By early July, the DCP women interested in tackling the discriminatory behavior of the Chicago Park District (CPD) were also ready to move. Harold Washington, after his late April city council victory, was now able to win approval of two new CPD board members. Washington’s appointees, architect Walter Netsch and African American arts figure Margaret Burroughs—Frank Marshall Davis’s old friend “Flo” in Sex Rebel: Black—would give him a board majority that could sideline CPD superintendent Ed Kelly and transfer his authority to Washington aide Jesse Madison. This would effectively undermine the core of Chicago’s traditional Democratic machine, for journalists believed that a thousand of the CPD’s thirty-four hundred full-time employees were precinct captains and political operatives, particularly from Kelly’s own 47th Ward. When, on June 16, the new board majority did just that, Kelly filed suit challenging the action’s legitimacy. In the meantime, on July 2, DCP gave Netsch and Burroughs a tour of disheveled Far South Side parks before they spoke at a DCP community meeting at St. Helena of the Cross. The two new members told DCP to bring a list of needed repairs that CPD staffers had failed to make to the next CPD board meeting on July 10.
The next day a judge upheld the board’s removal of Ed Kelly, who lashed out angrily at the mayor. “Washington’s ruined this city,” Kelly told reporters. “He’s going to be gone. We’ve got to get him out.” On July 10, after Obama was already in Los Angeles, St. Helena parishioner Eva Sturgies took charge of DCP’s presentation. She had carefully prepared a list of forty-one requests regarding eight different parks that DCP had given to CPD employees two months earlier—and only ten had been completed. At the meeting, Sturgies summarized the disappointing inaction: “The summer is already half over, and we have only seen work done on the most cosmetic aspects” of DCP’s list. She indicated that DCP knew, thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests it had submitted, that CPD staffers had not even prepared work orders for the other items. Sturgies said that Far South Side citizens want “the same kind of service that other neighborhoods in the city get.”
Four days later, a court ruling reaffirmed the authority of Harold Washington’s new appointees, and the next week Ed Kelly surrendered his post, promising, “I don’t get angry. I get even.” Washington quickly named George Galland, corporation counsel Judson Miner’s former law partner, as the Park District’s new attorney. Galland announced that thousands of supposed jobs on the CPD’s payroll were “blatantly illegal,” and vowed to clean house. “It has been one of the most valuable havens for employment by the Democratic organization,” Galland tartly commented.
Before Obama left for Los Angeles, he and Jerry Kellman attended a ceremony where Joseph Cardinal Bernardin publicly presented the CHD grants, including the latest $33,000 to DCP for organizing in Altgeld Gardens and for Barack’s prospective plan “to improve high school and college opportunities for minority students,” a CHD press release noted. Then, following the holiday weekend, Barack left for Los Angeles on Tuesday, July 8.23
In the fourteen years following Saul Alinsky’s 1972 death, IAF had abandoned its Chicago roots, but attending an IAF training was still a rite of passage even for experienced organizers. Three years earlier Greg Galluzzo, Mary Gonzales, and their younger UNO colleague Danny Solis had taken it thanks to Peter Martinez, and in 1985 UNO’s Phil Mullins attended as well. Mount St. Mary’s College was IAF’s long-standing summer location, with trainees arriving on a Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday was devoted to two basic staples of IAF teaching: “World As Is/World As Should Be ‘Power’ Session” and “Power and Self-Interest.” The 125 or so attendees were divided into groups of about 25, with the IAF’s five senior “cabinet members”—Ed Chambers, Ernie Cortes, Mike Gecan, Arnie Graf, and Larry McNeil—rotating among them.
Obama was already familiar with Alinsky’s major themes and principles, thanks to Kellman, Kruglik, and the three-day Milwaukee event six months earlier. Ed Chambers, Alinsky’s lead inheritor, had articulated them in a small 1978 volume titled Organizing for Family and Congregation. Alinsky’s best-known principle was that “power tends to come in two forms: organized people and organized money.” But Alinsky had never fully grasped a second point that was now emphasized by Kellman, Galluzzo, and Chambers: “one of the largest reservoirs of untapped power is the institution of the parish and congregation,” because “they have the people, the values, and the money.”
Mike Gecan acknowledged that Alinsky had failed to “create organizations that endured,” and by 1986 IAF was striving for permanency through growth: “as the number of local churches in the organization increases, the organization becomes increasingly self-sufficient” thanks to each congregation’s financial support. Obama already knew that the number of organizers a group could hire was dependent on its funding. Barack understood how organizers had to prioritize “the finding and developing of a strong collective leadership,” and thanks to the many one-on-ones Kellman had had him conduct, he appreciated how “the single most important element in the interview is the interviewer’s capacity to listen.”
As Jerry and Mike had made clear, it was crucial to “select and engage in battles that can be won,” instead of larger problems—like the closure of Wisconsin Steel—that were obviously insoluble. Resolving small issues would “season people in victory.” Failures sapped morale and enthusiasm, whereas with small victories “a sense of competence and confidence grows.”
For individuals already working as organizers, the ten-day IAF training was “designed to force reflection on what you have done, what you didn’t do, and ways and means of approaching reality and institutions based on a clear understanding of the tension between self-interest and self-sacrifice. The first week is spent in getting people to look at who they are, what their visions are, are they willing to reorganize themselves and their visions.” The first day’s sessions would “force people to reflect and open up to the world as it is against the world as it should be,” and participants read a portion of Viktor Frankl’s famous 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning. From there, the training explored “the difference between issues and problems” before sessions on “how to spot and develop leaders” and “how to do a power analysis of a particular community.” Next were the more confrontational elements of the Alinsky model: choosing “enemies” and “creating crises.”
The fourth day was devoted to individual meetings between attendees and the IAF trainers. Mike Gecan, who remembered Obama from their brief meeting eighteen months earlier at NYPIRG, was struck by how Barack now seemed “very intellectual, very abstractly intense. He’d be very intense about an idea,” such as identity, but “very detached about the people.” Instead of personalizing a subject, “he’d be lost in the idea,” exhibiting “very little connection” and seemingly “abstracted from relationships and others,” Gecan recalled.
Early in the training, before a session with Arnie Graf, Obama learned from either Gecan or Ernie Cortes that Graf was married to an African American woman and had several interracial children. Graf remembers that Barack sought him out, and from Friday onward, the two had “a series of conversations … that were not related to the training. He had lots of questions … he’s very curious about interracial relationships and children and how you raise a child.” Graf remembers Obama wanting to know how Arnie felt “as a white person, raising interracial children and being in a solidified marriage.” Barack did not say much about his own childhood, but he wanted to hear about Arnie’s experience: “How do my children see themselves, how do they identify themselves and how do I feel about that and how does my wife feel about it?”
Arnie and his wife Martha had met in graduate school, and by 1986 they had been married for thirteen years and had three children: two boys and a girl, ages ten, seven, and three. Barack wondered how they raised them “to understand who they are?” Arnie replied that given his children’s ages, “I’m not sure how they see themselves quite yet,” but that they knew their racially distinct