When Kellman again asked them to accept Kruglik, and Loretta said no, Calicott spoke up to second Loretta’s refusal: “Let’s get somebody who knows us!” As Loretta vividly recalled, Calicott didn’t stop there. “The priest pointed his finger at Jerry, and he said, ‘I don’t know where you’re looking, but there’s got to be somebody out there who looks like us and thinks like us and understands our needs. So wherever you’ve been looking, you go back and look again.’ ” Yvonne Lloyd remembered those five words just as Loretta did: “go back and look again,” but “Jerry was livid,” Loretta recalled. Kellman insisted he would not jettison Kruglik, and Calicott said fine, but not for DCP. “The whole room was just absolutely quiet,” Loretta remembered, but Kellman agreed that he would look again.
Mike Kruglik was not happy about what had happened. “The people said, ‘We don’t want you because you’re not black,’ ” he acknowledged years later. Kellman, feeling “desperation,” told CCRC clergyman Bob Klonowski he would shift gears and advertise for a “black organizer trainee” in addition to an experienced organizer. Since the late 1970s, a little-known national organization called the Community Careers Resource Center had published Community Jobs, a small newsprint magazine comprised mainly of want ads that came out ten times a year. Community Jobs did not have many individual subscribers, but many university and public libraries paid twenty dollars a year to subscribe. It was not a publication they saw any point in retaining—who could possibly want to read job ads from 1985?—and so a quarter century later only one single library would still possess the June 1985 issue containing the job ad that Jerry Kellman submitted.
Community Jobs organized its ads geographically, so on page 3, under a large “Midwest” heading and directly below an ad for “Canvass Director, North Dakota,” appeared Jerry Kellman’s ad with a boldface title, “Two Minority Jobs Chicago.”
The Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) is an Alinsky organizing project in the industrial heart of Chicago. This region was once a world leader in steel production. However, in the past four years, 50,000 jobs have been lost. CCRC has pulled together 60 churches from the far Southside of Chicago and suburban Cook County to address this economic crisis. Half of CCRC’s budget comes from local church dues. The project is also committed to church renewal.
APPRENTICE DIRECTOR
Duties: Help to supervise all organizing on the far Southside of Chicago, an area which is 95 percent black. Serve as consultant to local parishes; recruit and train lay leaders in listening skills, research, strategic planning, public action skills and (with local clergy) theological reflection.
Requirements: Experience with church-based or community organizing; or experience in leadership and church development; highly disciplined; confident; mature; reflective; able to think and act strategically; experience in black community preferred.
Salary: $20,000/year to start, negotiable for more experienced organizer. Automobile allowance; health insurance.
To apply: Send resume to Gerald Kellman, Director, CCRC, 351 E. 113th St., Chicago, IL 60628. 312/995-8182. Selected candidates will receive phone interviews. Finalists will have interview in Chicago (CCRC will cover travel expenses). Affirmative action position.
TRAINEE
Duties and Requirements: Same as for Apprentice Director but not expected to have skills in advance, must have ability to pick up skills and master them quickly.
Salary: $10,000/year to start. Similar benefits as Apprentice Director.
To Apply: Same as for Apprentice Director.
In early June 1985, the new issue of Community Jobs started landing on library shelves across the United States.42
HONOLULU, SEATTLE, HONOLULU, JAKARTA, AND HONOLULU
AUGUST 1961–SEPTEMBER 1979
Barack Hussein Obama departed Nairobi’s Embakasi Airport on the evening of August 4, 1959, bound for New York, via Rome, Paris, and London. He was twenty-five years old—not twenty-three, as he would later claim—and he was leaving behind a nineteen-year-old wife, Grace Kezia Aoko, who was three months pregnant with a second child, and a sixteen-month-old son, Roy Abon’go.
Obama’s dream was to have an education beyond what was available in colonial Kenya. A possession of Great Britain since the late nineteenth century, Kenya lacked any post-secondary educational institution aside from a newly opened technical college. Three years earlier, a dynamic young Kenyan politician, Tom Mboya—who, like Obama, was a Luo, Kenya’s third-largest ethnic group—had visited the United States and begun making it possible for young Kenyans to seek higher education opportunities there. Mboya was introduced to Bill Scheinman, a wealthy young businessman likewise interested in African decolonization, and thanks largely to Scheinman’s personal largesse, as many as thirty-nine Kenyan students enrolled at a variety of U.S. colleges and universities during the years 1957 and 1958.
By 1958, Barack Obama and his young wife were living in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi, yet the first twenty-four years of his life had been anything but easy. The second child, and first son, of Hussein Onyango Obama and Habiba Akumu, he was born near Kendu Bay in the Nyanza region of western Kenya, close to Lake Victoria. Hussein Onyango had served as a cook with the British colonial military forces, traveling widely. Hussein’s third child, Hawa Auma, later recounted that “he loved all the whites, and they loved him.” Another younger daughter, Zeituni Onyango, remembered Hussein as “unyielding and unapologetic…. My father never shed the attitude of a soldier,” nor his belief in corporal punishment for wives as well as children.
When Barack Hussein was nine years old and his older sister Sarah Nyaoke about twelve, Hussein Onyango moved the family—now including a second wife, Sarah Ogwel—from Kendu Bay to the village of Kogelo, well north of Lake Victoria in the Alego area of Nyanza, where his ancestors had historic roots. But Alego was wild and rugged, and within a few months, a pregnant Habiba Akumu escaped from her husband and three children and returned to Kendu Bay. In despair, Barack and Sarah soon tried to follow her but were returned to Kogelo to live with their stepmother, Sarah Ogwel, while their father increasingly worked in Nairobi. Decades later Sarah would tell her stepgrandson that his father “could not forgive his abandonment, and acted as if Akumu didn’t exist. He told everyone that I was his mother.”
In Kogelo Barack attended Ng’iya Intermediate School, and in 1949, at age fifteen, he took the Kenya Africa Examination. In early 1950, he was admitted to Maseno Mission School, Kenya’s oldest secondary institution. School records initially described Barack as “very keen, steady … reliable and outgoing,” but during his senior year school administrators took a strong dislike to him and effectively expelled him. Classmates acknowledged that Obama had become “rude and arrogant” toward teachers, and the white English principal fingered him as the primary author of an anonymous letter criticizing the school’s practices. Wherever the blame lay, Obama was out of school without having graduated, and a furious Hussein Onyango instructed him to move to Mombasa, Kenya’s eastern port city, to earn his