The Chicago City Council approved a vote of no confidence in Manford Byrd by 39 to 4, soon followed by the resignation of a board of education member who now felt similarly. “I assumed education was the first priority of the whole system, and it is not,” retired business executive William Farrow announced. Down in Springfield, House speaker Michael J. Madigan brought the interested parties together for marathon negotiation and drafting sessions in his office. Danny Solis and Al Raby both took part, but the most influential participant was one of Madigan’s deputies, Chicago state representative John Cullerton. By the end of June Al Raby was proclaiming that “real reform of Chicago schools is within our grasp,” and on Saturday, July 2, both houses of the state legislature passed a compromise bill. Failure to adopt the measure by the end of June would delay its effective date for a year, but Chicago United’s Patrick Keleher said the bill represented “as much if not more than any of us had hoped for.”
Barack heard far less encouraging news about his other top concern, the Southeast Side landfill tussle. Mayor Sawyer’s new UNO-and-DCP-dominated task force had held additional public hearings during June, and in late July met privately with both city and Waste Management representatives. By the end of the summer, its report to Sawyer was complete, though several weeks would pass before cochairs Loretta Augustine and Mary Ellen Montes joined the mayor at a City Hall press conference. “The city of Chicago is facing a crisis,” Sawyer announced. “We’re going to have to bite the bullet and do some things that we would prefer not to do,” namely allow the O’Brien Locks site to become a landfill. That outcome had always looked inevitable, but Bruce, Barack, and Mary Ellen’s strategic success in blowing up the Fitch negotiations meant that any landfill now would be controlled not by Waste Management but by the Metropolitan Sanitary District.
Alinsky-style warfare had not only destroyed a likely Southeast Side consensus to accept a quid-pro-quo deal with Waste Management, it had deprived those neighborhoods of the multimillion-dollar bounty WMI had been willing to pay. It was a debacle all around. A decade later, Jim Fitch would be sent to federal prison for eighteen months and fined $1 million for looting bank funds throughout the 1980s in order to contribute to Southeast Side politicians. Another decade further on, with UNO having abandoned South Chicago and transformed itself into something that bore no resemblance to the organization that Mary Gonzales, Greg Galluzzo, and Mary Ellen Montes had originally built, UNO would endorse a Waste Management effort to expand Southeast Side landfills.
In Barack’s final days before he left for Harvard, the DCP members to whom he had become closest held a small barbecue for him at Loretta Augustine’s home. He assured them, “If you have problems, you can contact me and I’ll do what I can.” He also had a trio or more of presents for them, wooden figurines he said he had brought back from Kenya. Dan Lee remembered that Barack gave him “a statue of a warrior with a chipped beard.” Cathy Askew recalled admiring a giraffe, but “I think he gave me the zebra because of the mixed black and white stripes,” an acknowledgment of their disagreement about biracial identity.
Mary Ellen Montes did not attend that party, but one evening Barack took her out to dinner at a downtown restaurant. “We had our own kind of little going-away party, Barack and I, and it was just Barack and I,” she remembered. Barack promised to write to her, and he would, but that night, or the next morning, was the last time Lena and Barack would see each other in person.
With the lease on the South Harper apartment expiring several days before Barack planned to leave, he joined Sheila in her apartment on South Kimbark. She was preparing to leave Chicago soon too to begin her dissertation fieldwork in South Korea thanks to a Fulbright fellowship, and when she joined Barack for a farewell visit to Jerry Kellman’s home, they had a question for Jerry and his wife. “They come to dinner at our house,” Jerry remembered, “and they say ‘Could you please keep this cat?’ ” The Kellmans willingly agreed to give Max a new home. “Barack was not sad to give Max away,” Sheila explained, but for Max the transition was all to the good, and he would enjoy eight years of love with the Kellmans.
Jerry knew that Barack and Sheila were not breaking up, just headed in different geographical directions. He thought “they had a great, healthy relationship,” although one that was now constrained by Barack’s career plans. “By the time Barack left to go to law school, he had made the decision that he would go into public life,” Jerry realized. Indeed, “my sense is that Barack’s dream was to come back and possibly become mayor of Chicago.”
But Barack was still trapped between his belief in his own destiny and his deep emotional tie to Sheila. One day that final week “he said that he’d come to a decision and asked me to go to Harvard with him and get married, mostly, I think, out of a sense of desperation over our eventual parting and not in any real faith in our future,” Sheila recalled. Her memory was reminiscent of Genevieve’s from three summers earlier, when Barack had asked her to come to Chicago with him, and Genevieve had thought Barack was asking her only because he was certain her answer would be no.
Now, once again, the answer was no, and Sheila was upset by Barack’s presumption that she should postpone, if not abandon, her dissertation research in order to accompany him to Harvard. A “very angry exchange” followed, with Sheila feeling that Barack believed that his career interests should trump hers.
Barack started eastward within a day or two, knowing he could stay temporarily with his uncle Omar, who had remained in greater Boston ever since first arriving there thanks to his older brother a quarter century earlier and whose phone number and address Aunt Zeituni had given Barack while he was in Nairobi. But before heading back down Stony Island Avenue to the Skyway and then the Indiana Toll Road, Barack needed to have one other conversation.
“I was a little troubled about the notion of going off to Harvard. I thought that maybe I was betraying my ideals and not living up to my values. I was feeling guilty,” he told a college audience just six years later. Barack called Donita at Trinity and made an appointment to see Jeremiah Wright to seek his counsel about those doubts. In a way, it was just like the conversation he had had nine Augusts earlier, in Honolulu, when eighteen-year-old Barry had gone to visit Frank Marshall Davis before leaving for Occidental and life on the mainland.
Years later, before their relationship was torn apart, Wright would say that Barack was “like a son to me.” One of the most knowledgeable and savvy women in black Chicago would make the same point: “Jeremiah Wright was the black male father figure for Barack,” she emphasized. “Don’t underestimate the influence that Jeremiah had on Barack.” Wright would not specifically remember their conversation that August day, but Barack always would. In a way, it was a three years’ bookend to the admonishing monologue about being a do-gooder that Bob Elia have given him that night in the motel lobby on South Hermitage Road.
That exchange would stay with Barack always, as would this one, but the substance of Wright’s message was identical to the warning that old Frank had voiced: “You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained,” trained “to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore,” trained “to forget what you already know.” Wright’s message was just five words, ones that would ring in Barack’s ears for the entire two-day drive eastward: “Don’t let Harvard change you!”83