Young Mr. Obama (6 page)

“I'm pretty new to the area,” Obama confessed.

Eager to establish a friendship, Obama suggested they continue the conversation another time. Not long after, the two men had lunch downtown. As they were walking up Michigan Avenue, Owens pointed at the Art Institute of Chicago, a block-long beaux arts museum with a pair of bronze lions flanking its stone facade. Its banners announced an exhibit by Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of Owens's favorite photographers.

“Yeah, you know, I'm gonna go check that out one of these days,” Owens said.

“Well, let's go right now,” Obama suggested.

They spent the afternoon in the gallery, looking at photos that Owens would always remember as astonishing.

Obama took this male courtship to the next step by inviting Owens over for Sunday dinner. It was a sign Obama was serious about the relationship; he rarely allowed anyone into his spare apartment. The walls were bare of posters, and Obama stored his James Baldwin, his Adam Smith, and his Martin Luther King biographies in an old ammunition box. Owens commented on a book that was critical of capitalism, figuring Obama agreed with the author.

“You see, Barack,” he said, “this is one of the reasons we gotta change this system.”

But as McKnight found, Obama's reading was motivated as much by intellectual curiosity as ideology.

“Yeah, but, John,” he retorted, “if you want to be honest about it, where else can you find a system that allows you to do as much as you can do in this country?”

The whole scene—two guys sitting around after dinner, talking about ideas—was new to Owens. In his neighborhood, men drank together in taverns. They didn't hang out like this. But Obama lived in the academic enclave of Hyde Park, where even in the mid-1980s, the heyday of the Chicago Bears, Sundays were for brainy dinner parties, not football games. While Obama seemed secure in his identity as a black man, he rarely socialized outside Hyde Park, and Owens was one of his few black friends. Even his girlfriend was white.

Six months or so after they'd met, Obama invited Owens to Los Angeles for a two-week leadership training retreat put together by the Industrial Areas Foundation, the group Alinsky had founded. Owens was skeptical. In spite of his friendship with Obama, he thought of community organizers as impractical radicals standing on street corners and shouting, “Let's storm the Bastille!” Those two weeks changed his mind. He began to understand how an organized community, trained in the acquisition of power, could determine its own destiny. When they returned to Chicago, Obama asked Owens to come to work for the DCP, as his assistant. Owens accepted. This, he realized, was why Obama had cultivated him so avidly. The man always had an agenda, no question about it.

One of Owens's first DCP meetings was a training session at a hotel in the south suburbs. It was memorable not because of anything Obama said that weekend, but because of what he did. It was the only time any of the DCP's members saw their punctilious organizer cut loose.

“Barack, how did you even find this place?” Loretta Augustine asked when they pulled up in the Honda. “You musta worked really hard. This place is away from everything. Why are we here?”

“I wanted to eliminate all the distractions,” he said.

That's Barack, Augustine thought. All business, all the time.

“However,” he added, “at the end of training on Saturday night, we're going to have a party.”

That
was not the Barack she knew. Augustine couldn't wait to see Obama party. After the training session, Obama actually ate a full dinner, then set up a portable stereo and slotted in a tape of his beloved R&B. As soon as Obama began swaying to the bass, Owens tried to bust his chops.

“Barack, what you doin' out there on the floor?” he chided. “You know that ain't the place for you.”

“What?” Obama shot back. “Who said I can't dance? I'll bust all y'all out.”

Obama threw his hand over his head and spun it like he was twirling a lasso. Yeah, their director could write a funding grant and get a bureaucrat down to the Gardens. But he could
dance
, too.

As the leader of a church-based community group, Obama was attending a lot of Sunday services. Recruiting pastors was part of his job, and there's no better way to flatter a preacher than to sit through one of his sermons. Obama had arrived in Chicago unchurched, having been raised by a family whose attitudes toward religion ranged from indifferent to hostile. When his grandparents fled Kansas for the West Coast, they left behind the stringent prairie Methodism of their youth, exchanging it for Unitarianism, a less demanding and less judgmental brand of Protestantism. Once they reached Hawaii, they were far enough from their mainland origins to quit church altogether. Obama's mother, who married two men with Muslim backgrounds, would have fallen into the category of “spiritual, but not religious.” A compassionate, nonacquisitive woman, she tolerated all faiths but embraced none. Her son would write that she was “skeptical of organized religion.” Obama's father rejected Islam for atheism, making him the family member with the most conviction on religious matters.

Because he'd had no religious upbringing, and because he'd never lived before in an African-American community, Obama was only vaguely aware of the role the church played in black life. He knew, from his reading, that black Christianity had provided the spiritual underpinnings of the civil rights movement. But he didn't know that the typical black church also provided its parishioners with social services—food, clothing, and housing assistance—as well as political guidance. The pastors he met were African-American rabbis, as concerned with the temporal advancement of an oppressed people as they were with its salvation. Obama was put off by the political jealousies of some older preachers, but the more time he spent on the South Side, the more he began to see the importance of joining a church.

While Obama was determined to succeed as an organizer, it would be cynical to say he became a Christian to smooth his relations with the pastors. He was spending all his time working with religious people and seeing how churches could uplift a neighborhood. Every DCP meeting began and ended with a prayer. After a while, faith began to sink in.

Early on, Obama had several long talks about his spirituality with Reverend Alvin Love. Like his mother, he believed in God but wasn't sure he could fit into the mold of religion.

“I pray,” he told Love, “but I haven't made the commitment I have to make as far as accepting Jesus Christ as my savior.”

Love would have liked to have Obama as a parishioner but wasn't surprised to see him join Trinity United Church of Christ. Trinity was east of the Calumet Expressway, outside DCP territory. Joining a DCP church might have caused resentment among the other pastors. Also, Trinity's pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., was more cosmopolitan and intellectual than the Baptist and Church of God in Christ preachers Obama dealt with in his daily work. Their roots were in Southern gospel services. Wright was from Philadelphia, read Greek and Latin, and had studied at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His mother held a Ph.D. in mathematics. He planted a
FREE SOUTH AFRICA
sign on his lawn and welcomed gays and lesbians. That was common among white churches on the North Side, but most black churches were so traditional they still preached the epistle lesson “Wives, submit to your husbands.”

Trinity's programs—it offered classes in financial management and counseled parishioners who were drinking too much or going through divorces—were a model of how a church could serve its community. The congregation appealed to both Obama's background and his aspirations. It was a magnet for well-educated strivers—the crowd W. E. B. DuBois had called the black community's “Talented Tenth.” An offshoot of Congregationalism, the United Church of Christ had always occupied a high position on the social ladder. Trinity's members were seen as “very middle-class, stable” by other Chicago blacks. Obama was too cool and cerebral to feel at home in a storefront church with a name like True Vine of Holiness Church of God in Christ or Greater True Love Missionary Baptist. An Afrocentric minister, Wright dressed in a kente-trimmed robe and flattered his flock by preaching that Jesus was African. He appealed to its nostalgia for the down-home with such vernacular sermons as “Ain't Nobody Right but Us.” But he also published a brochure called “A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.” As so many pastors do, he preached against his flock's greatest weakness.

Wright's sermon “The Audacity to Hope” would inspire the title of Obama's second book. The biblical passage that was the sermon's subject, from 1 Samuel, was about Hannah, the barren wife of Elkanah, who continued to pray although God refused to bless her with children. But the message was about black America, which only advanced out of slavery, poverty, and ignorance because its people had hope.

“In order for a race despised because of its color to turn out a Martin Luther King and a Malcolm X, a Paul Giddings and a Pauli Murray, a James Baldwin and a Toni Morrison, and a preacher named Jesse, and in order to claim its lineage from a preacher named Jesus, somebody had to have the audacity to hope,” Wright growled. “In order for Martin to hang in there when God gave him a vision of America that one day would take its people as seriously as it had taken its politics and its military power; in order for him to hang in and keep working and keep on preaching even when all the black leaders turned against him because he had the courage to call the sin of Vietnam exactly what it was—an abomination before God—he had to have the audacity to hope.”

On the Sunday morning Wright delivered that sermon, Obama listened with tears streaming down his cheeks, never imagining that one day his name would have a place in that list of African-American pioneers.

By Obama's third year in Chicago, the DCP was thriving. With more than a dozen churches paying dues, Obama was earning $27,500 a year and employing Owens as a full-time assistant. So he decided to pursue a project that reached beyond Altgeld and Roseland: school reform. It fit perfectly into his mission of community empowerment. There was a move afoot in Springfield to establish local school councils—boards composed of parents who would have a say in hiring and firing the principals at their children's schools. The plan was adamantly opposed by Machine Democrats, who feared the councils would become training grounds for amateur politicians who might get the big idea of running for alderman. Obama organized a bus trip to the state capitol—another time-honored lobbying tactic—and conducted a teach-in on the three-hour ride down Interstate 55. The parents, who had grown up in Richard J. Daley's segregated Chicago, were skeptical that any politician would hear them out.

“They're not gonna listen to us,” they told Obama. “They're elected officials.”

“They'll listen to you,” Obama assured them. Then he said, “This is what you do.”

He split the parents into groups and gave each the name of a legislator. They were to write notes and hand them to the uniformed doorkeepers outside the house and senate chambers. It was intimidating just to walk into the capitol, past bronze statues of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Mayor Daley, then climb three flights of marble stairs, past the two-story mural of George Rogers Clark parleying with the Indians, and stand in front of the ceiling-high wooden doors, among a crowd of professional lobbyists in suits and smart dresses. But the doorkeepers took the notes onto the floor. The legislators came out. To the parents' surprise, they listened and even asked questions. On the ride home, the parents, who had gone to Springfield glumly expecting to be ignored, were feeling sky-high—“energized, like we could do anything,” one would later say. The school reform bill passed.

In the late 1980s, the Chicago schools were so decrepit, so indifferent to the task of guiding teenagers toward college, that Secretary of Education William Bennett condemned them as “the worst in the nation.” No mayor in recent memory had sent a son or daughter to public school. Daley, Bilandic, and Byrne were Catholic, so their children were educated by the archdiocese, and Washington's brief marriage had been childless. At some inner-city schools, fewer than half the freshmen ended up graduating.

The Career Education Network, which aimed to prevent kids from dropping out of high school, was Obama's most ambitious piece yet. Obama wanted to recruit tutors for an after-school program at four South Side high schools. The tutors would help the kids study, but they'd also teach job skills and act as mentors. In a sign he was already maturing from organizer to politician, Obama wanted Mayor Washington to sign on.

“We can either partner with downtown or challenge downtown,” he told Owens.

This time, he wanted to partner. It would fulfill his dream of working with Harold, and the mayor's endorsement would bring in other players. Obama got as far as a meeting with Joe Washington, the mayor's education adviser. It didn't go well.

Joe Washington (no relation to the mayor) was unimpressed with the young organizer from out of town. They got into a heated argument about the community's role in the schools. “He doesn't know shit about Roseland,” Washington later told a friend. “Or Chicago.”

Undeterred, Obama approached his state senator, Emil Jones Jr. As president of the Illinois state senate, Jones would become Obama's political godfather. In the 1980s, though, Jones was just a backbencher. Obama wrote a proposal asking for half a million dollars in state aid. Jones could only deliver $150,000. That was enough to hire a director and four part-time tutors, and rent space in a Lutheran church. It wasn't enough, however, to spin off the Career Education Network into an independent organization that could eventually work in schools throughout the city, as Obama had envisioned.

Obama was frustrated. Owens thought he saw the wind go out of his boss's sails. After three years, he was beginning to see there was only so much he could accomplish from the outside, as an organizer going cup-in-hand to politicians. One weekend, he visited McKnight in Wisconsin, where he told the professor he wanted to quit organizing and go to law school.