Young Mr. Obama (7 page)

“I've learned what I can from this, and I've seen its possibilities and its limits, and I want to go into public life,” Obama said.

Obama asked McKnight to write him a letter of recommendation to Harvard. McKnight agreed but warned Obama that most organizers were unhappy in law and politics.

“The most important thing is what would you be satisfied with, because you have to do it every day,” he told his twenty-six-year-old protégé. “To do something that's unsatisfying is a waste of life.”

Lawyering, McKnight said, was nothing like organizing, “where you take the right position and fight for it to the end.” And the essence of an elected official's job was compromise. That's why Alinsky had discouraged his pupils from getting involved in lawsuits or partisan causes.

“Most people I know who are organizers would not be satisfied with politics,” McKnight concluded.

Obama understood, but he was still determined to follow his new course. McKnight wrote the letter, and Obama sent his application to Harvard.

After three years, Obama had not only learned all he could learn, he had also taught all he could teach. Thanks to Obama's training, the women of the DCP were starting to feel confident enough to undertake projects on their own. Waste Management Inc., America's largest trash hauler, operated the enormous landfill on 130th Street. The dump was a neighborhood blight. The tainted extract of sodden garbage leached into the groundwater through its porous clay lining. The gulls who perched on the Gardens' ziggurat rooflines were strays drawn away from the lake by the feast inside the dump. Word got out that Waste Management planned to expand into land abutting the O'Brien Lock, which allows river-going barges to enter Lake Michigan—the source of Chicago's drinking water. Alarmed, the DCP and the United Neighborhood Organization—a Latino group that goes by the acronym UNO—held a rally at Saints Peter and Paul Church in the South Chicago neighborhood. Two hundred people attended. That same night, Waste Management officials were meeting with community leaders in a conference room at South Chicago Bank, trying to win approval for the expansion. At seven o'clock, all two hundred demonstrators left the church and walked silently toward the bank. Once inside, they marched up the stairs and filed into the conference room without saying a word. The president of UNO read a statement about meeting behind closed doors to cut deals that would damage the far South Side. Then everyone left, as silently as they had entered.

Another rally, at the same church, was attended by the city's new mayor, Eugene Sawyer. Sawyer had been appointed to replace Harold Washington, who died of a heart attack on the day before Thanksgiving in 1987. DCP and UNO wanted a task force to debate the dump's expansion. Augustine prepared a speech. Since it was a bilingual crowd, she would have an interpreter. But she was asked to deliver one phrase in Spanish:
vamos a decide
. We will decide. Obama walked her through the presentation, including the pronunciation of those three words. When Augustine recited “
vamos a decide
” the room burst into cheers and chants of “We will decide!” For that performance, Augustine was appointed to cochair the task force, which succeeded in blocking Waste Management's plans. Obama, she believed, had given her the confidence to speak before a crowd.

“I wanted to follow him,” Augustine would say years later. “I wanted to be part of the things that I felt he could make happen, and I really wanted to learn. He brought out something in me. I was never that outgoing before. I would feel like something needed to be said but I was afraid to say it. He changed that dynamic to the [point] that when I would be at these meetings, and I knew something needed to be said, it was something inside of me that overcame that fear of speaking up and out that went from ‘Needs to be said, but I'm afraid' to ‘It needs to be said, and if I don't say it, even though I'm afraid, I'm gonna die. I have to say it.' ”

Johnnie Owens was surprised to hear Obama was quitting the DCP, even more surprised to hear he was quitting for Harvard Law School. Obama gave his assistant the news in a roundabout way that emphasized it would be a change for Owens, too.

“Are you ready to lead?” Obama asked Owens one day at the rectory.

“Lead?” Owens responded. “What are you talking about?”

“I've been accepted at Harvard.”

“What?”

Owens was thrilled for his boss. On the other hand, he wasn't sure he was ready to take over a community organization. He was going to have to run the fledgling Career Education Network and deal with two dozen pastors. And he'd be succeeding a leader who, in three years, had become beloved by his followers. Loretta Augustine, Yvonne Lloyd, and Margaret Bagby were as loyal to Obama as they were to the DCP.

To make the change easier, Obama took Owens around to all the DCP churches.

“I'm leaving,” he told his priests, bishops, and reverends. “John's gonna take over. I have complete confidence in him. If you like what I did, you'll like what he does even better.”

Some did. Owens ended up serving six years as the DCP's director, twice as long as Obama. Alvin Love, who eventually became president of the group, thought Owens was the best community organizer he'd ever met. But, he always added, Obama had trained him.

It was different for the women of the DCP. None of them had expected Obama to stay forever—he was too smart, too talented, to spend his life driving them to church-basement meetings in a decaying Honda. They wanted to see Obama go to Harvard, but when they lost him, they also lost some of their devotion to community organizing.

“We continued working, but I guess, I don't know, I dwindled away,” Margaret Bagby would say. “I just got tired, I guess.”

Eventually, all three women left Chicago. Bagby found a house in the suburbs, Augustine moved to Mississippi with her second husband, and Lloyd, by then widowed, went home to Nashville.

Just before Obama left for Harvard, he wrote an article about organizing for
Illinois Issues
, a statewide political journal. Entitled “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” it was later reprinted in the anthology
After Alinsky
.

Despite the success of the civil rights movement, the election of black mayors, and the Buy Black campaign, the inner city still suffered, Obama argued. In some ways, it was worse off, because middle-class blacks, who had once been bound there by restrictive covenants, were now free to leave, taking their money and education with them. Politicians and businesses couldn't transform the ghetto “unless undergirded by a systematic approach to community organizing.”

“Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement those solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership—and not one or two charismatic leaders—can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions,” Obama wrote.

Alinsky's disciples still believed an organizer's task was to wrest money and resources from powers outside the neighborhood. Why not, Obama suggested, build power within the neighborhood?

“Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.”

That could have been a manifesto for Obama's next Chicago endeavor, which he undertook the year after he came back from Harvard.

Chapter 4

PROJECT VOTE!

I N   H I S   T H I R D   Y E A R
of law school, Obama was named president of the
Harvard Law Review
, the first African-American to win that position. His election scored him a profile in the
New York Times
and even more job offers than most
Law Review
presidents have to fend off.

Obama was getting calls from judges and law firms all over the country. Abner Mikva, a former Chicago congressman then serving on the District of Columbia court of appeals, invited him to interview for a clerkship. The old gray judge had heard about Obama from one of his current clerks, a fellow Harvard law student. Most of Mikva's young assistants were Ivy League WASPs, so he was interested in diversifying his staff. At least an Ivy League black would be different. Mikva asked his clerk to approach Obama on her next trip back to Cambridge. She did but came back with bad news: “He doesn't want to interview with you.”

“Oh,” Mikva replied. “He's one of those uppity blacks who just wants to clerk for a black judge.”

“No,” the clerk said. “If he were going to clerk, he certainly would interview with you, but he's going back to Chicago and run for public office.”

Mikva was both floored and impressed. He himself had arrived in Chicago as an outsider, a Jew from Milwaukee who attended the University of Chicago Law School and decided to make his career in the city. On his first attempt to get into politics, he walked into a ward office and announced that he wanted to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson's campaign for governor. “Who sent you?” the man behind the desk demanded. Nobody, Mikva admitted. He was a volunteer. The ward heeler brushed him off with a phrase that became part of Chicago's political lore: “We don't want nobody nobody sent.”

That is one brash kid, thought Mikva, who didn't know that Obama had already spent three years on the South Side. You just didn't come to Chicago and say, “Here I am. Elect me.”

Obama could have gone to work at Sidley and Austin, the white-shoe Chicago law firm where he had interned over a summer and met his fiancé, Michelle Robinson, a fellow Harvard Law student who served as his mentor. But in spite of the money, Obama wasn't interested in becoming one of dozens of first-year associates in a corporate shop. Instead, he was responding to the courtship of Davis, Miner and Barnhill, a small firm specializing in civil rights litigation. One of its founders, Allison Davis Jr., was the son of the first black professor to win tenure at the University of Chicago. Another, Judson Miner, had been Harold Washington's corporate counsel. Miner called Obama after reading about his
Law Review
presidency in the
Chicago Sun-Times
. The piece mentioned that Obama was interested in civil rights and planned to come back to Chicago. Miner figured everyone in the country would be trying to hire this guy, but Davis, Miner
was
the leading civil rights firm in Chicago. He had nothing to lose by throwing his hat in the ring. Thinking, What the hell? he dialed the
Law Review
office and asked for Obama.

“Is this a recruiting call?” the secretary asked.

“Well, I really don't know the fella, so I guess it's a recruiting call,” Miner said. “It's a curiosity call.”

“All right,” she said with a sigh. “I'll put you on the list. You're number six hundred forty-three.”

“Okay. Great. Here's the deal. I'll let you use my name if you promise to call me as I percolate to the top, so I can prepare for this phone call.”

The secretary never called back. Obama did—that same day. When Miner returned home from an evening bike ride, his daughter told him that “a man with a very funny name” had left a message. Obama knew about Miner's work in the Washington administration. They agreed to have lunch the next time Obama came to Chicago for a job interview.

“You won't be offended if I fly there on another law firm's dime, will you?” Obama asked.

Miner ran a twelve-lawyer office, so he said no, he wouldn't.

They met at a Thai takeout joint and talked for three hours. Obama was impressed to learn that Davis, Miner gave legal advice to not-for-profits in the black and Latino community, helping them set up government partnerships. That offered the possibilty of continuing his work as an organizer.

“How satisfying is it dealing with these problems as a lawyer?” Obama asked Miner. “Have you ever thought you could have been more effective addressing those issues in some way other than being a lawyer?”

Miner went back to his office, called his wife, and told her he'd just had lunch with the most impressive law student he'd ever met. Like so many powerful, accomplished men before and after him, he had succumbed to Obama's talent for charming potential mentors.

“Gosh, I don't know that I've ever met a young man who was more comfortable with himself,” Miner gushed. “He's just enormously comfortable with his own intellectual capacity, and not in an offensive way at all, in an enormously positive way. He never once reminded me who he was. This kid has powerful credentials, but he didn't brag about that or say ‘I can do whatever I want.' He was just a curious kid who had a lot of questions. There was an even keel to him.”

After another half-dozen lunches, Obama agreed to join Davis, Miner. But, he said, he was going to need a year off first. He was working on a book, which would be published as
Dreams from My Father.
He didn't want to start full-time until he was sure the writing wouldn't be a distraction. And he'd agreed to head up a voter registration drive that summer. Miner knew that nearly every other law firm in Chicago was pursuing Obama, offering to pay for his bar exam and let him do whatever he wanted until he was ready to start. The first black president of the
Harvard Law Review
was the class of '91's most coveted rookie. So Miner said, “Fine, Barack. See you next year.”

Project Vote! was the brainchild of Sandy Newman, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and civil rights activist looking to register minority voters. Newman focused his efforts on D.C. and had only been tangentially involved with Chicago, donating money to the registration drive that helped elect Harold Washington. He'd avoided the city because in Chicago, voter registration was closely controlled by ward organizations, which typically paid street beaters a buck for every voter they signed up.

In the early 1990s, Chicago's black political community was in a funk. Washington had been dead for four years, and the new mayor, Richard M. Daley, had beaten black candidates two elections in a row. Blacks created the Harold Washington Party in an attempt to keep control of city hall, but the movement foundered without its namesake political genius. Washington had drawn in Latinos and white liberals with a message of inclusion; his would-be successors drove them away by shouting about black empowerment. Worn-out and discouraged by their loss of power, by 1991 Chicago blacks were voting at their lowest rate ever. As a transient community with a high proportion of renters, blacks needed continual reminders to register. It had been nearly a decade since anyone had given them a good reason. Newman thought a Project Vote! chapter might reverse that trend.

In search of a director, Newman called his community organizing contacts in the city. They kept mentioning this ex-organizer who'd just returned to town from Harvard Law School. So Newman hired Barack Obama.

Even before Obama registered a voter, Project Vote! got a huge break. Carol Moseley Braun was the Cook County recorder of deeds, an obscure clerical office, but she decided to seek the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate out of anger toward the incumbent, Alan Dixon, who had voted to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. A wealthy trial lawyer also ran, making it a three-way race. When the two white guys eviscerated each other, Moseley Braun slipped between them to win the March primary. Blacks were thrilled by the prospect of electing a sister to the all-white Senate.

As a grassroots campaign, Project Vote! was a bridge between Obama's past as a community organizer and his future as a politician. It was also a chance to duplicate the effort that had brought his idol Harold Washington to power.

Still a rube about the mechanics of Chicago politics, Obama went to see a West Side alderman who had worked on Washington's registration drive. He walked into Sam Burrell's office carrying a book bag, looking like a law student.

“You've been successful at this,” Obama said to Burrell.

Burrell gave Obama an explanation he probably didn't want to hear.

“The reason I'm so successful is that I reimburse them for expenses,” he explained. “I pay a dollar a vote.”

Burrell offered Obama the services of his office manager, Carol Anne Harwell. They set up headquarters on Michigan Avenue with a five-person staff. Officially, Harwell was a secretary, taking care of “the female things” around the office, but she became one of Obama's first guides to black Chicago politics. As a West Sider, she taught him that her part of town was different from the South Side he'd gotten to know. West Side blacks were even poorer than South Side blacks, she explained. Closer to their Southern roots. South Siders looked down on West Siders as “country,” while West Siders thought South Siders were stuck-up, “bourgeois.” That was all new to Obama.

“He didn't know anything,” Harwell would recall. “He was so naive. I gave him the address of a meeting on the West Side. We didn't have cell phones or pagers. Barack is very punctual. He was a couple of minutes late. He has this Kansas City twang. He said, ‘Y'all didn't think I was ever gonna get there. I had no idea Chicago is that big.' ”

It may have been the most intense summer of Obama's life, a test of the discipline and organization he had already shown as a community organizer and a law student. Not only was he running a voter registration drive, he was writing his memoir, studying for the bar exam, and preparing for his wedding to Michelle that fall. In exchange for $200,000 in seed money, Obama had promised Newman 150,000 new voters. In spite of Burrell's advice, he was adamant that he wasn't going to buy those names, Chicago-style. But Obama needed Burrell's operation, the United Voter Registration League, to sign up voters on the West Side. So he worked out an accounting trick that allowed him to look honest while still acknowledging the realities of inner-city politics. Burrell's workers were paid “expenses” for car fare and lunch. Inevitably, those expenses worked out to a dollar a voter.

On the South Side, with its older, more prosperous black community and better-established civic groups, Obama had an easier time finding volunteers. He started at his own church. Once Obama got Reverend Wright behind the campaign, he could count on forty or fifty bodies every weekend. (Trinity was the largest church in the Twenty-first Ward, so that was one alderman Obama didn't have to ask for help.) The NAACP and Operation PUSH contributed volunteers. So did ACORN, beginning Obama's long involvement with that activist group. They stood outside L stations, supermarkets, and welfare offices. They trolled Taste of Chicago, a civic eating festival that draws six-figure crowds to Grant Park, the great lakefront commons. Obama signed up voters at the Bud Billiken Parade, which marches through the South Side's black neighborhoods each July.

But not everyone embraced Project Vote! Obama got the brush-off from Lu Palmer, a militant journalist and radio host who ran the Black Independent Political Organization, a group that considered itself the torchbearer of Harold Washington's legacy. Palmer, who was practically a separatist, was suspicious of the half-white, half-Kenyan guy with the Harvard degree and the Hyde Park apartment.

“When Obama first hit town, my recollection is that he came here running some voter registration drive,” Palmer would say a few years later. “He came to our office and tried to get us involved, and we were turned off then. We sent him running. We didn't like his arrogance, his air.”

As a former organizer, Obama's instinct was to bypass politicians and work with community groups. Moseley Braun made that power-to-the-people ideal easy to achieve. Her primary campaign had been an insurgency against a regular Democrat: Alan Dixon, a former Illinois secretary of state, was a genial, undistinguished solon who went by the nickname “Al the Pal.” The ward bosses would have pushed harder for Dixon in the general election. But the NAACP chairmen and the church ladies in white gloves and feathered hats were thrilled to sign up voters for Moseley Braun. There had only been one black senator since Reconstruction. And there had never been a black woman. Project Vote! was officially nonpartisan, but it practically became an arm of the Moseley Braun campaign. “We have got to get Carol elected” was in the mind of every volunteer. All over town, blacks were telling registrars, “I want to register. Carol Moseley Braun is running for Senate.” Bill Clinton was also on the ballot that year, but in black Chicago, he hardly figured as a selling point.

Black pride was running high all over the country in 1992. It was the summer of Spike Lee's
Malcolm X
. Young people wore silver X baseball caps and black power T-shirts. One shirt bore the in-your-face motto
IT'S A BLACK THING, YOU WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND.
Another featured a triptych of three black idols, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela (who had just been released from prison and would soon be elected president of South Africa), with the legend
MARTIN, MALCOLM, MANDELA AND ME.

Obama wanted to tap into that spirit, so he asked his staff for a slogan that would connect Project Vote! to the legacy of Malcolm X.

Someone came up with “Register and Vote by Any Means Necessary.”

“It's kind of harsh,” said Obama, showing an ear for what would sound too militant to whites.