Sharon Jacobson oversaw the local Chicago committee that ratified Brereton’s recommendations, and she noted DCP’s intent to develop an employment training and placement program for residents of Altgeld Gardens as well as its desire to improve Far South Side public schools. She wrote that “the large geographical area” DCP sought to cover “is too broad” and threatened to dissipate DCP’s efforts rather than focus them, but DCP was Chicagoland’s “strongest organizing project. In the past year, we have witnessed thorough leadership training, successful multi-issue campaigns, and widespread grassroots community support,” and $33,000 was committed to DCP.
Jacobson also wrote to Brereton that Obama’s attendance at the CHD-IAF minority organizer training in Milwaukee had proven notable; out of twenty attendees, he and one other “had demonstrated the most potential,” leading Jacobson and Mary Yu to recommend that Barack be invited to attend IAF’s premier training event, a ten-day course that took place each July at Mount St. Mary’s College in the Santa Monica Mountains above Los Angeles. CHD would pay Barack’s $500 tuition, $400 room and board, and also cover his travel expenses.16
On March 18, special elections were held in the seven redrawn city council wards. Washington’s backers captured two seats from Vrdolyak’s 29–21 majority, but two other pro-Washington candidates fell short of the necessary 50 percent plus 1 and were forced into runoff contests to be held on April 29. Victory was assured for the Washington supporter in the black-majority 15th Ward, but in the 26th Ward, two Puerto Rican candidates, one of whom was sponsored by powerful Vrdolyak ally Richard Mell, faced off amid a cascade of election-misconduct allegations. The Chicago Tribune labeled the 26th Ward contest “the most closely watched election in Chicago history,” with both Washington and Vrdolyak campaigning there two days before the rematch, and Washington’s young election lawyer, Tom Johnson, a 1975 graduate of Harvard Law School, keeping a close eye on the proceedings. When Washington’s ally, Luis Gutierrez, prevailed by a surprisingly comfortable margin of more than 850 votes, the mayor attained a 25–25 city council split, putting him in position to cast a decisive tie-breaking vote—at least until the next regularly scheduled city elections just one year later.
While most of Chicago focused on the Washington vs. Vrdolyak contest, another vote—by United Steelworkers members on a dramatically concessionary new contract with LTV—was building to its own climax on April 4. One week earlier, on March 28—the sixth anniversary of Wisconsin Steel’s closure—Harold Washington met with Frank Lumpkin’s Save Our Jobs Committee. At LTV Republic’s East Side mill, Maury Richards campaigned against the proposed 9 percent reduction in workers’ hourly wage rates and benefits. But even though 1033’s members voted against the new contract 1,254 to 750, well over 60 percent of LTV’s nineteen thousand steelworkers in other states approved it.17
As winter turned to spring, DCP began to focus on the forlorn state of the Far South Side’s public parks, a visible example of basic city services being denied to black and Hispanic neighborhoods but not white ones. The city’s parks were overseen by a quasi-independent entity, the Chicago Park District (CPD), which remained a notorious nesting ground for white Democratic ward organization loyalists, even after Washington’s three years in office. Two energetic DCP members—Nadyne Griffin, who had a special interest in Robichaux Park, up at 95th Street, and Eva Sturgies, who lived across the street from Smith Park, at 99th and Princeton—had brought this issue to Obama’s attention. DCP began distributing leaflets in the solidly middle-class blocks around Smith Park, encouraging the community to attend a meeting to address the problem. Aletha Strong Gibson, a college graduate homemaker in her early thirties who lived one block south on Princeton, knew that Smith Park “really wasn’t very safe or conducive for young children” like her six- and four-year-olds. Gibson went to the meeting and spoke up. Afterward Barack “said he’d like to come meet with me about doing some more work on the parks issue,” and following that one-on-one Aletha became a key recruit.
One day early that spring, when Barack was visiting the handsome old Monadnock Building in the downtown Loop, which housed many small progressive organizations, he stopped into the offices of the ten-year-old Friends of the Parks (FOP) and introduced himself to John Owens, a twenty-nine-year-old army veteran who had become FOP’s community planning director a year earlier after finishing a degree in urban geography at Chicago State University. Owens was immediately impressed with Obama. “This guy sounds like he’s president of the country already,” Owens recounted just four years later. “He had an air of authority and a presence that made you want to listen.” Barack talked about the discriminatory treatment accorded Far South Side parks, and Owens explained some of what he knew about “the ins and outs of the Chicago Park District.” Barack had “all kinds of personality,” and “we sort of clicked,” Owens explained.
Barack invited John down to Roseland, and they worked together to start compiling a list of parks the CPD was ignoring: Abbott Park, east of the Dan Ryan Expressway; West Pullman Park, on Princeton Avenue; Carver Park, down in Altgeld Gardens; and the huge Palmer Park, just north of Holy Rosary. One afternoon in Palmer Park, gunshots sounded nearby, and they both ducked behind parked cars. Owen recalled Obama saying, “ ‘You hear that? Whoa!’ ” and remembers thinking, “ ‘Well, he hasn’t been around here very long.’ ”
John and Barack hit it off. Some evenings they went to music clubs together. “I could see he was somebody that I could learn a lot from,” said Owens, and Obama also could learn from Owens, a native of the South Side’s middle-class Chatham neighborhood, about his life experiences as a black man who had grown up in Chicago. Johnnie—as he was often called—quickly became Barack’s first truly close black male friend, at least since the cosmopolitan Eric Moore at Oxy. Before the end of April, Barack asked Johnnie to attend the upcoming July IAF training in Los Angeles, and Owens readily agreed.18
In early May, Jerry Kellman’s CCRC got another major grant: $30,000 from the Joyce Foundation to support Mike Kruglik’s organizing work in Chicago’s south suburbs. But Kellman also used his connections within Chicago’s Catholic archdiocese to re-create, in somewhat different form, Tom Joyce and Leo Mahon’s original vision of CCRC as an organization straddling the Illinois–Indiana state line to encompass the entire Calumet industrial region. Jerry had been thinking about restarting work in Indiana even when Barack first arrived, but underlying that was a fundamental truth that Leo and Tom had experienced and that Greg Galluzzo best articulated in explaining that “what was joined together industrially and geographically is not together politically.”
Chicagoans, especially black Chicagoans, who were deeply proud of their first black mayor, identified with their city. Residents of the south suburbs, many of whom had fled Chicago in earlier years, focused on their own townships and the larger overlay of Cook County, not the city’s government. Indiana residents paid little attention to Chicago politics and even less to Illinois. These regional identities were more significant than Leo and Tom’s belief in a “Calumet community.” Also the diocese of Gary, in northwest Indiana, was organizationally separate from the Chicago archdiocese, with independent financial access to local and national CHD resources.
By early May, Kellman had successfully attained funding from Father Tom Joyce’s Claretian Social Development Fund for what he called the “Northwest Indiana Organizing Project,” and thanks to Bishop Wilton Gregory, one of Cardinal Bernardin’s deputies, Bernardin requested that Norbert F. Gaughan, who had become bishop of Gary in October 1984, meet with Gregory and Kellman so that CCRC’s work could be reborn east of the Illinois state line. Gaughan agreed to commit his own diocesan funds to the effort, and sent a letter to the pastors of all his parishes, encouraging them to work with Kellman, who began establishing ties with existing groups such as East Chicago’s United Citizens Organization. But neither UCO nor the larger Calumet Project for Industrial Jobs, with a predominant union focus, used