By late spring 1986, it was clear that Frank Lumpkin’s cynical complaint that CCRC’s Regional Employment Network only created employment opportunities for its own employees was true. One headline announced that “Regional Employment Network Reports Initial Success,” but, as the article made clear, the organization’s definition of “success” was its data bank of 1,350 job seekers, not actual job offers. Governors State University appealed to state officials for an additional $375,000 to extend the program past the summer of 1986, but the request received no support. Obama would later remember REN as “a bust” that failed to find work for even one applicant. The savvy Fred Simari recalled how “there was an elaborate system to assess their needs,” but it “was all smoke and mirrors, the whole thing.”19
By mid-April, Barack had been working for several months to broaden DCP’s outreach with Altgeld Gardens residents, but with only modest success. Then one lady, Callie Smith, handed him an ad she had seen in April 14’s Chicago Sun-Times. “Specification No. 8632” sought bids for the “Removal of Ceiling and Pipe Insulation Containing Asbestos at the Management Office Building of Altgeld Gardens, 940 E. 132nd Street.” The bids were due April 30, and specifics could be obtained at Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) headquarters in the Loop. Potentially cancer-causing asbestos had been discovered in December 1985, but Altgeld was not the only CHA property with such a problem: asbestos had just been uncovered in two apartments at the Ida B. Wells Extension Homes in the Bronzeville neighborhood. Linda Randle, an organizer at the nearby Centers for New Horizons and who lived in another part of Wells, told her friend Martha Allen, who wrote for the Community Renewal Society’s (CRS) monthly Chicago Reporter, about the asbestos. Allen arranged for laboratory testing of a sample from Wells, and the results were shocking: “to find that much amosite [a type of asbestos] there is astounding,” one scientist stated.
Obama met Randle at a CRS-hosted meeting of organizers, and when Linda mentioned the discovery at Wells, Barack pulled out the Sun-Times ad and said, “the same thing is happening in Altgeld.” Linda and Barack agreed to be in touch, and back in Altgeld, Callie Smith called CHA manager Walter Williams to ask if the CHA had determined whether or not asbestos was present throughout the hundreds of homes as well as in the management office. In his own later telling, Obama accompanied Callie to a meeting where Williams said the CHA had checked and none had been found. Smith and Obama understandably doubted that assertion and sought documentation to back up Williams’s claim.
On May 9, several residents met with Gaylene Domer, executive assistant to CHA executive director Zirl Smith, to request immediate, independent testing of Altgeld residential buildings and public release of the results. They also asked that Smith appear at an Altgeld community meeting to respond to residents’ concerns. After a week with no response, Callie Smith, Loretta Augustine, and two other members of the Altgeld Developing Communities Project sent a Western Union Mailgram to Smith, with a copy to Mayor Washington. Citing the May 9 meeting, followed by CHA’s silence, their message repeated the two requests and asked for a written response within five days. On May 20 they wrote to Washington on CCRC letterhead and asked his staff to intervene.
Coincidentally or not, that same day CHA contacted a testing firm, and within twenty-four hours two vacant apartments and two boiler rooms were surveyed, with asbestos readily apparent in three of the four locations. Although most of the asbestos pipe insulation was in good condition, the inspectors warned that in residences it “is highly subject to damage” and should be removed whenever apartments become vacant.
That same day a Developing Communites Project press release noted the Altgeld complaints and said residents would visit CHA’s downtown headquarters the next morning. The Chicago Defender quoted liberally from Callie Smith’s statements in the release: “Basically we feel like we’ve been lied to and given the run-around,” she said. “We think it’s typical of the arrogance of the CHA to remove hazardous materials from its own offices without even checking to see if residents have the same problems.” WBBM Newsradio 780 began covering the story from daybreak onward.
Obama had booked a yellow school bus to take his community members to CHA headquarters downtown, and he had multiple copies of an outline of the residents’ demands. But only a modest number of people, including Callie Smith and Hazel Johnson of PCR, plus several children, showed up for the trip. When they arrived, they were brusquely told that Zirl Smith was unavailable, but the presence of one or more TV crews motivated officials to promise that testing would move ahead and that Smith would attend a community meeting in Altgeld on June 9.
Obama, in his own account nine years later, gave the CHA visit an oddly outsized importance, writing that “I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way,” since it had suggested “what might be possible and therefore spurs you on. That bus ride kept me going, I think. Maybe it still does.” He also wrote that only eight people, rather than “about 20 Altgeld residents” as reported in the press, made up his group.
On the next night’s 10:00 P.M. WBBM Channel 2 newscast, reporter Walter Jacobson recounted his inability to get anyone from CHA to respond to residents’ complaints about what “literally may be a question of life or death.” Instead, “the public affairs director of the CHA is getting her lunch while the people who live in the CHA continue getting poisoned by asbestos.” It was powerful television.
A CHA press release the next day said the issue was “resolved” and that test results demonstrated “no asbestos exposure danger.” Zirl Smith appeared on WBBM’s 10:00 P.M. newscast and insisted that “residents know we’re here to serve them” and that “we are good managers: we feel a responsibility to our residents.” Three days later, WBBM revealed on its 6:00 P.M. show that it had paid for testing at both Altgeld and Wells and had gotten dire results. “This is definitely a threat to human health, a threat to the health of the people who live there,” a medical expert told viewers. “It’s a situation that should be corrected as soon as possible.”
Within an hour, CHA ordered emergency inspections, and on WBBM’s 10:00 P.M. news, 2nd Ward alderman Bobby Rush called CHA’s behavior “criminal.” When the CHA’s inspectors finally began work at Altgeld on June 4, they found “many samples of exposed asbestos,” Walter Jacobson told WBBM viewers. While that was taking place, Obama and three Altgeld residents—Hazel Johnson, Evangeline “Vangie” Irving, and Cleonia Graham—were at City Hall trying to invite Washington to attend the Altgeld community meeting. With TV cameras rolling, the four were sent to an impromptu meeting in a tiny room with Washington’s city council floor leader, 4th Ward alderman Tim Evans. “We are sincere about having this taken care of,” Vangie Irving explained. Hazel Johnson added, as journalists looked on: “We’re asking the mayor to save our children and ourselves. We don’t have faith in promises from CHA management. With the mayor’s support, I think we’ll get some action.”
Evans promised to take their concerns to the mayor, and Obama was mentioned in the next day’s Sun-Times and Defender. The former identified him as a “community organizer,” but Evans would remember having the impression Barack was “related to someone who actually resides in CHA because that was the way he was relating to these people, like a member of their family. It was clear they had talked before that meeting about who would deal with what aspect of the plight” and when one participant got nervous, “this young man got up and sat next to the person who was supposed to speak…. ‘Let Alderman Evans know what concerns you have.’ He was not there to impose himself on them, he was there to facilitate their discussions with the so-called powers that be.”20
The next day Zirl Smith made a bad situation worse by admitting to a city council committee that CHA had discovered the asbestos six months earlier and then blaming residents “for disturbing the asbestos-covered pipes, creating a crisis themselves.” Bobby Rush responded that it was “very irresponsible” to allege that tenants were purposely “exposing themselves and their children to possible cancer,” and after the session, Smith hid in a men’s room to avoid WBBM reporter Jim Avila and his camera