In early May, Sheila and Barack’s mutual friend Asif Agha returned to Hyde Park after six months in Nepal. He remembers thinking at the time that “they had a good relationship. They were really tight, really solid,” but he also noted that the tensions between them were even greater than they had been during that tumultuous weekend in Madison nine months earlier. Asif thought Sheila had a deeper commitment to their lives together than did Barack, and now, listening to Barack talk about his goals, Asif understood that his friend “wanted to have a less complex public footprint” as a future candidate for public office, particularly in the black community. Asif recalls Barack saying, “The lines are very clearly drawn…. If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.”
Asif realized just how profound the tension had become for Barack between the personal and the political. “If he was going to enter public life, either he was going to do it as an African American, or he wasn’t going to do it.” When asked if Barack had said he could not marry someone white, Asif assented. “He said that, exactly. That’s what he told me.”79
Even as his time in Roseland was ending, Obama still had to keep up with DCP’s school reform alliance with UNO. Johnnie, Aletha Strong Gibson, and Ann West were more involved than he was, but DCP continued to follow UNO’s Danny Solis and Lourdes Monteagudo. By late April, what was left of Harold Washington’s official Education Summit had failed to endorse reform legislation that was muscular enough to satisfy top reformers like Don Moore, Fred Hess, and Pat Keleher of Chicago United. So UNO and DCP were now formally backing Chicago United’s proposal, which was introduced in the state legislature by Senate Education Committee chairman Arthur L. Berman as S.B. 1837.
When Berman’s committee held a daylong hearing on four competing bills on Tuesday, April 26, Barack and a small group of DCP members including Loretta Augustine, Rosa Thomas, Aletha Strong Gibson, and Ann West traveled to Springfield to lobby legislators and to hear Lourdes Monteagudo testify on behalf of UNO and DCP in support of S.B. 1837. Writing in the Tribune, CPS superintendent Manford Byrd once again energized reform advocates by decrying their attacks on “some monolithic, intractable bureaucracy which in fact does not exist” and claiming that “the school system is broadly understaffed.” First the Sun-Times and then the Tribune began publishing multipart exposés on CPS’s failings. The Trib series debuted with a long feature on one elementary school, “a hollow educational warehouse” that is “rich in remedial programs that draw attention to a child’s failures.” An accompanying editorial warned that “Chicago’s public school system is failing its children and jeopardizing the city’s future.” The next day, in a culmination of negotiations that Don Moore’s Designs for Change colleague Renee Montoya had been conducting with UNO’s Danny Solis, DFC’s reform bill, H.B. 3707, sponsored by African American Chicago representative Carol Moseley Braun, was strengthened with the addition of provisions from Chicago United’s S.B. 1837. UNO and DCP joined in publicly shifting their support to the Braun bill, whose cosponsor was progressive Chicago Puerto Rican state senator Miguel del Valle, and reform energies increasingly coalesced behind the Braun–del Valle measure. In one Trib story, powerful 14th Ward alderman Edward Burke declared that “nobody in his right mind would send kids to public school.” In another, Manford Byrd called himself “probably the most gifted urban administrator in this country” while once again dismissing CPS’s obligations to its students: “When you’re all done, the learner must learn for himself.”80
In the final ten days before Barack’s departure from Chicago for his two-month trip to Europe and then Kenya, things came completely apart at 5429 South Harper Avenue. Ever since Barack had transferred to Columbia almost seven years earlier, he had kept a journal, using it to record vignettes that might find their way into a future book and also sometimes for creating drafts of short stories and even letters to friends. Sheila knew of Barack’s practice, and sometime after their heated argument outside the Spertus museum, she decided to take a look at it. Lena Montes heard from Barack what ensued. “She reacted to this journal that he kept under his bed or mattress,” Lena recalled. “I remember when he says that she found some journal, and he talks about somebody in this journal and that she’s upset” after she read it. Barack did not tell Lena whether she was that someone. “Was it a straw that broke the camel’s back? I’m not sure. I just remember him saying that she … was leaving because of this journal.”
Just as Barack was about to leave Chicago, Sheila moved out of their apartment and moved in with her younger friend Simrit “Sima” Dhesi, who had just completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, and her sister in an apartment four blocks away at 5324 South Kimbark Avenue. Sheila later said that May 1988 “was kind of a blur for me.” Barack mentioned what was happening not only to Lena, but also to Loretta Augustine and even to his archdiocesan friend and Hyde Park neighbor Cynthia Norris. Cynthia understood that Sheila “was upset,” and that the tensions between her and Barack were “because of her race…. Yes, I do remember that.” Norris knew that Barack “had a lot of respect for” Sheila, and from what she knew, “I thought he handled things very, very well.” Loretta remembered it similarly. “He talked to me about her,” she recalled. “We had some really open and candid conversations” about the turmoil. “He obviously cared for her,” and was disturbed by what was happening. “I remember telling him, ‘If it’s really real, what you all have, you’ll come back’ ” after his trip and revive the relationship, “ ‘and if it’s not, you’ll go forward.’ ”
A number of small going-away parties occurred during Barack’s last week before he departed. Reformation Lutheran caretaker John Webster remembered one there, which was also where the small CEN program was now centered; Margaret Bagby recalled another one at St. Catherine’s with catered food. One evening everyone from DCP was invited to a quiet party at a small restaurant in suburban Blue Island. Greg Galluzzo, who had spent so many hours with Barack over the previous eighteen months, “bought him a briefcase and had it engraved” with just “Barack” as a useful going-away present for a law student.
On another night, Barack and Bruce Orenstein went out to drink beer, and Barack asked Bruce what he would be doing ten years from now. “I’m going to be making social change videos,” Bruce answered. Bruce in turn asked Barack the same question. He said he intended to write a book about his upcoming trip to Kenya, and then “I’m going to be mayor of Chicago.” Bruce was taken aback. “That was the first I heard of it,” and “I thought it was a lot of moxie to say that he was going to be mayor.”
A few days later, with Sheila having moved from their apartment, Barack flew east. Almost that same day, a dinner announced several weeks earlier was taking place to honor Frank Lumpkin for the eight years he had devoted to winning recompense for the Wisconsin steelworkers who had been thrown out onto the streets of South Deering back in March 1980.
Frank’s loyalties had not changed. The banquet’s proceeds would “benefit the People’s Daily World,” the newspaper of the Communist Party USA, but that did not deter a trio of notable figures from signing on as public patrons. State Senator Miguel del Valle, sponsor of the pending school reform bill, was one, 22nd Ward reform alderman Jesus “Chuy” Garcia was a second, and Monsignor Leo T. Mahon was a third. “Best wishes to a man who fights for justice,” read Leo’s greeting in the banquet program. Maybe Foster Milhouse and the other right-wing zealots had been right all along, that social justice Catholicism and grassroots communism were indeed one and the same.
Roberta Lynch, CCRC’s first staff organizer, and Tribune business editor Dick Longworth both sent their apologies for being out of town, but a crowd of more than four hundred attended, including U.S. congressman Charles Hayes, a veteran of both labor struggles and the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement. The Daily Calumet gave the event glowing coverage—“Lumpkin Honored at Dinner”—and three days later editorialized in his honor, simply and accurately calling him “a hero.” After eight years of organizing, Frank Lumpkin had prevailed, and even triumphed.
Just short of three, Barack Obama was headed toward Harvard Law School with the intent of becoming not just mayor of Chicago but eventually president of the United States.81
Barack had