Barack also argued that “the leadership vacuum and disillusionment following the death of Harold Washington” highlighted the need for a new political strategy. “Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches,” if those institutions would “educate and empower entire congregations and not just serve as a platform for a few prophetic leaders. Should a mere 50 prominent black churches, out of the thousands that exist in cities like Chicago, decide to collaborate with a trained organizing staff, enormous positive changes could be wrought in the education, housing, employment and spirit of inner-city black communities, changes that would send powerful ripples throughout the city.”
Barack ended his essay on a revealingly poetic note, writing that “organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people.” When the entire series of Illinois Issues articles was subsequently republished in book form, one reviewer quoted that sentence as the single most powerful statement in the entire volume. But another of Barack’s sentences about organizing was the most revealing of all, for when he wrote that through their work “organizers can shape a sense of community not only for others, but for themselves,” he was publicly acknowledging the self-transformation he had experienced in the homes and churches of Greater Roseland.
As early as his second year at Oxy, Barack had felt “a longing for a place,” for “a community … where I could put down stakes.” The idea of home, of finding a real home, “was something so powerful and compelling for me” because growing up he had been a youngster who “never entirely felt like he was rooted. That was part of my upbringing, to be traveling and always … wanting a place,” “a community that was mine.” His “history of being uprooted” allowed Barack to develop in less than two years what Sheila knew was “his deep emotional attachment to” Chicago, one that was almost entirely a product of Greater Roseland, not Hyde Park.
“When he worked with these folks, he saw what he never saw in his life,” Fred Simari explained. “He grew tremendously through this,” through what he acknowledged was “the transformative experience” of his life, through what Fred saw was “him getting molded.” Greg Galluzzo saw it too and said that Barack “really doesn’t understand what it means to be African American until he arrives in Chicago.” But, working with the people of the Far South Side, Barack “recognizes in them their greatness and then affirms something inside of himself.” Through “the richest experience” of his life, through discovering and experiencing black Americans for the first time, Barack “fell in love with the people, and then he fell in love with himself.”
Years later, Barack admitted that “the victories that we achieved were extraordinarily modest: getting a job-training site set up or getting an after-school program for young people put in place.” And he also knew that “the work that I did in those communities changed me much more than I changed the communities.” Ted Aranda, who had worked for Greg and in Roseland before Barack and whose Central American heritage made it possible for him to be accepted as black or Latino, came to the same conclusion as Barack. “I’m not sure that community organizing really did that much for Chicago,” he reflected. “I don’t know that we had any really tremendous long-term effect.” But Greg, looking back on a lifetime of organizing, understood the great fundamental truth of Barack’s realization: “it’s the people you encounter who are the victories.” For Ted, the disappointments and frustration of organizing radicalized him. A quarter century later, deeply devoted to Occupy, Ted was driving a cab. Greg understood as deeply as anyone that “the great victory of the whole thing is Barack himself.”78
In mid-April, the Spertus museum, part of a historic Jewish cultural center on South Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, opened a seven-week exhibit depicting the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi henchman who had played such a central role in the anti-Semitic effort to exterminate European Jews. The centerpiece of the exhibition was a continuous film of the trial, supplemented by large photographs and illustrations of newspaper stories plus Jewish artifacts documenting the culture that the Nazi Holocaust had sought to destroy.
The Tribune publicized the opening, and then, less than three weeks later, a front-page Tribune story revealed that anti-Semitism was alive and well even in Chicago’s City Hall: “Sawyer Aide’s Ethnic Slurs Stir Uproar,” read the headline of a story about mayoral assistant Steve Cokely, who had recently delivered four “long and frequently disjointed” lectures under the auspices of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam (NOI). Tapes of them were on sale at an NOI bookstore, and while anti-Semitism lay at the center of Cokely’s often incoherent ramblings about a “secret society,” he also called both Jesse Jackson and the late Harold Washington “nigger.” Even worse, it was revealed that Mayor Sawyer’s office had known about the recordings for more than four months, and three weeks earlier representatives of the Anti-Defamation League had met with Sawyer about the lectures. But Cokely was still on the mayoral payroll.
Well-known Catholic monsignor Jack Egan labeled Cokely’s retention a “travesty,” but a number of prominent black aldermen defended Cokely. Danny Davis, a supposed reformer from the 29th Ward, called Cokely “a very bright, talented researcher with an excellent command of the English language.” The 9th Ward’s Robert Shaw, citing voters he knew, said, “I don’t think it would be politically wise for the mayor to get rid of Mr. Cokely.” But the Tribune published a blistering editorial, denouncing Cokely as “a hate-spewing demagogue” and “a fanatic anti-Semite” and also lambasting Davis. After five days of feckless indecision, Gene Sawyer finally fired Cokely, but the damage to Chicago, never mind to Sawyer’s indelibly stained reputation, was already done. That evening, at a large West Side rally, Roseland’s Rev. Al Sampson introduced Cokely to a cheering crowd as “our warrior” and declared that “this is a case of Jewish organizations trying to stop one black man from having the right to speak.”
In the middle of this, Barack took Sheila to see the Eichmann exhibit. Both of them would long remember what ensued. In Obama’s later account, in the one single public reference he would ever make to his 1980s girlfriends, he created a character who was a conflation of Alex, Genevieve, and mostly Sheila who goes with him to “a new play by a black playwright.” Several weeks earlier Barack had taken Sheila to see a Chicago amateur production of August Wilson’s powerful 1985 play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” but Sheila would remember the aftermath of the Eichmann exhibit more vividly than Wilson’s play. As they left, she asked Barack not about Eichmann, but about Steve Cokely and why so many prominent black Chicagoans were defending him rather than denouncing his moronic anti-Semitism. In Obama’s version, his white girlfriend asked about black anger, and he replies: “I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater,” and “When we got back to the car, she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.”
Obama would admit that “whenever I think back” to that argument, “it somehow makes me ashamed.” Sheila and Barack did argue angrily that early May night on South Michigan Avenue, but it was because “I challenged him on … the question of black racism,” and his response was so disappointing that their argument became “pretty heated.” As Sheila recalled it, “I blamed him for not having the courage to confront the racial divide between us,” but in retrospect, she concluded that the chasm between them was not racial at all.