Barack also visited Emil Jones at his office on 111th Street. No elected official had done more for Barack and DCP, and Jones said he was sorry to see him go. To Jones as to others, Barack emphasized that there was no question he would return to Chicago after law school. He called Renee Brereton and other CHD staffers to tell them, plus organizing colleagues like Linda Randle. Barack apologized to Howard Stanback for pulling up stakes during their landfill effort. Stanback was surprised by Barack’s choice. “ ‘Why are you going to Harvard?’ He said, ‘Because I need to.’ I said, ‘Are you coming back?’ ” to which Obama said, “I’m absolutely coming back.”76
Barack, Loretta, and Yvonne Lloyd all attended Lena’s thirtieth birthday party, but by early April, there was not much to celebrate regarding UNO and DCP’s position in the Southeast Side’s landfill war. Anger at Sawyer’s new task force was white hot, especially in Hegewisch, just across the Calumet River from the O’Brien Locks site. Hegewisch News editor Vi Czachorski asked Howard Stanback, “Why should UNO decide if there will be a landfill in our backyard?” and Marian Byrnes, Hazel Johnson, and three allies called the task force unrepresentative and called on Mayor Sawyer to disband it. That group held its first public hearing at St. Kevin on April 7, and this time UNO’s critics made it into the basement meeting room, mocking cochairwomen Lena Montes and Loretta Augustine with chants of “No deals,” the same slogan Lena had used during the Fitch ambush two months earlier.
The Daily Cal reported that Loretta defended the panel’s “makeup and goals” as a “positive development for the community and said the mayor had pledged to abide by the task force’s findings,” with its report due at the end of May. “The panel approved reopening discussions with Waste Management,” with Lena declaring, “What is different about it is that it will be talked about in open hearings, not behind closed doors.” But when old foe Foster Milhouse rose to speak, “Montes quickly closed” the meeting.
The Daily Calumet editorialized against any reopening of negotiations with WMI, and UNO’s opponents advocated for a popular referendum vote against landfill expansion on the upcoming fall general election ballot in Southeast Side wards. One week later, the task force convened its second hearing at Our Lady of the Gardens gymnasium in Altgeld Gardens, where the tumultous Zirl Smith meeting had occurred two years earlier. Father Dominic Carmon, a task force member and Our Lady’s pastor, remembered that Barack “was there listening,” as at the previous St. Kevin session too. Howard Stanback, Jim Fitch, and WMI’s Mary Ryan all spoke to the panel as a crowd of 125 chanted “No more dumps.” For the first time, Stanback publicly acknowledged that the city did want the O’Brien Locks site to become a new landfill. Mary Ryan said WMI would immediately place $2 million into a community trust fund, with similar sums to be added every year, and it would give up title to two other parcels of land, including the marshland just below South Deering whose vulnerability had led Harold Washington to impose the initial landfill moratorium. That was followed by numerous single community members who spoke fervently against the deal. In the days that followed, the Daily Cal kept up a regular drumbeat against the task force. “Why study something no one in the community wants or asked for?” political columnist Phil Kadner queried.
As the UNO–DCP landfill gambit drew more and more flak, the task force’s third hearing, scheduled to take place at Bob Klonowski’s Hegewisch church, was postponed and moved to Mann Park’s field house. When it finally convened, Klonowski welcomed the crowd in a calm tone, but, according to Vi Czachorksi, when a city representative again explained why O’Brien Locks was the best option available, “500 angry, frustrated people shouted down the city proposal of a new landfill.” The meeting “ended abruptly when Mary Ellen Montes lost control, stating ‘This has turned into a war.’ ” Declaring that “It doesn’t appear we can conduct this in a civilized manner,” she dissolved the hearing, leaving the entire UNO–DCP–Stanback strategy in tatters. The mayor’s office named several additional task force members and postponed its reporting date until later in the summer, but the entire venture was now dead.
Years later, Bruce Orenstein acknowledged that his and Barack’s game plan had gone entirely awry. When “we make ourselves the center of authority … we make ourselves the target” for large numbers of Southeast Side residents who for years had been opposed to the city using their neighborhoods as a dumping ground. Orenstein mused that if Harold Washington had not died, perhaps the O’Brien Locks deal with Waste Management could indeed have netted the community a $25 million trust fund, just as he, Obama, and Stanback had envisioned. But Gene Sawyer had no public stature as mayor. “With a very strong mayor” like Washington, a successful outcome was highly plausible, but “now we have a very weak mayor.”77
During April’s landfill warfare, Gamaliel held its fourth weeklong training at Techny Towers, and Barack drove out there for several days’ sessions. By then, everyone knew he was leaving. Mary Gonzales was “pretty upset” when she heard, and David Kindler recalled thinking: “there goes one of our best and brightest.” Kindler’s friend Kevin Jokisch remembered telling Greg Galluzzo that Gamaliel would certainly miss Barack, with Greg responding, “We held on to him about as long as we were going to. Barack will probably end up being a United States senator.”
One evening that week, Barack drank beer with Mike Kruglik and talked about what he wanted to do after law school. “Obama is talking about his vision for a very powerful, sweeping organization across black Chicago, of fifty to 150 congregations, that would be highly disciplined, highly focused, professionally organized,” Mike remembered. “This vision … had such a claim on his mind” and Barack was explicit about “coming back to Chicago after Harvard and reengaging in community organizing in a more powerful way.”
Barack was thinking ahead in part because Ken Rolling and Jean Rudd at Woods had decided to fund and commission a series of articles about community organizing in Illinois Issues, the state’s premier public policy journal. Barack accepted an invitation to write one, but a quick deadline loomed. He had decided that he would travel to Nairobi to see Auma and meet the other members of his Kenyan family, but before that he wanted to spend at least three weeks on his own touring the big cities of Europe. Thus he needed to write his article before he left Chicago in late May. His essay would document how his thinking had evolved. Recent African American activism, Barack wrote, had featured “three major strands”: political empowerment, as personified by Harold Washington; economic development, of which black Chicago had seen very little; and community organizing. Barack argued that neither of the first two “offers lasting hope of real change for the inner city unless undergirded by a systematic approach to community organization.” Electing a black mayor like Washington was “not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods or cut a 50 percent drop-out rate in the schools,” though such a victory did have “an important symbolic effect.”
At the community level, “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.” Barack claimed that DCP and similar groups had attained “impressive results,” ranging from school accountability and job training programs to renovated housing and refurbished parks. Those assertions echoed what Marlene Dillard had heard Barack boast about during their visits to DCP’s