Public Enemy (33 page)

Kennedy sent me a letter back thanking me for my “thoughtful response” and my “kind words and support.” He reiterated his point about there being no place in a democracy to celebrate political assassinations and noted that the board decision “was not a personal or political matter, but simply a decision of the board.”

Some tricky lawyer—probably Thomas Bearrows—had to have written that last phrase, because merit is the only basis of emeritus status, and he would be hard-pressed to explain my promotion to Distinguished Professor on any other basis. Furthermore, the First Amendment prohibits using political criteria for employment decisions at public colleges, and the role of politics in this unprecedented action is unmistakable.

But Bearrows—who had previously defended me in his role as university counsel—was brought in to counter the Faculty Senate and others who were organized to object. He now endorsed the misrepresentation that I supported political assassinations and repeated the fabrication that I had never expressed any regret for my activities. He escalated the falsification when he asserted that I was a willing participant “in what can only be described as terrorist conduct.” I had never been charged, arrested, or convicted of “terrorist conduct.”

At that moment a controversy erupted in New York regarding an honorary doctorate for the justly acclaimed playwright Tony Kushner, which had been recommended to the City University of New York board of trustees by the faculty and administration, denied, and then approved in a rapid reversal because of a firestorm of protest. While the facts were different—and I was surely no Tony Kushner—the principles were similar. As the CUNY board chairman, Benno Schmidt Jr., noted, they had “made a mistake of principle, and not merely of policy,” and politics and personal opinion should not play a role in these types of things. The board (in that case, as well as the one at UIC) had no capacity to investigate nominees and no stated criteria to evaluate them; the board had never before rejected a nominee in its long history, even though it always had the legal right to do so. The board appeared capricious and arbitrary in its decision.

Being denied emeritus status didn’t mean a lot practically: losing my parking permit and my e-mail account—damn! But, really, who cares? Yet when the news hit the media, I immediately got phone calls from folks in parking and communication: “Fuck them,” said one older clerk. “You’ll get your parking sticker as long as I’m here.” And from a young woman computer nerd, “If Kennedy wants to take down your e-mail, let him try. I’ll find a way around it. Keep going.” And then I got another encouraging note from Espie Reyes: “I returned my emeritus award to Chris Kennedy and told him if you were not worthy, then I wasn’t either. I sent him your vitae and told him he owed you an apology.” Oh, Espie!

Best of all, a group of friends and faculty hosted a big retirement party on a Saturday night in a funky open space on Sixty-first and Blackstone. The Experimental Station is an innovative South Side social and cultural incubator home to the Blackstone Bicycle Works, B’Gabs Goodies Raw Vegan Deli, the Backstory Café, the 61st Street Farmers Market, the Invisible Institute, the art studios of the renowned Dan Peterman and the dazzling Theaster Gates, and once the
Baffler
magazine. It also hosts events ranging from book launches to theatrical performances to ARC events and rallies. The joint was teeming with a wild mash-up of art, political purpose, and life, while masquerading on the outside as a hulking, abandoned industrial relic.

Hundreds of people—political comrades, university colleagues, family and friends—crowded in, and the potluck tables groaned with plates of fried tofu in dill and basil, yummy homemade tamales, tasty grits with spicy greens, cardamom cake, and sweetened rice squares. Lovable Lisa Lee and her kids made a zillion astonishing cupcakes, each with a strip of paper bearing a quotation from one of my books toothpicked to the top like a delicious exhortation. People loaded up, ate, and talked, and then moved on to the dance floor as DJ Dave kept the party going with a mix of old and new. Bernardine and I swirled through the crowd, warm embraces and surprising homemade tattoos and buttons in every direction: “I pal around with Bernardine and Bill.” It was loud and sweaty, lovely and sweet.

Barbara Ransby stopped the music for a moment and invited just a few people to say a word or two to mark the moment—embarrassing but true—and my kids spoke. I choked up a little, and then Rachel DeWoskin read a poem she’d written for the occasion and I cried. Barbara Ransby presented a plaque to me that read: “The People’s Emeritus Award!” That was all I really wanted or needed. Then FM Supreme adapted and spit one of her classic pieces, and everyone joined in on the noisy refrain: “This is the Movement! This is the Movement! So get moving, y’all! Get moving!”

On the first Tuesday of November 2012, the Obama campaign hosted what they called an election night “watch party” at McCormick Place, a cavernous convention center south of Grant Park, with attendance mostly limited to luminaries and supporters who’d volunteered in Ohio or one of the other “swing states” or volunteers who’d manned the phone banks for the last week of campaigning. They would cheer their man’s progress on huge screens, celebrate Barack Obama’s reelection, and congratulate one another on a job well done. We weren’t invited.

We watched the early returns instead at the home of close comrades, but late in the evening we headed once more to Grant Park—just Bernardine and me this time—to reprise and remember the experiences from four years earlier. There would, of course, be no reliving 2008—that was a one-and-only evening, never to be touched again. Plus, everyone was now at watch parties large and small all over town. But we wanted to tap the ground anyway, so we walked the length of the abandoned park, a cold rain driving off the lake and soaking us to the bone.

In 2008, Grant Park had become a human river in full flood by the time Bernardine and I arrived, people flowing naturally into the gathering stream, moving, churning, surging happily forward, spilling over the shifting banks without incident and then effortlessly remaking the shore. There were children of all ages in hand or tucked into strollers and backpacks, buoyant parents delighted to let them stay up late just this one night in order to witness this precious and perhaps fragile moment. “Eighty years from now I want her to tell her grandchildren she was here,” a young man said to us as he posed for a picture with his infant daughter. “She’s a part of history, even if she doesn’t know it yet.”

What had been unimaginable a year, a month, even a day before had become inevitable, and on that special night and in this specific place, unforgettable: an African American president, a community organizer in the White House, a generational shift at last. We sang and we danced, and the enchanted night sparkled in reply. We felt ourselves to be a brand-new, shimmering galaxy, a little bit of heaven on earth.

The crowd was diverse in a thousand ways. I saw a newborn wrapped tight on his mother’s chest pushed up next to a small old woman smiling broadly from her wheelchair and waving an oversized American flag in wide arcs above her head. I saw a young Black police officer with a gold earring joined in a circle dance with two gray-haired white women. And on one brightly lit corner, a huge man with a ukulele who beautifully evoked the ghost of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole belted out Iz’s version of “Somewhere over the Rainbow”—dreams really do come true—and I burst into tears. What a wonderful world it could be.

We’d stopped by my brother’s place hours earlier to watch the first returns. Juan and Judi were lifelong Democratic Party stalwarts, and they’d spent weekends that year with their friends phone-banking and canvassing for Obama in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana. We were tied to multiple screens and they were taking every precinct in those three battlegrounds personally, every vote marking a distinct and intimate victory or defeat. The groans were painful, the cheers joyous, and, as the numbers began to add up, the mood turned giddy.

We had moved on to a large gathering of our closest political allies and comrades at Barbara Ransby and Peter Sporn’s place, both long-time peace and justice activists. There was joy here, too, tempered by a sense that this wasn’t the end of anything, but rather a new beginning and perhaps an opening of sorts—rising expectations and expanding imaginations, but with more serious work to do tomorrow and the next day and the next. The mood here was more a sigh of relief, less an inclination to dance in the streets.

But we couldn’t resist, and before John McCain had conceded we decided that dancing in the streets was exactly what we needed to do, and so we headed for the door with friends in tow: Jacco, a historian from the Netherlands who was staying with us for a few days of jaw-dropping Chicago experiences; Ryan, the brilliant young cartoonist living with us as we collaborated on a comic book about teaching; and Paul, an accomplished Zimbabwean scholar whose irrepressible excitement poured into his cell phone connecting Grant Park to Africa, Europe, and the world.

Zayd called from Harlem, Malik from Berkeley, and Chesa from New Haven.

I’d been a part of large crowds many times before this—demonstrations and rallies, sporting events and the fabulously extravagant Taste of Chicago, also held in Grant Park—but every one of them had been edged with tension or anger or demand or performance, characterized by fighting or drunkenness, gluttony or narcissism. This was unlike anything I’d known before—a huge mobilization sharing a deep sense of unity, satisfaction, and release, closing a door on eight years of fear and loathing, war and divisiveness and looking forward to a world that could be but was not yet. It was oddly serene and sober, and, while there was lots of rejoicing, there was surprisingly little crowing. The dominant tone was a soft purr as people went gently over the moon.

We saw friends and colleagues and former students every step of the way, and we stopped for kisses and hugs and group cell phone photos, the spirit spilling seamlessly over to strangers, with more embraces and more photos. I’d endured snubs and quick expressionless glances for months from some of these same folks, and I’d felt unfairly singled out, but that was then. Now we were all friends again, I guessed, and I felt wave after wave of liberation, like a weight finally being lifted from my neck, an albatross or a yoke I’d forgotten was there because it was with me night and day and I’d grown accustomed to it. Now it was gone, and I felt only lightness and a fugitive memory of a once-solid stone I’d been carrying. A neighbor who had shunned me for months smiled and waved, and maybe I should have felt angry but I didn’t, not at all. I felt grateful. I teared up and just let the feelings wash over me—thankfulness, reprieve, solitude. Bernardine was here, still holding my hand, still dancing, still moving forward.

I surprised myself again and again, bursting into tears all evening long: first, simply experiencing the connectedness and solidarity as the animated convergence grew and grew and kept on growing; later when I ran into two African American high school kids I’d known, their videocams in hand, filming a curriculum project called “Searching for Democracy;” and much later standing on the exact spot where, forty years before, at the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention, I’d been beaten bloody by Chicago’s finest and hauled off to jail. I corralled two young police officers—a Black woman and a Latino man—to pose with me while Bernardine snapped photos. We all had tears in our eyes.

Barack Obama looked positively Lincolnesque that night, standing tall with his beautiful family in front of our twinkling starry sky and our vast blue-black lake. But I’m an entirely untrustworthy witness here—after all, I’d been inhaling that sparkly, rarified atmosphere for quite a while by then, and I was prone to being taken over by aliens the whole day. Luckily Bernardine was right there, nudging me back to reality.

When the president-elect spoke, the exultation rose in response:

There was a simple straightforwardness to his talk, and there was a deep bow to the reality that every community organizer knows well:

Echoes rang out from Amilcar Cabral, the anticolonial African leader, insisting that the movement tell no lies and claim no easy victories, and from Martin Luther King Jr.—bending the arc of history toward justice so that “we as a people will get there.” Everyone there heard hard reverberations of the legacy of slavery as well and the struggle for abolition and equality. Everyone saw a symbol of change rise up in our minds. And everyone felt a pervasive sense that our imaginations could grow more freely, more powerfully: “This is our moment. This is our time. Yes we can . . .”

It was a wonderful feeling to breathe in the good air, to breathe out the bad air, and then just to keep on breathing—wonderful and refreshing. It was great to feel the energy of rising expectations, to hear the sounds of heavy chains dropping from our minds, to see the shining faces of hope everywhere.

Barack Obama can’t save us, I thought then, but look around: with some hard work and a little luck, these folks right here just might save Barack Obama. I wanted nothing more than to embrace that moment, to hold tight to this fleeting but feasible community, and to store all this energy away for the tough times to come.