Obama's Community Roots
David Moberg
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070416/moberg
In 1985, freshly graduated from Columbia University and working for a
New York business consultant, Barack Obama decided to become a community
organizer. Though he liked the idea, he didn't understand what the job
involved, and his inquiries turned up few opportunities.
Then he got a call from Jerry Kellman, an organizer working on
Chicago's far South Side for a community group based in the churches of
the region, an expanse of white, black and Latino blue-collar
neighborhoods that were reeling from the steel-mill closings. Kellman
was looking for an organizer for the new Developing Communities Project
(DCP), which would focus on black city neighborhoods.
Obama, only 24, struck board members as awesome and extremely
impressive, and they quickly hired him, at $13,000 a year, plus $2,000
for a car--a beat-up blue Honda Civic, which Obama drove for the next
three years organizing more than twenty congregations to change their
neighborhoods.
Despite some meaningful victories, the work of Obama--and hundreds of
other organizers--did not transform the South Side or restore lost
industries. But it did change the young man who became the junior
senator from Illinois in 2004, and it provides clues to his worldview as
he bids for the Democratic presidential nomination.
I can't say we didn't make mistakes, that I knew what I was doing,
Obama recalled three years ago to a boisterous convention of the
still-active DCP. Sometimes I called a meeting, and nobody showed up.
Sometimes preachers said, 'Why should I listen to you?' Sometimes we
tried to hold politicians accountable, and they didn't show up. I
couldn't tell whether I got more out of it than this neighborhood.
But, he continued, I grew up to be a man, right here, in this area.
It's as a consequence of working with this organization and this
community that I found my calling. There was something more than making
money and getting a fancy degree. The measure of my life would be public
service.
After a transient youth and an earnest search for identity, Obama also
found a home--a community with which he continued relationships, a
church and a political identity. He honed his talent for listening,
learned pragmatic strategy, practiced bringing varied people together
and developed a faith in ordinary citizens that still influences his
campaign message. He discovered the importance of personal storytelling
in politics (and wrote short stories that refined his style).
Later, as a politician, he worked closely with community groups (though
not as ardently as another community organizer turned politician, the
late Senator Paul Wellstone). As a presidential candidate, he frequently
refers to his community organizing, asking supporters to treat his
campaign as a social movement in which he is just an imperfect vessel
of your hopes and dreams.
Obama worked as an organizer at a time when Harold Washington's
election as mayor stirred his hopes and dreams, as well as those of
blacks and progressives in the city. Interviews with people who worked
with him during that time elicited few complaints--virtually everyone
described him in glowing terms, including dedicated, hard-working,
dependable, intelligent, inspiring, a good listener, confident but
self-effacing. They expressed admiration for him as an organizer who
trained strong community leaders while keeping himself in the background
and as a strategist who could turn general problems into specific,
winnable issues. Loretta Augustine-Herron, a member of the DCP board
that hired him, remembers him as someone who always followed the high
road. You've got to do it right, she recalls him insisting. Be open
with the issues. Include the community instead of going behind the
community's back--and he would include people we didn't like sometimes.
You've got to bring people together. If you exclude people, you're only
weakening yourself. If you meet behind doors and make decisions for
them, they'll never take ownership of the issue.
Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made
Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing, as translated
through the Gamaliel Foundation, one of several networks of faith-based
organizing. Often by confronting officials with insistent
citizens--rather than exploiting personal connections, as traditional
black Democrats proposed--Obama and DCP protected community interests
regarding landfills and helped win employment training services,
playgrounds, after-school programs, school reforms and other public
amenities.
One day a resident at Altgeld Gardens, a geographically isolated public
housing project surrounded by waste sites, brought a notice about
planned removal of asbestos from the project manager's office. Obama
organized the community to find out if there was asbestos in their
apartments. They persisted as officials lied and delayed, then took a
