Young Mr. Obama (3 page)

“That's fine,” Augustine said. “But the reason we're here is—”

“You don't even know what I do,” Cerda retorted.

From the back of the room, a baritone voice broke the stalemate.

“Let Loretta speak!”

It was Obama, with his hand cupped over his mouth.

“We want to hear what Loretta has to say!”

The entire crowd took up the cry.

“Let Loretta speak!” they shouted.

Loretta spoke, and Cerda agreed to a series of meetings on bringing a center to the far South Side. It took six months of negotiations, and the MET decided to put the center in less-remote Roseland, but that was a victory because Roseland is only a fifteen-minute bus ride from Altgeld. It was a lot closer than South Chicago and a lot friendlier to blacks.

Even more exciting was the news that Mayor Washington would attend the ribbon cutting. A mayoral visit was a pageant that would fill South Michigan Avenue. Obama's phone blew up with calls from neighborhood politicians and pastors, begging for the chance to introduce Harold. It was his very first taste of power—for fifteen minutes, he would hold the most precious coin in Chicago politics, access to the mayor. Had Obama been more familiar with the Machine, he might have allowed the alderman or the state senator to speak before Washington, collecting chits he could cash in when he lobbied the city and state for money. Instead, he asked Loretta Augustine to introduce the mayor. That would promote the DCP, which had after all brought the intake center to Roseland. While Augustine had the mayor's attention, Obama instructed her, she should invite him to the organization's big rally that fall.

It was a raw spring day, with clouds the color of stone. Augustine dressed in a ruffled shirt and a belted trench coat, the nicest outfit she could afford on her salary as a teacher for the archdiocese. She waited nervously for the mayor on the windy street, which was blocked off with sawhorses for his arrival. When the limousine pulled up, the mayor popped out and waved to the crowd. A stout but nimble figure, he walked over to Augustine and gave her a hug.

“Ms. Augustine,” said the bachelor mayor in the manner of a practiced ladies' man, “it's a pleasure to meet you.”

“Do you mind if I take your arm?” Augustine asked. It was her job to stay close to the mayor. Plus, if she let him go, she'd be overwhelmed by the throng following him down the street. Everyone wanted to shake Harold's hand.

The pair strolled past the remnants of Roseland's commercial glory: Herman's Army Store, Old Fashioned Donuts, and the Ranch, a Western-themed steakhouse with photos of Roy Rogers and Tom Mix in its booths. Augustine pointed out the new facades on the Roaring Twenties storefronts.

When they reached the new intake center, Augustine gave a brief speech.

“This is the kind of success we can have when the community comes together,” she said.

Reverend Alvin Love had walked the four blocks from his church to watch the ribbon cutting. It was a big day in Roseland's history, he thought. Before, if you'd wanted anything from the city, you had to go through the alderman or a city hall bureaucrat who didn't know jack about the neighborhood. Before Obama walked into his study, Love had never heard of community organizing or Saul Alinsky. Now this little group of priests and preachers and housewives he'd joined was working in exactly the way Alinsky had intended, as Chicago's second party, a way for ordinary people to improve their neighborhoods without going begging to the Machine. It did help that the city had a mayor who'd beaten the Machine himself, with the help of just these sorts of church-basement groups. Community groups were welcome in the mayor's fifth-floor office. It hadn't been that way when Daley presided there. Organizers who worked in Chicago in the 1980s would recall the Washington years as a golden age, “a fantastic time to be a community person.”

After Washington cut the ribbon, Augustine sighed with relief and headed for the punch bowl. Seeing her alone, Obama ran over in a panic.

“Where's the mayor?” he demanded. “You're supposed to be with him until he gets in his limo. You're supposed to ask about the rally.”

Augustine gulped her punch and found the mayor, just in time to invite him to the DCP's fall rally. An assistant jotted down the information. Just as Obama had ordered, Augustine stayed by the mayor's side until the black car pulled up in front of the center. The MET did bring jobs to Altgeld. That summer, it hired teenagers to staff a program for children in the Our Lady of the Gardens gym. It also showed skeptical African-American pastors that Obama's Developing Communities Project could get city hall's attention.

“I think he really helped us to get organized in an effective way,” Father Carmon would remember. “We had tried before to get the city's attention. When he came in, things really began to move.”

The center stayed open only a few years, but that day on Michigan Avenue was historic nonetheless. It was the only time Barack Obama came face-to-face with Harold Washington. And if Harold Washington had never been mayor of Chicago, Barack Obama would not have become president of the United States.

Chapter 2

HAROLD

I N   T H E   S O U T H   S I D E
precincts where he'd received a near-unanimous share of the vote in the last mayoral election, Harold Washington was simply “Harold,” a beloved character whose official portrait grinned from the walls of beauty shops and four
A.M.
taverns, occupying the same position of reverence as St. Anthony of Padua in the homes of Italian Catholics. The black community was his family, because he had no family of his own. Long divorced, childless, he lived alone in a Hyde Park high-rise, his one-bedroom apartment barren except for piles of books and newspapers. He was not so much ascetic as indifferent to anything except politics. His ties were stained. His home-cooked meals were cans of Campbell's soup boiled in the can, because that didn't dirty a pot. As a young man, he had been a track star at DuSable High School, but as mayor, he ate so many deep-dish pizzas and Wendy's cheeseburgers that he snorted, “I can't run around a dime.” A friend bought Washington an exercise bike, but it sat unpedaled in his living room. The mayor's idea of recreation was to leave city hall early on Thursday so he could spend the afternoon on political work.

Washington had begun his political career during the reign of Richard J. Daley, when most Chicagoans would have found a black mayor as horrifying as a black next-door neighbor or a black son-in-law. (A lot of them still felt that way even after he won. On the morning after Washington's victory in the Democratic primary,
Chicago Sun-Times
wiseass Mike Royko began his column, “So I told Uncle Chester—‘don't worry. Harold Washington doesn't want to marry your sister.' ”)

Had it not been for Washington, Barack Obama might never have left New York. Obama wanted to live in a city with a strong African-American community, a community that controlled its own destiny. In the mid-1980s, that was Chicago.

“I originally moved to Chicago in part because of the inspiration of Mayor Washington's campaign,” Obama would tell the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in 2008 as he received its Harold Washington Award. “For those of you who recall that era, and recall Chicago at that time, it's hard to forget the sense of possibility that he sparked in people. I'll never forget how he reached out to everyone—black, brown, and white—to build a coalition for change.”

Had it not been for Washington, who ruled for four and a half years without setting off a white-flight panic to the suburbs, black politicians would not have gained the confidence to run for the U.S. Senate, and whites wouldn't have had the confidence to vote for them. Blacks already had a long history of wielding political power in Chicago, but Washington was the linchpin figure who inspired them to expand their influence throughout the state of Illinois, and finally, across the nation.

“Everybody owes something to Harold Washington, because [his election] was something they never thought could happen,” says Lou Ransom, editor of the
Chicago Defender
, the city's African-American newspaper. “If Harold can be mayor, what can't we do? Obama talks about the audacity of hope. That audacity grew into the notion that a black man can be president of the United States.”

The black political culture that lifted Washington to city hall—and Obama to the White House—began developing even before Washington was born, in 1922. It had its roots in the First Great Migration from the South, which occurred during World War I, when blacks were needed in war industries to replace whites who had been drafted or gone home to Europe to fight for their native countries. Between 1916 and 1920, fifty thousand blacks moved to Chicago, riding north on the Illinois Central Railroad's “Fried Chicken Special,” which traveled from the Mississippi Delta to the terminal at Twelfth and Michigan in fifteen hours, fast enough to get by on one box lunch. Many were lured by the promises of jobs and freedom in the
Defender
, which was left in train stations all over the South by Pullman porters.

“Have they stopped their Jim Crow cars?” the
Defender
asked its Southern readers. “Can you buy a Pullman sleeper when you wish? Will they give you a square deal in court yet? 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.” ' ”

Mississippi bluesman Skip James sang about this land of promise in “Illinois Blues,” letting his fellow blacks know that life in Chicago was better than chopping wood in a Delta lumber camp:

You know, I been in Texas and I been in Arkansas

I been in Texas and I been in Arkansas

But I never had a good time till I got to Illinois

Timuel Black's parents came to Chicago in 1919 as part of that migration. Black's father was educated enough to read, write, and count, and self-confident enough to show up at the polling places on Election Day, always with a pistol in his pocket for protection. These qualities marked him as a troublemaker in Birmingham, Alabama—a “bad ass nigger,” in the words of his son, who would become black Chicago's most prominent historian. The Black family was met at the Illinois Central station by relatives, who instructed them on how to behave in Chicago: Don't spit on the sidewalk; wear a suit, not a pair of overalls. If you're reading the
Defender
, put it behind a copy of the
Tribune
, so white folks can't see what you're up to.

Illinois was the Land of Lincoln, home of the man who had freed the slaves, so its race laws were extremely liberal for the era. Blacks had been granted the right to vote in 1870, and the first black was elected to the state legislature in 1876, just as post-Reconstruction politicians were stripping Southern blacks of their short-lived franchise. School segregation was illegal, and a civil rights law guaranteed political equality.

There was, however, a price for this freedom. It was distilled into this saying: “In the South, the white man doesn't care how close you get, as long as you don't get too high. In the North, he doesn't care how high you get, as long as you don't get too close.” Chicago's blacks were confined to a long, narrow ghetto known as the Black Belt. It was bounded by Twenty-fourth Street on the north, Thirty-ninth Street on the south, the Rock Island Railroad tracks on the east, and Cottage Grove Avenue on the west. As the black population grew during and after World War I, the Black Belt stayed the same size. The whites made sure of that, both through genteel restrictive covenants among real estate agents and thuggish violence by Irish “athletic clubs,” including the Hamburgs, who counted among their members a teenage Dick Daley. Between 1917 and 1921, fifty-eight homes were bombed by whites who resented the new migrants. In the summer of 1919, a lethal race riot broke out after a young black swimmer was stoned to death for drifting too close to a white beach. Fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks were killed, as young Irish toughs dragged blacks from streetcars and black snipers took potshots at hapless white deliverymen. Over a thousand homes were torched.

The riot taught blacks to stay on their side of the color line. By the end of the 1920s, more than three hundred thousand were corralled into the overcrowded, overpriced, rat-infested slum later portrayed in Richard Wright's
Native Son
and Gwendolyn Brooks's
A Street in Bronzeville
. Its population density and disease rates were four times that of the surrounding white neighborhoods.

It was this segregation, though, that allowed Chicago's blacks to achieve political power more rapidly than any community in the country. In that era, blacks still belonged to the Party of Lincoln. Their votes were welcomed by Republican mayor William Hale Thompson, who saw them as a bloc to counter the Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants who allied with the Democrats. By the late teens, blacks made up a majority in two of the city's fifty wards. They were fanatically loyal to Thompson, who led Chicago through most of the Roaring Twenties. In the 1919 mayoral election, the Black Belt gave Thompson 80 percent of its vote, as well as an admiring nickname: “the Little Lincoln.” Following the great tradition of Chicago patronage, Thompson rewarded their loyalty with jobs, so many jobs that white Democrats derisively called city hall “Uncle Tom's Cabin.” Edward H. Wright, boss of the all-black First Ward, became Thompson's assistant corporation counsel.

The election contributed to the tension that erupted in the race riot. According to
Boss
, Mike Royko's biography of the first Mayor Daley, “Besides the threat they posed in housing and job competition, the blacks had antagonized the heavily Democratic white neighborhoods by voting Republican. They were given credit for Republican mayor William Thompson's slim victory that spring.” During the campaign, Democrats had driven calliopes playing “Bye, Bye Blackbird” through white neighborhoods and passed out a leaflet depicting Thompson as the engineer of a trainload of Negroes. “This train will start for Chicago, April 6, if Thompson is elected,” the leaflet promised.

More importantly, blacks had their own alderman. Oscar DePriest, first elected to the city council in 1915, would become America's most significant black politician between Reconstruction and World War II. Like many prominent blacks of that era, DePriest was of mixed race—a “quadroon,” three-quarters white. His parents had been so active in Alabama's Reconstruction politics that they fled to Kansas after the Jim Crow laws were passed, fearing for their lives. DePriest arrived in Chicago in 1889, where he worked as a housepainter, sometimes passing for white to get jobs. Immediately, DePriest showed a talent for ward politics. A friend invited him to a meeting, where two candidates were vying for a precinct captain post. DePriest exploited the deadlock to win his first political office.

“The vote was twenty-twenty for rival candidates, and I saw right away that a deal could be made,” DePriest would recall. “So I went to one of the candidates and said, ‘Now you're the one who ought to be captain—I'll give you two additional votes if you make me secretary.' The man refused. I went to his rival and made the same proposition. He accepted. I was made secretary. I kept at it because it was recreation to me. I always like a good fight; the chance, the suspense, interest me. I never gambled nor played cards so it was fun to me.”

DePriest was one of Chicago's great rogue politicians. Chicago's red-light district was in his ward, having migrated south following the Great Fire of 1871. After only two years on the city council, DePriest was indicted for taking money from brothels and gambling houses, and passing it on to the cops as protection. Defended by Clarence Darrow, he was acquitted but ordered not to run again by the Republican Machine.

DePriest kept his hand in politics by starting his own machine, the six-thousand-member People's Movement, which backed him when his next opportunity arose. He made it back to the city council in 1927, the same year Thompson was returned to city hall with the support of Al Capone. Thompson appointed DePriest committeeman—party chief—of the Third Ward. The following year, DePriest dutifully supported the incumbent white congressman Martin P. Madden against a primary challenge from an up-and-coming black Republican named William Dawson. Madden won but died before the November election. DePriest was in Indiana, taking the baths at a spa with a group of black politicians, when he heard the news. The next morning, he was in Thompson's office, demanding the nomination.

“You know, Oscar, I am with you,” the mayor said.

One of DePriest's rival candidates, William H. Harrison, was an assistant attorney general of Illinois. In July, DePriest was indicted again, this time for allowing black racketeers to operate casinos. Harrison, a black independent who stood to gain by knocking DePriest off the ballot, offered to drop the charges if DePriest dropped his candidacy. DePriest told Harrison to “go to hell” and beat his white Democrat opponent by four thousand votes. Illinois's First Congressional District has had a black representative ever since, the longest run in the nation's history. The Voting Rights Act was decades away, but in Chicago, blacks were so concentrated on the South Side that whites couldn't gerrymander them out of a seat.

Washington, D.C., had not seen a black congressman since 1901, when North Carolina's George White gave a valediction declaring his defeat “the Negro's temporary farewell to the American Congress.” DePriest wasn't just the South Side's representative. He stood for his entire race. In his maiden speech, favoring a bill to investigate American imperialism in Haiti, he scolded Democrats for caring more about West Indians than sharecroppers.

“I am very glad to see the gentlemen on the minority side of the House so very solicitous about the conditions of the black people in Haiti,” DePriest said. “I wish to God they were equally solicitous about the black people in America.”

DePriest appointed blacks to Annapolis and West Point. He fought to fund D.C.'s all-black Howard University. In the Capitol, an Alabama senator tried to prevent DePriest from using the Senate dining room. You're not big enough to stop a black congressman from sitting where he wants, DePriest told the senator.

In Chicago, pride in the only black congressman ran deep. DePriest was a hero when he walked down Forty-third Street, in the heart of the Black Belt (which had expanded since World War I), visiting speakeasies with his son, Oscar Jr. White Chicago may have had a Second City complex toward New York City, but black Chicago didn't. New York wouldn't achieve black representation until 1944, when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was elected in Harlem. Harlem's population was more diverse, with blacks from the South Atlantic states, the West Indies, and Africa. It lacked the political unity of Chicago, where entire families and communities had migrated up from Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. New York also lacked factories and the fat paychecks they provided. When South Siders drove to New York to see Joe Louis fight, they paraded their sedans through Harlem to envious whistles.