceptions--I live in Hyde Park, near the Univ. of Chicago, which maintains a nice mix thanks to the heavy-handed influence of the University. But generally the dictum holds fast--separate and unequal.
I work in five different neighborhoods of differing economic conditions. In one neighborhood, I'll be meeting with a group of irate homeowners, working-class folks, bus drivers and nurses and clerical administrators, whose section of town has been ignored by the Dept. of Streets and Sanitation since the whites moved out twenty years ago. In another, I'll be trying to bring together a group of welfare mothers, mothers at 15, grandmothers at 30, great-grandmothers at 45, trying to help them win better job-training and day care facilities from the State. In either situation, I walk into a room and make promises I hope that they can help me keep. They generally trust me, despite the fact that they've seen earnest young men pass through here before, expecting to change the world and eventually succumbing to the lure of a corporate office. And in a short time I've learned to care for them very much and want to do everything I can for them. It's tough though. Lots of driving, lots of hours on the phone trying to break through lethargy, lots of dull meetings. Lots of frustration when you see a 43% drop-out rate in the public schools and don't know where to begin denting that figure. But about 5% of the time, you see something happen--a shy housewife standing up to a bumbling official, or the sudden sound of hope in the voice of a grizzled old man--that gives a hint of the possibilities, of people taking hold of their lives, working together to bring about a small justice. And it's that possibility that keeps you going through all the trenchwork.
Two other guys on our staff, both white, in their late thirties, do the same thing in the white suburbs. What draws the two areas together is a devastated economy--the area used to be the biggest steel producer in the U.S., and now closed down mills lie blanched and still as dinosaur fossils. We've been talking to some key unions about the possibility of working with them to keep the last major mill open; but it's owned by LTV, a Dallas-based conglomerate that wants to close as soon as possible to garner the tax loss.
Aside from that, not much news to report. My apartment is a comfortable studio near the Lake (rents are about half those in Manhattan). Since I often work at night, I usually reserve the mornings to myself for running, reading and writing. I've enclosed a first-draft of a short story I just finished; if you have the patience, jot some criticism on it, let George mark it up, and send it back to me as soon as possible, along with some of the things you guys may have written.
It's getting cooler, and I live in mortal fear of Chicago winters. How's the weather over there? I miss NY and the people in it--the subways, the feel of Manhattan streets, the view downtown from the Brooklyn Bridge. I hope everything goes well with you, give my love to Karen, George, Paul, and anyone else I know.
Love--
Barack
Obama had arrived in Chicago in June of 1985, two years after Harold Washington won election as the city's first black mayor. To the African-Americans of the city, this was an epochal breakthrough, a seeming end to traditional white machine rule and what was commonly called the city's "plantation politics," and they were always ready to talk about it. Obama could walk into his barbershop or the Valois cafeteria and get a quick seminar on Washington's victory. He saw the campaign posters everywhere, tattered and yellowing but still displayed in shop windows. He saw the portraits in the South Side barbershops next to King and Malcolm and Muhammad Ali. Obama joined Washington's admirers and followed the daily drama of the Mayor's battles with a City Council that was still packed with old machine-style aldermen, the most famous of whom was "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak.
There is no telling how Obama might have developed had he answered an ad to work in some other city, but it is clear that the history of African-Americans in Chicago--and the unique political history of Chicago, culminating in Washington's attempt to form a multiracial coalition--provided Obama with a rich legacy to learn from and be part of. "The first African-American president could only have come from Chicago," Timuel Black, one of the elders of the South Side and a historian of the black migration from the South, says. Tim Black came to Chicago from Alabama with his family as an infant, grew up on the South Side, and went on to write and assemble Bridges of Memory, a two-volume oral history of the black migration and African-American life in the city. For decades, Black has been a college teacher, political activist, and resident sage of the South Side, and he is one of the elders Obama sought out when he was an organizer. They met for the first time at a student hangout near the university, Medici on 57th, where Obama quizzed him for hours about the history of the migration and the political and social development of the South Side. Obama was not only fascinated by the history of black Chicago; he also chose to enter that history, to join it. Chicago was where he found a community, a church, a wife, a purpose, a political life--and he was absorbed in its past. "He soaked it up," Black said. "He made it his own."
African-Americans have lived in the lakeside portage that became Chicago for more than two centuries. According to legend, the Potawatomi Indians, who first lived there, had a saying: "The first white man to settle at 'Chickagou' was a Negro." A French-speaking black man, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, was the first permanent settler, arriving in "Chickagou" at the end of the eighteenth century. Until the Civil War, blacks were officially banned from settling in Illinois, yet in the eighteen-forties and fifties pro-slavery polemicists called it "the sinkhole of abolition" because so many escaped slaves kept arriving via the Underground Railroad.
The Great Migration of African-Americans to Chicago began around 1910; the migration was a process that came in bursts, peaking in the nineteen-forties and fifties, but did not entirely end until the nineteen-seventies. In all, it raised Chicago's black population from a marginal two per cent to thirty-three per cent, transforming the politics and culture of the city. In the South, boll weevil infestations put cotton farmers out of work and, later, mechanization transformed cotton cultivation forever; at the same time, in the industrial North there were thousands of jobs available in the slaughterhouses and the mills and the factories, not least because the Great War and then the Immigration Act of 1924 shut off the borders to Europeans while so many whites were being shipped off to war. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 also sent hundreds of thousands of black sharecroppers looking for work and a place to live. Throughout the migration, the most important of the black newspapers, the Chicago Defender, a weekly edited by Robert S. Abbott, a Georgia native, published milk-and-honey appeals to Southern blacks asking them to question their conditions in the South and come North for a life of freedom and plenty:
Turn a deaf ear to everybody.... You see they are not lifting their laws to help you. Are they? Have they stopped their Jim Crow cars? Can you buy a Pullman sleeper where you wish? Will they give you a square deal in court yet? Once upon a time we permitted other people to think for us--today we are thinking and acting for ourselves with the result that our "friends" are getting alarmed at our progress. We'd like to oblige these unselfish souls and remain slaves in the South, but to their section of the country we have said, as the song goes, "I hear you calling me," and have boarded the train singing, "Good-bye, Dixie Land."
Trainloads of black families arrived every day at Illinois Central Station. Between 1916 and 1970, half a million blacks arrived in Chicago from the South. A Black Belt began to take shape on the South Side, a triangle running between Twenty-sixth Street on the north and Fifty-fifth Street on the south, from State Street to Lake Michigan. It was a huge, dense neighborhood that came to be known as Bronzeville. To some extent, the Defender's boosterish appeals were genuine. Blacks really did find greater opportunity in Chicago and, in a world of de-facto segregation, Bronzeville became a lodestar of black life in America, a "parallel universe," as Timuel Black calls it, of "parallel institutions": black churches, theaters, nightclubs, and gambling parlors known as "policy wheels." John (Mushmouth) Johnson became Chicago's first black gambling czar and he, in turn, helped Irishmen like "Hinky Dink" Kenna and "Bathhouse John" Coughlin develop their careers as the political bosses of the First Ward.
Still, many whites in Chicago resisted the influx, the expansion of Bronzeville, by every means possible. Between July, 1917, and March, 1921, a bomb went off in a black-occupied house roughly every three weeks. The community association in Kenwood and Hyde Park determined that blacks could not move east of State Street and "contaminate property values." Real-estate tycoons ran scams that played on white fears. One of the major white real-estate barons, Frederick H. Bartlett, handed out leaflets to whites in Douglas, Oakwood, and Kenwood reading, "Negroes are coming. Negroes are coming. If you don't sell to us now, you might not get anything." And so whites suffering from "nigger mania" sold cheap and the realty companies, accepting tiny down payments, sold the same houses for double and triple the price to newly arrived blacks. Realtors would sell to whites promising that there was a restrictive covenant and they could be assured of having no black neighbors. At the same time, black resentment of white racism was growing; black soldiers who had fought in Europe and returned home only to be treated once more as inferior beings helped stoke a growing sense of militancy.
The event that ignited the long saga of racial conflict in Chicago came on the afternoon of July 27, 1919. A black teenager named Eugene Williams went swimming in Lake Michigan and floated across an imaginary line marking Twenty-ninth Street, and into a "white area." A group of white youths stoned him to death. As a group of blacks tried to get care for Williams, they grabbed George Stauber, one of the white youths, and tried to get a white policeman to arrest him. The officer refused and a fight broke out, setting off four days of violence, spreading into the taverns and the pool rooms, from one neighborhood to the next. Members of Irish "athletic clubs," armed with clubs and other weapons, went out looking for "jigs" and "smokes"; to their surprise, the blacks fought back, even torching houses near the stockyards and the railroad. The August 2nd issue of the Defender described "a blaze of red hate flaming as fiercely as the heat of day"; the paper wrote about streets and alleys filled with abandoned corpses, mobs controlling whole areas of Chicago, city police unable, or unwilling, to regain the upper hand, a metropolis consumed with fear, violence, and rage: "Women and children have not been spared. Traffic has been stopped. Phone wires have been cut." Spearheading the riot was a white gang in the Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport known as the Hamburg Athletic Club. One of its members--and one of its eventual leaders--was a teenager named Richard J. Daley. When the battles were finally over, thirty-eight men and boys had been killed--twenty-three of them black.
That summer, the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay, who was living in Harlem, published a sonnet called "If We Must Die" about the lynchings and race riots raging throughout the country. The opening lines reflected the sense of outrage and determination among black men and women in places like Harlem and the South Side:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
Throughout Chicago, the borderlines between white neighborhoods and black remained tense for years after the 1919 riot. The Property Owner's Journal, the Kenwood and Hyde Park Association's official publication, issued a warning that reflected the depth of hatred and foreboding:
Every colored man who moves into Hyde Park knows that he is damaging his white neighbor's property. Therefore, he is making war on the white man. Consequently, he is not entitled to any consideration and forfeits his right to be employed by the white man. If employers should adopt a rule of refusing to employ Negroes who persist in residing in Hyde Park to the damage of the white man's property, it would soon show good results.
Chicago's blacks sought refuge in the Republican Party. Partly out of loyalty to the party of Lincoln, they voted for William Hale Thompson for mayor. During his three terms--from 1915 to 1923 and then from 1927 until 1931--Mayor Thompson, dubbed Big Bill and Bill the Builder, welcomed blacks into his coalition. He gave so many city jobs to blacks that his opponents took to calling City Hall Uncle Tom's Cabin. During his political races, Democratic Party campaign workers were sent out on the streets with calliopes to play "Bye, Bye, Blackbird" and to distribute leaflets showing Thompson piloting trainloads of blacks from Georgia with a caption reading, "This train will start for Chicago, April 6, if Thompson is elected."
The pioneer black politician of the South Side was a well-to-do businessman--a contractor, decorator, and real-estate broker--named Oscar Stanton De Priest. Born to former slaves in Florence, Alabama, De Priest won election as an alderman in 1915 but stepped down two years later when he was indicted on a Mob-connected corruption charge; with Clarence Darrow as his attorney, De Priest was acquitted. In 1928, running in Chicago's first congressional district as a Republican, De Priest became the first black member of the House of Representatives since Reconstruction.
With the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, blacks in Chicago began to shift their loyalty to the Democratic Party and to a new mayor, Anton Cermak, who built the foundations of a political machine that ruled the city for half a century. Cermak was mayor only between 1931 and 1933, but he helped bring Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Czechs, Italians, and blacks into city government. He even helped bring in the lower-class Irish from Bridgeport and Back of the Yards. On February 15, 1933, at a public ceremony, in Bayfront Park, in Miami, Cermak was shot in the chest while shaking hands with President-elect Roosevelt. The bullet was most likely intended for Roosevelt. Cermak's supposed last words to F.D.R.--"I'm glad it was me instead of you"--are inscribed on a plaque in his honor at Bayfront Park.
White ethnic politicians dominated the Chicago machine, but someone needed to control the black South Side. A get-along pol named William Levi Dawson, who had switched from the Republicans to the Democrats, soon became the boss of what was called the "sub-machine"--a black extension of City Hall. Dawson was born in Albany, Georgia. His grandfather had been a slave, his father a barber. When his father's sister was raped by a white man, and he retaliated, he was forced to head North. Young Dawson graduated from Fisk in 1909 and worked as a porter and a bellhop. Fighting in France in the First World War, he was gassed. Along the way, he lost one of his legs in an accident.
A mild but clever man with a neat pencil moustache, Dawson returned to Chicago and went to work in a ward political office on the South Side. As a local politician and then as a congressman, his priority was to bring relative economic and political well-being to the black neighborhoods of the South and West Sides. Any talk of ideology and reform, of civil rights and empowerment, seemed to him an indulgence, the self-defeating radicalism of young hotheads. In Congress, he stood in direct contrast to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of Harlem, who was a militant and flamboyant spokesman for civil rights. Dawson was tied to the leading ministers, the Defender, the ward leaders--Chicago's parallel universe of black institutions. He was a master at defusing any rebellion in the ranks. When the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P. denounced Dawson for failing to speak out about the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, he fought back. He had had his loyal precinct captains run for delegate positions to the local N.A.A.C.P. convention; they won, and he took control of the organization. In 1956, he opposed a federal bill to end segregation in the schools because he feared a loss of federal funding. And, in 1960, he advised the Kennedy campaign, "Let's not use words that offend our good Southern friends, like 'civil rights.'"
Dawson believed that he was acting in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, waging winnable battles and leaving the rest for another day. The advice he gave to Kennedy was, in his mind, hardheaded politics, a way to win votes among Southern congressmen for concrete aid to the poor. The social realities of black Chicago in the post-war era, however, were extremely complex, and not something that Dawson's old-fashioned attitude to power was capable of dealing with. Accommodation was winning very few battles.
Even so, the South Side was one of the most culturally vibrant black communities in the country. With the ferment of the Harlem Renaissance a memory, the South Side was arguably the capital of black America. Joe Louis lived there. The Defender, which, in 1956, began to publish a daily edition, was there. Joseph H. Jackson, the pastor of the Olivet Baptist Church and the head of the conservative National Baptist Convention, was there. All the best blues performers, gospel singers, jazz musicians, and actors came to the Savoy Ballroom and the Regal Theater. Chicago was home to establishment figures like Dawson and Jackson, but also to a range of political radicals, religious leaders, and cultists, including Elijah Poole, who, as Elijah Muhammad, moved the headquarters of the Black Muslims from Detroit to the South Side. Richard Wright, who had come North from Mississippi to Chicago as a young man, insisted that life was so hard on the South Side that no one should be surprised at what political ferment might one day arise there. "Chicago is the city from which the most incisive and radical Negro thought has come," he wrote in his introduction to Black Metropolis, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's classic 1945 study of the South Side. "There is an open and raw beauty about that city that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life. I felt those extremes of possibility, death and hope, while I lived half hungry and afraid in a city to which I had fled with the dumb yearning to write, to tell my story. But I did not know what my story was."
By the nineteen-forties, the rise of a distinct, heterodox, and growing black population on the South Side inspired the white press to publish countless scare headlines. The white neighborhoods on the South Side built "improvement associations" designed to prevent the influx of blacks. White taverns installed locks and buzzers to keep out blacks. A black Chicagoan had to be careful not to wander into the wrong neighborhood lest he ignite a riot like the one near the lake in 1919.
Even after the 1948 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Shelley v. Kraemer barred state enforcement of restrictive covenants and promised an end to housing segregation, Chicago remained one of the most racially segmented cities in the country. (It remains so, today.) When, in 1951, a black family moved into an apartment in the white working-class town of Cicero, thousands attacked the building for several nights in a row until the National Guard was ordered to end the violence. Mayor Martin Kennelly, a son of Bridgeport and a product of the machine, sent police to the South Side to raid the policy wheels, and Bill Dawson decided to assert his will. The Cook County Democratic Central Committee had to decide whether to re-anoint Kennelly as its mayoral candidate in the 1951 election. Furious with City Hall's assault on the policy wheels, Dawson sent word from Washington that he opposed Kennelly's nomination. Dawson told Kennelly, "Who do you think you are? I bring in the votes. I elect you. You are not needed, but the votes are needed." The Central Committee decided on a compromise: it would allow Kennelly one more term and then, in 1955, turned to another son of Bridgeport, Richard J. Daley.
At first, Mayor Daley built on Cermak's principle of machine politics that an effective organization would come not merely from the Irish base but from a coalition of all ethnic groups and the effective use of patronage systems. For Daley, blacks were a dependable source of support. They were crucial to his first election. And yet Daley could not tolerate a wholly independent sub-machine. Almost immediately after taking office, he undermined Dawson, taking away his right to appoint the committeemen in his wards.
Daley's ruthless efficiency could not be doubted. Through a web of loyal aldermen, committeemen, and precinct workers, he dispensed thousands of jobs---forty-five thousand at the machine's peak. He was so intimately involved in the city's workforce, it was said, that he could greet many of the forty thousand employees by name. Daley was shrewd enough to bridge a political culture that ranged from buffoonish ward hacks to independent liberals like Governor Adlai Stevenson and Senator Paul Douglas. While more than a few members of the machine over the years took bribes or committed other crimes, Daley lived modestly, went to Mass every day, and showed at least a grudging respect for some of his political foes. Still, as the radio broadcaster and oral historian Studs Terkel once said of Daley, "He's marvelous when it comes to building things like highways, parking lots, and industrial complexes. But when it comes to healing the aches and hurts of human beings, he comes up short." This was especially so in the case of race.
Daley had inherited ugly, racist sentiments about black men and women. When he became mayor, his antipathy to blacks showed itself gradually at first, and then, for many, wholly eclipsed his better qualities. However delusionally, he thought of himself as fair-minded and believed that blacks would assimilate and advance in much the same way that other ethnic groups had. His condescension was brutally offhand. When a young man from South Carolina named Jesse Jackson moved to Chicago after making a name in the Southern civil-rights campaigns, Daley offered him a job--as a toll-taker on the highway.
Daley enforced policies of de-facto segregation, not so much because of closely held theories of black inferiority as because of his view of political power and how to retain it. In the late fifties and sixties, he built a series of vast housing projects--Henry Horner Homes on the near West Side; Stateway Gardens on the South Side; Cabrini-Green on the near North Side; and the twenty-eight sixteen-story towers of the Robert Taylor Homes. To isolate Robert Taylor and Stateway from any white neighborhoods, he routed the Dan Ryan Expressway so that it locked in the separation of the races.
Beginning in 1959, when the League of Negro Voters ran an independent candidate for city clerk, there were signs of some resistance to Daley in the black community. At a national convention of the N.A.A.C.P. in 1963, in Chicago, Daley was booed off the stage, mainly because he had so consistently opposed the integration of the public-school system. The half dozen blacks who won seats on the City Council by the nineteen-sixties, however, were so compliant that they were known as "the Silent Six." The most outspoken alderman on questions of race was Leon Despres, who was white; Despres was a leading example of the post-war liberal Democrats who kept their distance from the machine and called themselves independents. Some admiring blacks called Despres "the lone Negro on the City Council."
"Whenever I would raise a point about discrimination, segregation, oppression, civil rights, or an ordinance on those matters, which I increasingly did, Daley would always sic one of the 'Silent Six' to answer me," Despres said. One of the six, Claude W. B. Holman of the Fourth Ward, practiced a form of loyalty and devotion to Daley that seemed almost North Korean in its blind passion. Despres recalls Holman once telling Daley, with the cameras on, "You are the greatest mayor in history--greatest mayor in the world and in outer space, too."
Even as the civil-rights movement came to the forefront of American political life, doing battle and making advances in the South, black activists in Chicago like Willoughby Abner, Timuel Black, Albert Raby, and Dick Gregory could make little headway against Daley's implacable machine. "A good legitimate Negro wanting to go into politics in Chicago," Gregory said in the mid-nineteen-sixties, "not only has to run against a handkerchief-head Negro but also against a machine getting kickbacks from dope and prostitution.... You have to respect Daley. He has a big job being mayor, governor, prosecutor, and president of the Chicago Branch of the N.A.A.C.P."
The most dramatic challenge to Daley's hegemony came in the mid-sixties, from Martin Luther King, Jr. After winning victories on the streets of Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham, after successfully pushing Lyndon Johnson on voting rights, King and his lieutenants started debating where and how to bring the campaign North. Adam Clayton Powell, among others, was unenthusiastic about having the movement come to New York, and so King started thinking that Chicago, with eight hundred thousand blacks, might be the right choice. At a downtown rally in 1965, King said:
Chicago is the North's most segregated city. Negroes have continued to flee from behind the cotton curtain, but now they find that after years of indifference and exploitation, Chicago has not turned out to be the new Jerusalem. We are now protesting the educational and cultural shackles that are as binding as those of a Georgia chain gang.
Despite the warnings and the opposition of some members of his inner circle, King planted himself in Chicago and launched a bold, if vaguely conceived, anti-poverty and anti-discrimination plan. He rented an apartment in a grim building in Lawndale, on the West Side. "King decided to come to Chicago because Chicago was unique in that there was one man, one source of power," Arthur Brazier, the Pentecostal minister who worked with Saul Alinsky in Woodlawn, and then with King, said. "This wasn't the case in New York or any other city. He thought that if Daley could be persuaded of the rightness of open housing and integrated schools that things could be done."
Daley proved an elusive and stubborn foe. In the South, King had been helped by the grotesque dimensions and reliable brutality of his adversaries. Bull Connor, Jim Clark, and George Wallace were ideal foils for a movement steeped in the language of the Gospels and the tactics of Mahatma Gandhi. The moral contrast was, to millions of Americans, increasingly self-evident. In Daley, King faced a far craftier opponent, one gifted in the art of political manipulation, public compromise, and private deceits. And he was on his home turf.
At first, King's associate Andrew Young said, "We didn't see Mayor Daley as an enemy. In 1963, he had held one of the biggest, most successful benefits that S.C.L.C. had ever had at the time of Birmingham. Mayor Daley and Mahalia Jackson put it together." Daley's fear now was primal: if the civil-rights movement succeeded in registering more voters, it might threaten his coalition and the very existence of the machine. "The machine had served the black community well, but its days were over and we were there to announce that," Andrew Young said. "But Daley wasn't ready to turn loose."
Daley could rely on more than just the compliance of a cadre of black politicians. Many black clergymen, for instance, realized that if they sided overtly with King against City Hall they might suddenly lose their patronage. Who would give jobs to their parishioners? Who would pick up the garbage, repair the roads, maintain electricity and sewage, and prevent crime in the neighborhood? King could not provide these things, but Daley could take them away. He had the capacity to make life miserable. Dorothy Tillman, who came to town with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and who later became an alderman, said, "Chicago was the first city that we ever went to as members of the S.C.L.C. staff where the black ministers and black politicians told us to go back where we came from."
The Nation of Islam, under Elijah Muhammad, was a growing presence on the South Side, especially for disaffected young black men and women who had grown tired of the more obedient Christian ministers. But King could not expect any help from the Nation, which denounced integration. "If anything they were more zealous in support of segregation than Mayor Daley, since the mayor paid lip service to racial tolerance and the Muslims were black supremacists," Ralph Abernathy, King's closest adviser, wrote. "They would probably have joined us if we had proposed killing all the white people, but they certainly didn't want to listen to anyone preach the gospel of brotherly love."
The prospects for victory in Chicago were so grim that there was real division in King's own ranks. "I have never seen such hopelessness," Hosea Williams, a King adviser, said. "The Negroes of Chicago have a greater feeling of powerlessness than I've ever seen. They don't participate in the governmental process because they are beaten down psychologically. We are used to working with people who want to be free."
Nevertheless, King organized a huge rally for July 10, 1966, at the city's main football stadium, Soldier Field. On a ninety-eight-degree day, with thirty-eight thousand people in the seats, King was driven to the speaker's platform in the backseat of a white Cadillac convertible. Members of the Blackstone Rangers gang hoisted a Black Power flag. Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Peter Yarrow performed. And King, introduced by a leader of the Chicago archdiocese, gave a speech that announced the movement's weariness with the status quo in Chicago and the other industrial cities of the North:
Yes, we are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North. We have also come here today to remind Chicago of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. We have also come here today to affirm that we will no longer sit idly by in agonizing deprivation and wait on others to provide our freedom.... Freedom is never voluntarily granted by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed....
This day, henceforth and forever more, we must make it clear that we will purge Chicago of every politician, whether he be Negro or white, who feels that he owns the Negro vote rather than earns the Negro vote.
King not only employed one of his favorite phrases--"the fierce urgency of now," a phrase that he had employed at the March on Washington three years earlier to signal an unwillingness to delay--but also recognized the growing appeal of a more radical Black Power movement and tried to suggest the moral interdependence of the races: "The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt. Any approach that overlooks this need for a coalition of conscience is unwise and misguided. A doctrine of black supremacy is as evil as a doctrine of white supremacy."
Then, after leading demonstrators on a long march downtown to City Hall, King, in an echo of Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, attached a list of demands for equality in housing, employment, and education to the Mayor's door.
Daley did not deny King an audience. Rather, he invited him into his office and then, with a combination of courtesy and stubborn guile, he paid lip service to greater equality if King would, in exchange, end his demonstrations and leave town. Occasionally, Arthur Brazier recalled, Daley poked King by noting that he was the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and saying, "So why are you here in Chicago? Why don't you go back South?"
King kept up the pressure, staging marches on the West Side, in black neighborhoods, where he was received warmly, and in white neighborhoods like Marquette Park, where he was greeted with shouts of "Go back to Africa!" and a rock that was hurled at his head, hitting him. "I've never seen anything like it in my life," King said. "I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate."
"I'd never seen whites like these in the South," Dorothy Tillman said. "These whites was up in trees like monkeys throwing bricks and bottles and stuff. I mean, racism, you could almost cut it, a whole 'nother level of racism from hatred. And the sad thing about it was that most of those neighborhoods we went to were like first- or second-generation Americans.... Most of them were fleeing oppression."
Roger Wilkins, a young African-American lawyer working in Johnson's Justice Department, was dispatched to Chicago to talk to both sides and report back to Washington. Wilkins discovered that the tactics that had worked for the S.C.L.C. in the South had been rendered toothless in Chicago. Wilkins visited King at his apartment in Lawndale--"It was ugly and the stairwells stank of urine"--and found him negotiating with leaders of two gangs, the Blackstone Rangers and the Devil's Disciples, to march nonviolently against Daley and participate in various community programs. "The Illinois National Guard was out there in armored personnel carriers and these kids wanted to throw Molotov cocktails and Martin was saving their lives," Wilkins recalled. "He wouldn't let them go. He was conducting a nonviolence seminar." After the gang leaders left, King told Wilkins what he was learning in Chicago was that, in Wilkins's words, "you can have all the rights in the world, but if you were impoverished, those rights meant nothing; and if you went to a terrible school, you were nowhere. Martin now understood that the whole system was out of balance and, the way it was tilted, poor black people fell off. What he wanted to do now was not just about race. It was deeply about poverty." Wilkins was among those who thought that if King hadn't been killed, less than two years later, he would have started an anti-poverty movement no less profound than the civil-rights movement he had led in the South.
Daley made promises that he broke and offered compromises that he had no intention of adhering to. Tired and temporarily defeated, King left Chicago. "Like Herod, Richard Daley was a fox, too smart for us, too smart for the press ... too smart for his own good, and for the good of Chicago," Ralph Abernathy wrote.
King's trials in Chicago, however, along with the war in Vietnam, helped to radicalize him. He began to realize that the problem of racism was even more deeply rooted than he had imagined. Chicago, David Halberstam wrote in a profile of King in Harper's, left him "closer to Malcolm than anyone would have predicted five years ago--and much farther from traditional allies like Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins." It was a defeat that led to his proposal, in 1967, for a Poor People's Campaign and a multibillion-dollar Marshall Plan for the inner cities.
When King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, there was rioting in Chicago. Whole blocks on the West Side, the more recent of Chicago's black enclaves, were leveled. At a press conference, Daley betrayed how deep his antipathy toward the city's blacks now ran. He thought that the police had behaved with excessive restraint. Policemen should have had instructions, Daley said, "to shoot, to maim or cripple any arsonists and looters--arsonists to kill and looters to maim and detain."
It appeared that Daley, using both political guile and sheer brutality, had crushed the forces of reform that had "invaded" his city: the Woodlawn Organization, the S.C.L.C., the hippies, the Yippies, and S.D.S. Daley's victories, however, were far from permanent. Gradually, even some of the older, obedient politicians of the black sub-machine changed their minds.
Ralph Metcalfe, a silver medalist in the hundred-meter dash at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and a boss of the Third Ward, was a prime example. Metcalfe was Dawson's protege and his successor in Congress--a loyal member of the machine. When King came to Chicago, Metcalfe was among those black leaders who said that he wasn't wanted: "We have adequate leadership here." In 1972, police pulled over a black dentist, a friend of Metcalfe's, and handcuffed and bullied him for no reason. Not long afterward, another black dentist who was driving had a stroke and hit a parked car; the police held him in jail for five hours and he went into a coma. Metcalfe asked Daley to come to his office, but Daley refused; after these outrages, Metcalfe broke with Daley and the machine, saying, "The Mayor doesn't understand what happens to black men on the streets of Chicago and probably never will."
Richard J. Daley died, in 1976, after twenty-one years in office. Even his most loyal aides could not say that he had succeeded in holding off racial change in Chicago. "What Daley did was smother King," his press secretary, Earl Bush, told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1986. "What Daley couldn't smother was the civil-rights movement."
Daley was succeeded by Michael Bilandic, another machine politician from Bridgeport, who served ineptly until 1979, and then by Jane Byrne, who ran as a reformer in the city's first post-Daley election but, once elected, ignored her minority allies from the campaign and governed with an assemblage of machine hacks. When it was time for her re-election campaign in 1983, she faced two opponents, the scion, Richard M. Daley, and Harold Washington, a congressman from the South Side.
Harold Washington started out as a cog in the machine--his father was a precinct captain in Bronzeville; his mentor was Ralph Metcalfe--but both as a state senator in Springfield and as a member of Congress, he became a favorite of liberal whites along the Lakefront and South Side blacks looking for an effective new generation of leadership. Despite the shadow cast by Daley, there was a progressive tradition in Chicago politics: Ida Wells, Jane Addams, Saul Alinsky, Adlai Stevenson, Paul Douglas, the Independent Voters of Illinois, the various streams of black integrationists and more radical activists on the South Side. Washington, who was far more intellectual than he usually let on, was a student of his city's progressives, and he set out to win the mayoralty by drawing on those traditions and on his own deep experience in the maelstrom of Chicago politics.
In the Democratic primary, Washington's supporters hoped that Byrne and Daley would split the white ethnic vote and that Washington could succeed with a combination of blacks and just enough white liberals to win. In majority-black cities like Gary, Cleveland, and Detroit, a new generation of black mayors had already come to office. In Chicago, where African-Americans made up just forty per cent of the population, the demographics were less stark. Washington, using rhetoric that was echoed (if less bluntly) by Barack Obama a generation later, refused to assume the mantle of a racial candidate.
"I'm sick and tired of being called 'the black candidate,'" he said at the opening of a campaign office. "They don't talk about Jane Byrne as the white candidate. I don't even want to be called 'intelligent.' That's a put-down. It's manifestly obvious I am intelligent. Nor is it necessary to constantly refer to me as 'articulate.' Why don't they just come out and say I know what I'm talking about? Richard M. Daley believes he should be mayor simply because his father was. We don't have the divine right of kings in this country, I don't think."
Washington did not start out with a great deal of national help. Former Vice-President Walter Mondale, who was hoping to upset President Reagan the following year, supported Daley; Edward Kennedy, an important figure for Illinois Democrats, supported Byrne. The only newspaper to endorse Washington was the Defender. His fund-raising was limited and much of his grassroots support came from local churches.
Among the ministers who worked hard for Washington was the charismatic leader of the Trinity United Church of Christ on Ninety-fifth Street, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright and some of his colleagues collected names for a pro-Washington advertisement in the Defender. The ad said that the black church "which stands firmly in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.," and "stands on the shoulders of those African slaves who sang 'Before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave,'" could only support Harold Washington. To describe their point of view, the writers of the advertisement called themselves "unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian"--a phrase that Wright eventually adopted as the motto of his church.
Washington crushed Daley and Byrne in the debates, and his strategy paid off with a narrow win in the primary. "You don't have to be blessed with a great imagination to see the parallels between Harold Washington in 1983 and Barack Obama in 2008," Clarence Page, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune columnist who covered both races, said. "In 1983, you had the strong female incumbent, Byrne; the populist of the bungalow belt, Richie Daley; and the black spoiler. The breakthrough quality for Harold Washington was his oratory. The morning after that first debate, after Harold won so decisively, you saw Washington buttons all around town. And then, of course, the moment he won the Democratic primary a miracle occurred--half of Chicago went Republican overnight. And you had the black base asking if Harold was 'black enough' and whites thinking he was 'too black.' Sounds a little familiar, doesn't it?"
Chicago had long been a bastion of Democratic Party rule, but now, whites all over the city were newborn Republicans, and it barely mattered who the Republican nominee was. Racial animosities were so intense that nearly any sentient white Republican stood at least some chance of beating an African-American Democrat. The Republicans also had a point of attack: they were able to bring up, repeatedly, the fact that Washington had failed to file his income-tax forms for many years (although he paid the actual tax revenue); in 1972, a federal judge handed down a two-year sentence, then suspended all but five weeks of it.
Washington's Republican opponent, Bernard Epton, was from Hyde Park and had a reputation as a principled man. He was an early opponent of McCarthyism. He had marched with the sanitation workers in Memphis after Martin Luther King was there. As a state representative, he'd fought against racist real-estate practices. Epton ran for the Republican nomination with the expectation that (a) he would be running against Daley or Byrne and (b) that he would probably lose.
When Washington won the nomination, Epton said the right thing: "I don't want to be elected because I am white." But he rapidly betrayed himself. As his ambition intensified, he began to give himself over to Washington, D.C.-based Republican consultants who came up with a campaign slogan that appealed to racist instincts: "Epton for Mayor. Before It's Too Late." Some of Epton's supporters distributed leaflets saying they refused to vote for a "baboon"; others wore buttons that were just white. On the streets of white ethnic neighborhoods there were leaflets describing Washington's "campaign promises": "Raise Whitey's Taxes!" was one. "Replace CTA buses with Eldorados!" was another. The leaflets had Washington moving City Hall to Martin Luther King Drive and relocating a city bureaucracy to Leon's Rib Basket. Another flyer implied that Washington was guilty of child molestation.
Leanita McClain, a black member of the Tribune's editorial board, described in a column the vicious racial atmosphere during the campaign:
The Chicago Tribune endorsed Harold Washington in a long and eloquent Sunday editorial. It was intended to persuade the bigots. It would have caused any sensible person at least to think. It failed. The mail and calls besieged the staff. The middle range of letters had the words "LIES" and "NIGGER LOVERS" scratched across the editorial.
Hoping to shame these people, make them look at themselves, the newspaper printed a full page of these rantings. But when the mirror was presented to them, the bigots reveled before it. The page only gave them aid and comfort in knowing their numbers. That is what is wrong with this town; being a racist is as respectable and expected as going to church.
Filthy literature littered the city streets like the propaganda air blitzes of World War II. The subway would be renamed "Soul Train." ... In the police stations, reports were whispered about fights between longtime black and white squad-car partners. Flyers proclaiming the new city of "Chicongo," with crossed drumsticks as the city seal, were tacked to police station bulletin boards. The schools actually formulated plans to deal with racial violence, just in case.
Haskel Levy, an aide to Bernard Epton, told him that he was becoming the unwitting tool of a racist campaign. But, instead of repudiating racism, Epton repudiated Haskel Levy. He threw Levy's coat into the hall and told him, "Get the f*ck out!"
The erstwhile man of principle doubled down as he smelled victory. "I am not ashamed of being white!" Epton now declared. He told a crowd of Republicans in the Forty-seventh Ward, "Some of my great liberal friends feel they have to prove they are liberal by voting for a black who was sentenced to jail and who's supposed to run a city budget of two billion dollars plus. They call that liberalism. I call it sheer idiocy." Epton now seemed to relish his ability to rev up white crowds and their resentments. A young reporter for the Tribune, David Axelrod, described Epton as "volatile and capricious, prone to inexplicable outbursts and fits."
Naturally, Harold Washington was furious. He accused Epton, who had once been a friendly colleague in Springfield, of unleashing "the dogs of racism."
There was no doubt that Epton had done the unleashing, but Washington used wit rather than anger to deflect the worst of it. When asked on a radio call-in show if, as mayor, he would replace all the city's elevators with jungle vines, Washington cracked, "I don't think we have three million Tarzans in this city."
The racist fury was never more in evidence than on March 27, 1983, Palm Sunday. Accompanied by Vice-President Mondale, Washington went to St. Pascal's, a Catholic church in the northwest of the city. He was greeted by a racist mob shouting, "Nigger die" and "Carpetbagger!" and "Epton!" Someone had scrawled the graffito "Nigger die!" on the church. During the service, the demonstrators outside were so disruptive that Mondale and Washington had to leave. Soon afterward, the campaign became a national story with Newsweek publishing a cover feature on "Chicago's Ugly Election." David Axelrod covered the event for the Tribune. "It was one of the worst things I have ever seen," he recalled. "The racism was unguarded, full-throated. I thought people were going to get hurt, or worse."
In Chicago, Democrats routinely beat Republicans for mayor and just about every other local office, by landslides. But, despite that history, and the huge difference in party registration, Washington beat Epton by just over three per cent of the vote. Washington's campaign had united integrationists, black nationalists, Lakefront liberals, business people, community activists, church people, college students, and sixties-era leftists. That was just enough. An alarming number of whites, traditional Democrats, loyal to the old and hobbled machine, crossed over and voted for Epton--or, rather, against Washington. In the end, Washington's victory was due mainly to a record turnout among African-Americans.
When Washington's team organized a "unity breakfast" after the election and invited Epton to come, Epton refused, preferring to escape to Florida instead. But nothing could deflate the elation of the winner's supporters. "For blacks, Washington's victory was like the coming of the messiah," Don Rose, one of his campaign aides, said. "The feeling was: the veil of oppression was lifted by one of us, and we did it. It was the original 'Yes We Can.'"
As a young organizer, Obama absorbed these momentous events. He read up on them, asked about them, sought out conversations with people who remembered not just Daley and King but Dawson and De Priest. In Dreams from My Father, he captures the adulation of Harold Washington in his Hyde Park barbershop, describes the sense of hope the new city administration brought to the slums of the West Side and the housing projects of the South Side. It was part of the talk Obama, as a young community organizer, was hearing every day.
In office, Washington set out to be the mayor of all the city's neighborhoods and people. He also wanted to create a governing coalition capable of resisting the anti-New Deal ideology, racial indifference, and draconian cutbacks of Ronald Reagan, who had come to power two years before.
Harold Washington had worked as a teenager for the Civilian Conservation Corps, served in an engineering battalion in the Pacific theater during the Second World War, and worked his way up through the political ranks in Chicago's Third Ward. His sympathies were with the thousands of steelworkers who had been laid off and then denied benefits when the mills closed. In Washington's eyes, his victory was not solely an African-American victory, but a victory--no matter what the polls suggested--for a "multiethnic, multiracial, multilanguage city," as he said in his first inaugural address. At his victory celebration the band played "Take the 'A' Train" but also "Hava Nagila," "Besame Mucho," "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," "Auf Wiedersehen," "O Sole Mio," and "Fanfare for the Common Man." Washington's desire to extend a hand even to his enemies, rather than concentrate his efforts on the people who had elected him, alienated some of the nationalist activists in his electoral coalition--important voices like the journalist Lutrelle Palmer. "He never became what I would consider the black Mayor," Palmer once said. "Black people wanted something that was so simple: fairness.... Harold was too fair."
Obama was too young to have memories of the Kennedys and King. Harold Washington was the first elected politician in his lifetime who inspired him. For Obama, Washington's career suggested the value of a life on the inside, in politics. Mike Kruglik believed almost from the start that Obama was considering running for office one day--for mayor, perhaps. "Barack admired Harold Washington, he was inspired by him," Kruglik said, "and when he thought about the path to power himself he thought of becoming a lawyer, then a state legislator, then a congressman, then mayor--like Harold. Even before Harvard Law School, he thought about that. He would say, 'If you really want to get something done, maybe being mayor will help.' It was a matter of power integrated with purpose."
Obama's admiration was not absolute. Washington ran a disorganized office and was faced with constant opposition from the old machine aldermen on the City Council. "We were cynical about Harold, even though you couldn't help but like him," Jerry Kellman said. "Harold was interested in Harold. Barack was frustrated sometimes with the lack of responsiveness of Washington to the community and saw him as complex and flawed." The problem, Kellman said, "was that if Barack was going to get to a position of political power in Illinois his only option was Washington's path--from the state legislature, to Congress, to mayor. Racial politics precluded anything else. This was true as far as any of us could see at the time. But Barack did not see himself as another Harold Washington. He saw himself as having skills and a perspective from organizing that Harold did not have, and Barack hoped to find a way to put them to use."
For the time being, though, Obama could not afford to linger over the ramifications of political forces beyond his control. His daily work was in church basements, high-school gymnasiums, the waiting rooms of broken bureaucracies. These were the scenes of his political education. He was interviewing people: priests, ministers, activists, local officials, police officers, teachers, principals, workers, hustlers, shopkeepers. An organizer interviews people incessantly, asking them about their lives, their tragedies and frustrations, their desires and aspirations. Obama and his colleagues counted themselves failures if they were seen as visitors. The more they made themselves fixtures in the community, the better their chances of success.
"Narrative is the most powerful thing we have," Kellman said. "From a spiritual point of view, much of what is important about us can't be seen. If we don't know people's stories we don't know who they are. If you want to understand them or try to help them, you have to find out their story."
While Obama formed friendships in Hyde Park, the greater South Side was his community, the focus of his work and life. The closer he became to people on the South Side, the more he was able to get them to trust in the possibility of change. "Barack enjoys people and forms strong attachments," Kellman said. "He had the opportunity to do that here, unlike in New York City. There was an opportunity for intimacy. He wanted to get to know the black community and he felt very much at home. He wanted to be effective. And people would ask him questions: 'What church do you belong to?' 'Are you just here for a few months or are you really going to stay in Chicago?' 'Who are your mom and dad?' These questions, which seemed pretty innocent for most people, were very complicated for Barack. But he gradually became a Chicagoan and really fell in love with the city. He was in his element on the South Side. He comes to a community that is thought to be homogeneous but it really is diverse in income and many other ways. Give Barack diversity and he is king of the room. The diversity of the black community was a real plus. He could move in different worlds here, more so than anywhere else. There are so many communities in Chicago. Al Sharpton could never have risen to the kind of prominence he has in New York in Chicago. With time, even Jesse Jackson began to seem not sophisticated enough for this community."
Community organizing has a miserable success rate. For every triumph like Alinsky's in Woodlawn, there are dozens of failures, projects begun with high hopes that fizzle out in a splutter of indifference and frustration. To the local residents, young organizers can seem a vaguely comical, if well-meaning, nuisance. "We were always asking each other, 'Why do this work that busts your balls so bad all the time?'" Mike Kruglik recalled.
One winter morning, soon after he started working as an organizer, Obama was waiting outside a school to deliver some leaflets. An administrative aide from the school who had got to know him said, "Listen, Obama. You're a bright young man, Obama. You went to college, didn't you?"
Obama nodded.
"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 that 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.
Compared with most African-Americans, in the South and in the Northern cities, Wright had a middle-class upbringing, but not a sheltered one. In a sermon that deeply affected Obama, "The Audacity to Hope," Wright confided that when he was fifteen he was arrested for auto theft and that when he went away to college he briefly left the church and, under the influence of Malcolm X, flirted with Islam: "I tried one brief time being a Muslim: 'As salaam alaikum.'" He had experienced racism--in Virginia, in the military, even in enlightened Germantown--and understood the complexes that came with it. "When I was growing up," he said in a sermon called "Unhitch the Trailer," "folks used to buy a bleaching cream called Nadinola to try to change what God had done."
In the nineteen-sixties, the United Church of Christ, a mainly white denomination, established a small parish on the South Side, at Ninety-fifth Street, hoping to draw on the privately owned homes in the area. In the early nineteen-seventies, the parishioners at the new church, Trinity, wanted to play gospel music rather than the traditional Anglo-European hymns; they wanted the church to be more involved in the civil-rights movement, in social activism, in African culture. Most of the ministers on the South Side at the time were cultural conservatives: wary of the black liberation movement; wary of reform in their services; reluctant to adopt political positions that would put them in opposition to their patrons in City Hall. As a result, young people, searching for greater black identity as well as a spiritual home, were leaving the church for the Nation of Islam, black nationalism, or small sects like the Black Hebrew Israelites. Trinity promised a Christian home for young people who were politically and socially aware, and wanted that awareness to be part of their church.
Jeremiah Wright, who arrived in Chicago in 1969 and became Trinity's pastor in March, 1972, was among the young clergymen who reacted to the changing political atmosphere and rose to the challenge from rival confessions and sects. He had grown up in an educated household filled with both memories of segregation in Virginia and intense discussion about the heroes of black culture and education. At Virginia Union, he had become increasingly politicized, and at Howard he had heard Stokely Carmichael preach the ideas of Black Power, read the books of Afrocentric scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop, and studied with some of the faculty's most charismatic black scholars, including Sterling Brown. That was the moment, he said, "when the kids turned black." Wright, like many other young, educated preachers, felt that the time had come for a black church that was a center of racial solidarity and social justice, just as it had been in the years leading toward the Civil War. It was, Wright felt, as if he had been preparing to take over at a church like Trinity all his life.
"The members of this church said, 'No, no, no--we're not going to become Islamic or Hebrew, we're Christian,'" Wright told me. "We're going to be a black church in the black community. As a matter of fact, we're doing nothing in this community. We need to change." In Chicago, Wright had seen churches that either had "throw-down good music" or "a strong social justice component," but rarely both. Wright wanted both. He presented himself to Trinity as a devout intellectual, seminary-trained, and also as a modern race man determined to build a church community committed not only to civil rights but to the day-to-day problems that afflicted so many on the South Side: crime, gangs, drugs, pregnant teenagers, discrimination, poverty, poor education.
Wright began at Trinity with fewer than a hundred worshippers. At first, he told Roger Wilkins for the 1987 PBS documentary "Keeping the Faith," Trinity was a "white church in blackface." Eventually, he expanded the church to more than six thousand parishioners. He created dozens of educational programs and became one of the leading exemplars of black-liberation theology in the country. Wright's politics embraced not only the liberal and radical leaders of civil rights and Black Power--in 1977, he hung up a banner on the church reading, "Free South Africa"--but also an unusually progressive set of social views. He approved of female pastors, preached tolerance of homosexuals, and provided counseling for victims of H.I.V./AIDS. Above all, Wright was considered a brilliant preacher. In 1993, Ebony published a poll of the top fifteen black preachers in the country; Wright was second only to Gardner Taylor, and was one of the youngest in an august group including Samuel D. Proctor, Charles Adams, and Otis Moss, Jr.
An important contemporary intellectual influence on Wright and his church was James Cone, a brilliant young professor of divinity from Fordyce, Arkansas. After enduring the humiliations of the Jim Crow South in his youth, Cone reacted to the ferment of the 1967 riots in Detroit by writing Black Theology and Black Power, an impassioned manifesto for a black church determined to "emancipate the gospel from its 'whiteness' so that blacks may be capable of making an honest self-affirmation through Jesus Christ." The book was published in 1969, when Cone was thirty-one.
A student of the modern European theologians--Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, in particular--Cone recognized that, while his church preached justice and mercy, it had little or nothing to say about the suffering in his community. In an America that continued to oppress blacks, the church that preached a gospel of Christ must demand radical change: "Unless theology can become 'ghetto theology,' a theology which speaks to black people, the gospel message has no promise of life for the black man--it is a lifeless message." Cone had thought about leaving the church but decided instead to transform it. Blackness, for Cone, became a central metaphor for Christian suffering and Christianity itself a "religion of protest against the suffering and affliction of man." The text of Black Theology and Black Power cites the European theologians that Cone had been studying as a divinity student and as a young pastor, but it also leans on the ideas and language of Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon, the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Its tone is unapologetically ferocious. By way of explanation (and certainly not apology), Cone quotes Baldwin: "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in rage almost all of the time." Cone's book conceives a radical synthesis of Christian faith and Black Power, King's message of love and Malcolm's of insistence. For Cone, Christianity must focus on the oppressed, and for that role God has obviously chosen black men and women. (At times, Cone cautions that his concept of "blackness" is not restricted to African-Americans but, rather, is a metaphor for the dispossessed; he is not a separatist or a supremacist.)
Cone reminds the reader that the American black church, born in slavery, was a singular institution, posed against a white society that had robbed black men and women of their liberty, families, languages, and social cohesion. The spirituals, Cone writes, were not merely protest songs but a "psychological adjustment to the existence of serfdom."
The black-liberation theology that Cone conceived and that Wright brought to his church is rooted in nineteenth-century ideas: in David Walker's abolitionist Appeal, published in 1829, which refers to the "God of the Ethiopians"; in Frederick Douglass's slave narrative that distinguishes between the Christianity of Jesus Christ ("good, pure, and holy") and Christianity in America ("bad, corrupt, and wicked"); in Bishop Henry McNeal Turner's newspaper, Voice of Missions, where he wrote, "We have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that God is a Negro, as you buckra or white people have to believe that God is a fine looking, symmetrical and ornamented white man." In The Negro Church in America, E. Franklin Frazier writes, "The 'color' of God could only assume importance in a society in which color played a major part in the determination of human capacity, human privilege, and human value. It was not and is not a question of whether God is physically black, but it is a question of whether a man who is black can identify with a white God and can depend on His love and protection." Cone and Wright were part of a deep tradition when they married notions of rebellion and faith. Black-liberation theologians reminded their readers that Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey were not just rebel slaves; they were preachers. The A.M.E. Zion Church was known as the "freedom church," because it was a spiritual home for abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Eliza Ann Gardner.
Wright was not a pure follower of Cone. Relying on his own reading in Afrocentric history and theology, Wright rejected Cone's notion that the white slave masters had stripped the black man of his spiritual and cultural links to Africa. Unlike Cone, Wright insisted on the African origins of spirituals and the blues; he was more deeply influenced by Afrocentric thinking, in general. In church, Wright often wore African-patterned robes. He also came to believe in some of the more dubious theories linked to Afrocentrism. For instance, to explain the so-called differences in European and African "learning styles," Wright endorsed the idea that Africans and African-Americans were "right-brain" people, who are not "object-oriented" but, rather, "subject-oriented": "They learn from a person" rather than a book.
Initially, Obama approached Wright as an organizer. He wanted Trinity, with its thousands of parishioners, to consider joining a coalition of other churches on the South Side.
Wright welcomed the young man but laughed at his idea. "That isn't going to happen in this city," he said. "I ain't seen it. I've been in this city since 1969. We don't agree with each other on whether you baptize in the name of Jesus or baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost." The churches in Chicago, he insisted, were just too various, too at odds. Some believe in speaking in tongues, some are sedate and traditional. Some support homosexuals and female ministers; others, most decidedly, did not. The divisions ran deeper than the divisions between Orthodox and Conservative Jews, between Hasidim and Reform, Wright said. The idea of organizing all the churches in and around Roseland, as Obama proposed, was impossible. Wright teased Obama for his dewy idealism, saying, "You know what Joseph's brothers said when they saw him coming across the field: 'Behold, the dreamer!'"
Wright's reaction was typical among the pastors of some of the largest black churches on the South Side. Ministers like James Meeks, at Salem Baptist, told organizers that it was easier for them, politically, if they just picked up the telephone and called the Mayor. Meeks worked with the Developing Communities Project for a short while, Alvin Love recalled, "but Barack couldn't keep him in. One of the biggest problems for a community organizer is managing egos when you deal with the pastors." Wright, Love said, "figured he was already way ahead of any organizer on social-justice issues. Why deal with an organizer?"
Nevertheless, Obama was fascinated by Jeremiah Wright and began to discuss more intimate things with him. Ann Dunham had always described herself as "spiritual" and did not hesitate to have her children read sections of the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and other religious texts, but she was never a churchgoer, never a believer in the standard sense. Not having been brought up in the church, Obama was full of questions, academic and theological. Wright said, "His search was: 'I need a faith that doesn't put other people's faiths down, and all I'm hearing about is you're going to hell if you don't believe what I believe.' He didn't hear that from me."
Obama's colleagues were not surprised that he had found his way to the black church--particularly to Jeremiah Wright and Trinity. "Barack had no problem moving into the black church because it is rooted in social justice," Kellman said. "Some ministers can be awful and 'Where is mine,' but historically, this church saw these folks through from slavery. It was almost all they had to work with and it still is around these communities. He was vaguely aware of this but until he came to Chicago he didn't experience it. He had heard tapes of King, the music of it. He knew the church was central to the civil-rights movement. He wanted to be part of a community of people who make values part of the center of their lives. In Judaism, there is no individual salvation. It's community. Barack moves into that sense of the church. It took him years to figure out how to use some of that in his own rhetoric."
If it was merely a large and influential church he sought, Obama could have chosen the Reverend Arthur Brazier's enormous Pentecostal church on the South Side. Brazier had worked with Alinsky in the Woodlawn Organization and had been one of the black ministers who stood by King in Chicago. But Wright was even more politically involved and more progressive. "Reverend Wright and I are on different levels of Christian perspective," Brazier said. "Reverend Wright is more into black liberation, he is more of a humanitarian type who sought to free African-Americans from plantation politics. My view was more on the spiritual side. I was more concerned, as I am today, with people accepting Jesus Christ. Winning souls for Christ. The civil-rights movement was an adjunct; as a Christian, you couldn't close your eyes to the injustice. But in my opinion the church was not established to do that. It was to win souls for Christ."
The more Obama attended services at Trinity, the more Wright's rhetoric infused his thinking and language. Obama admired the way Wright responded to the needs of his community--he helped parishioners with AIDS, created support groups for addicts and alcoholics, developed an "African-centered" grade school, the Kwame Nkrumah Academy, and, every summer, took church members to Africa.
The political pronouncements by Wright that, two decades later, plagued Obama's Presidential run were not yet in evidence. "The only troublesome issue was how to relate to Louis Farrakhan," Kellman recalled. "And in the black community people were willing to cross the line and not care about anti-Semitism as long as he was helping people. And I don't think Barack was engaging Wright on that issue."
Obama's black and white friends say that his motives for joining Trinity were complicated, yet Trinity was undeniably a "power church" in town. Obama "saw it as a power base," Mike Kruglik said. "You can't interpret what Obama does without thinking of the power factor. Even then. For a long time, I wouldn't talk about this, but he told me way back then that he was intrigued by the possibility of becoming mayor of Chicago. His analysis was that the mayor in this town is extremely powerful and all the problems he was dealing with then could be solved if the mayor was focused on them."
In fact, Obama, who was working with the poor and the working class, was initially concerned about Trinity from a class point of view. There were black churches--and white churches, too--that put affluence next to godliness and he wanted to make sure that he was in the right place. "Some people say that Trinity is too upwardly mobile," he remarked to Wright.
In 1981, a committee at Trinity, chaired by a parishioner named Vallmer Jordan, had adopted a twelve-point document of "self-determination" called "The Black Value System." The document, which was written under the influence of the Black Power movement and came under scrutiny during Obama's Presidential campaign, calls for commitment to God, the black community, and family, dedication to education ("We must forswear anti-intellectualism"), a strong work ethic and self-discipline, charity for black institutions, and support for worthy black politicians. Article 8, on the "disavowal of the pursuit of 'middleclassness,'" warns that the black community is weakened by the division between its most fortunate and talented members and those whose lives are consumed by misfortune, crime, and incarceration ("placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons"). And while it is permissible to pursue middle-class prosperity "with all our might," members of the community must be wary of being seduced "into a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of 'we' and 'they' instead of 'us.'"
Vallmer Jordan admitted that there had been a "hunk of resistance" to the article on "middleclassness" among church members, until it was made very clear to congregants, not least to the substantial number of well-to-do members who no longer lived in the neighborhood, and who drove to church each Sunday, that they were being warned against their own potential alienation, a drift away from the community.
"We refuse to be silk-stocking," Wright says. The standing joke is that Trinity has B.A.s, B.D.s, M.D.s, J.D.s, Ph.D.s, and A.D.C.s, too--Aid to Dependent Children. "We've got welfare, those letters don't matter here," Wright said. "What matters is that you're made in the image of God. That kind of message, and trying to push that kind of message, is what makes us different."
When conservative critics suggested during the campaign that Trinity's Black Value System was a kind of black-nationalist manifesto, Obama replied, "Those are values that the conservative movement in particular has suggested are necessary for black advancement. So I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a document that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help."
After a couple of years, Obama had built the Developing Communities Project into a good, small program, but he could readily see its limits. His relationship with Kellman had grown frayed at times, but they still were able to meet, take walks, talk about their work and politics. Obama found himself thinking about a larger arena, about ways to make a greater impact. Obama knew that he could not live the conventional life of a corporate lawyer or executive. Once, Kellman sent him out to Northbrook on a project, and Obama found himself dressing in a suit and commuting on the train. "I never want to do this on a regular basis," Obama told him. "I can't live like this. It's my idea of a nightmare."
In late October, 1987, his third year as an organizer, Obama went with Kellman to a conference on the black church and social justice at the Harvard Divinity School. One night, as they took a walk in Cambridge, Obama told Kellman that he was thinking seriously about leaving Chicago. Obama talked with him about his father, about how he was learning from encounters with various half siblings how Barack, Sr., had lived the last years of his life--impotent with rage, unable to fulfill any of the personal and political dreams he had had when he was a promising student at the University of Hawaii. Obama was determined to do better; he was determined to acquire the proper tools to make his mark on a far broader canvas than he ever could as a community organizer.
It was time, Obama told Kellman, for him to get a legal education. He wanted to go to Harvard.
"Harvard Law School was also a personal security decision," Kellman said. "He wanted to make a living, a decent living. He wasn't a materialist at all. He wanted security to support a family." Money certainly was a part of his decision. By then, Obama's salary had gone up to thirty-five thousand dollars. He was not uninterested in making more than that. He wanted a family, and a reliable income. But above all he wanted to move on, acquire the tools he needed for politics. More often than not, Obama said, organizing ended up in failure; the gains were too small, too rare. Kellman, who soon left organizing himself for a while, did not argue the point. If anything, his level of frustration ran deeper. The conversations at the divinity school intensified Kellman's conviction that one day Obama would return to Chicago and run for public office.
On November 25, 1987, Harold Washington, who had been reelected the year before, died at his desk at City Hall--a death, Obama wrote, that was "sudden, simple, final, almost ridiculous in its ordinariness." Like most of the city, Obama spent much of that Thanksgiving weekend watching on television as the lines of mourners at City Hall stood in the cold rain; he listened to WVON, the main black talk-radio station in town, take calls from African-Americans who regarded Washington as a fallen king. In many ways, Obama revered Washington, but he also despaired that Washington had not left behind a strong political organization: "Black politics had centered on one man who radiated like a sun." After eight days of negotiations, the City Council installed Eugene Sawyer, a black member of the old machine, as mayor. Sawyer had shown support for Washington but now had to rely on the white conservative aldermen like the "Eddies," Edward Vrdolyak and Ed Burke, Washington's archenemies in what was known as the "Council Wars." (Vrdolyak, the epitome of a corrupt machine alderman, finally ended his long career in 2008 with a string of federal indictments and a conviction for mail and wire fraud.)
Obama went to City Hall to witness what he called "the second death": Sawyer's official elevation. Outside, Obama watched as the crowd, mainly older black men and women, denounced the African-American aldermen who were doing business with Vrdolyak and waved dollar bills at Sawyer, calling him an Uncle Tom. In the weeks after Washington's death and the sorry spectacle of Sawyer's installation, some of Obama's friends, including Mike Kruglik, became even more convinced that he would one day return to Chicago and run for office.
Toward the end of his time as an organizer, Obama met with Bruce Orenstein, an organizer for the United Neighborhood Organization, who had worked with him in an attempt to devise a way to profit off of the local landfills to fund community improvements on the far South Side. A proposal they had put together had won support from Harold Washington, but it collapsed after he died. Sawyer was not Harold Washington. Both Obama and Orenstein were frustrated and ready to move on--Obama to law school, Orenstein into video projects. When Orenstein asked him over a beer where he planned to be in ten years, Obama replied, "I'm going to write a book and I want to be mayor of Chicago."
Obama asked John McKnight, a co-founder, with Greg Galluzzo, of the Gamaliel Foundation and a professor of communications at Northwestern, and Michael Baron, his politics professor at Columbia, to write letters of recommendation for him to Harvard Law. (He also applied to Yale and Stanford.) McKnight had met Obama when he arrived in Chicago as a trainee. Obama told him that now that he had seen what could be done on a "neighborhood level," he wanted to explore what could be done in public life. McKnight, who has been involved with organizing for decades, and who shared the organizer's traditional wariness of politicians, cautioned him: an organizer was an advocate for people and their interests; a politician, he said, is "the reverse," someone who synthesizes and compromises interests. Would he be satisfied with that? "That's why I want to go into public life," Obama replied. McKnight agreed to write the letter. He had the idea that Obama had not received exceptional grades as an undergraduate--"I don't think he did too well in college"--but he had been deeply impressed by his intelligence and his commitment as an organizer.
Just after he left his job as an organizer, Obama published a short article in a local monthly, Illinois Issues, entitled "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City." In the article, Obama makes clear that he came away from the experience in Chicago believing that neither electoral politics nor government development programs would help the inner cities unless they were "undergirded by a systemic approach to community organization." Despite the hope created by the election of black mayors like Washington, in Chicago, and in Gary, Indiana, the high-school dropout rates were still at nearly fifty per cent; the old forms of discrimination had been replaced by institutional racism; the flight of the middle class and a Reagan-era decline in public support had left inner cities in despair.
Obama was not entirely frustrated with his experience in Chicago. He credited the Developing Communities Project and programs like it with gains in job training, school accountability, and better crime and drug programs. He and his colleagues had been able to set up a jobs-training center on Michigan Avenue in Roseland, on the site of a shut-down department store. (Harold Washington himself came to the ribbon-cutting.) And yet, like so many projects that Obama and his fellow organizers worked on, the jobs initiative floundered because there was so little work around. The center closed after three years. "I do know that we got some training done," Alvin Love said. "But I don't know how many people really got new jobs."
By 1988, Obama's ideas about organizing no longer focused much on Saul Alinsky. For Obama, organizing was a way of thinking about fixing specific problems and also building a culture. "We tend to think of organizing as a mechanical, instrumental thing," Obama said in 1989 at a roundtable discussion organized by the Woods Charitable Fund, in Chicago. "I think Alinsky to some extent may not have emphasized this, but I think the unions that Alinsky saw--I think John L. Lewis understood that he was building a culture. When you look at what's happened to union organizing, one of the losses has been that sense of building a culture, of building up stories and getting people to reflect on what their lives mean and how people in the neighborhood can be heroes, and how they are part of a larger force. That got shoved to the side."
Obama now saw Alinsky's theories and opinions as deeply flawed. Alinsky's critique of Martin Luther King, for example, showed a dismissal not only of charismatic leadership but also of long-term vision. Obama particularly disputed Alinsky's emphasis on confrontation. He thought the time had come to find new ways to reach young African-Americans. "They are not necessarily going to town hall meetings, and they are not going to pick up Reveille for Radicals," Obama said. "They are going to see the Spike Lee film, or they are going to listen to the rap group."
Obama was clearly thinking about broader politics now and about how he, or anyone, could bring the experience of organizing to elected office. "How do you link up some of the most important lessons about organizing--accounting, training, leadership, and that stuff--with some powerful messages that came out of the civil-rights movement or what Jesse Jackson has done or what's been done by other charismatic leaders?" he asked the panel. "A whole sense of hope is generated out of what they do. Jesse Jackson can go into these communities and get these people excited and inspired. The organizational framework to consolidate that is missing. The best organizers in the black community right now are the crack dealers. They are fantastic. There's tremendous entrepreneurship and skill. So when I talk about vision or culture it has to do with how organizing in those communities can't just be instrumental. It can't just be civic. It can't just be, 'Let's get power, call in the alderman,' etc. It has to be recreating and recasting how these communities think about themselves."
Obama could not have foreseen the full scope of his political future, but it's evident that he was thinking about the effect that someone like him could have both in imbuing a community with a sense of hope and in providing the organized framework for making that hope an asset for reform. He rejected organizing's "suspicion of politics." To disdain politics, he told the panel, was to disdain "a major arena of power. That's where your major dialogue, discussion, is taking place. To marginalize yourself from that process is a damaging thing, and one that needs to be rethought."
Obama, who had been attracted to community organizing by the example and the romance of the civil-rights movement, was, by the time his experience with it was over, thinking about how to combine elements of charismatic leadership, the principles of organizing, and a set of liberal political and policy principles. He was no longer interested in being an outsider; his thoughts were turning to elective politics. Going to law school--and, not incidentally, going to an institution like Harvard--was part of learning the fundamentals of a system he had seen mainly from the street.
Obama never completely left the world of community organizing. On vacations from law school, he visited a new girlfriend in Chicago named Michelle Robinson, and also Kellman and Kruglik. He later served on the boards of the Woods Fund and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, which helped fund organizing efforts in the city. He spoke at numerous retreats and training sessions. And while he learned a tremendous amount from his experience, he had also come to embrace the possibilities of charismatic leaders--whether an outsider like King or an insider like Washington--and what can be reaped in a political process of battle and compromise.
In May, 1988, Obama made a clean break with the first chapter of his life in Chicago. He had split up with his old girlfriend. ("I ran into her a couple of weeks after he left and she seemed upset, brokenhearted," John Owens recalled. "Barack tends to make a strong impression on women.")
As Obama handed over the leadership of the Developing Communities Project to Owens, he was determined to work on a broader level. "Barack's biggest success in Chicago had not been in bricks and mortar," his friend and comrade Reverend Alvin Love said. "He'd found out things about himself and his community. That was important. But what he really did was give people like me and Loretta, John Owens, and Yvonne Lloyd, and dozens and dozens of others, the tools to keep the work going, whether he was around or not."
Before leaving, Obama gave his cat, Max, to Jerry Kellman. Then he said good-bye to his friends and drove out of town.