Obama and Graf’s initial conversation about race and identity ran close to two hours. Barack’s friend Johnnie Owens was at the training too, and on Saturday afternoon, they went to Will Rogers State Beach to try out the Pacific Ocean. Johnnie was already impressed by Barack’s insistence on some form of exercise “every single day,” and one evening, Obama reproached Owens for eating dessert. Once in the water, Johnnie was astounded by Barack’s self-confidence as a swimmer: “he goes way out there,” Owens remembered. “He’s used to being in that ocean,” as all his Punahou friends could attest. Owens also went along when Obama asked for a tour of some of South Central L.A.’s most gang-infested neighborhoods. “It was a real experience. I was freaked out,” Owens recalls.
In the second week, Obama had another long conversation with Arnie Graf, again focused on “family and race.” But Barack also asked Arnie to talk about his experiences helping build a chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, as a college student in Buffalo in the early 1960s. The IAF wanted to add minority organizers to its staff, and Arnie suggested that Barack come work with him in Baltimore. Barack said he had moved around a lot in life and wanted to stay in Chicago: “I have to have some place where I want to be that feels like home.” Graf asked whether Barack envisioned a career as an organizer, and Obama said no. “I’d like to organize for another couple of years, because I think I need to get that under my belt. I need to understand on the ground how to relate.” Then, according to Graf, Obama said he thought he would go to a top law school and become a civil rights lawyer and perhaps a judge, a career his grandmother and mother had repeatedly mentioned to him.
Monday was devoted to analyzing how an Alinsky organization chose an “enemy” and how it could use a confrontation in a way that leads to a relationship with someone who had been ignoring you. “It’s a relational tool, not a tactic,” Mike Gecan explained. “The purpose of polarizing is to get into a relationship and then depolarize it.” Tuesday focused on values and congregations, Wednesday on IAF as an organization. Before the training ended at midday Thursday, Obama spoke again with Arnie Graf and said he had most enjoyed the theoretical basis that underlay the world-as-it-is-versus-the-world-as-it-should-be dialectic, but that he was uncomfortable with how IAF conceptualized enemies and confrontation. Both Graf and Gecan wanted to recruit Barack to IAF, even though they worried that he seemed to grasp everything “more in the intellect than in the gut,” as Graf put it. “There’s something missing here,” Graf thought, because Barack “always seemed one step removed from himself.”24
Thursday afternoon Obama flew back to Chicago. It had been an edifying ten days, an experience that underscored how “the key to Alinskyism is a kind of pragmatic rationality” and that an organizer “must be pragmatic and nonideological.” In Chicago, Barack was met by a Tribune front page that announced: “LTV Files for Bankruptcy.” Financial analysts said this “virtually assures” the closure or sale of the mill, and on Saturday, the news turned worse when LTV terminated the medical benefits and life insurance of its more than sixty thousand retired workers nationwide, an action that Local 1033 president Maury Richards denounced as “outrageous and inhuman.” On Tuesday, when reports circulated that U.S. Steel would soon lay off up to two-thirds of the 757 men still employed at South Works, the USW threatened to strike. In quick succession, the USW then struck LTV’s profitable Indiana Harbor mill in East Chicago, but not the East Side plant, where several retired managers who also had lost their health benefits joined Richards and hundreds of 1033 pickets while other colleagues kept the mill running. When a federal bankruptcy judge ordered LTV to restore the retirees’ benefits, the USW terminated its strike, but then two days later struck U.S. Steel, and South Works shut down. The next week LTV announced that it would lay off 1,650 of the 2,300 remaining workers at the East Side mill before the end of the year.
This meant the end for Chicago’s last integrated steel plant. Richards told reporters that many 1033 members “feel helpless and without hope,” a familiar refrain to everyone who had witnessed Wisconsin’s closure six years earlier. Jerry Kellman said LTV’s East Side mill had no future “unless the governor takes action,” but Thompson gave no sign of doing so and Kellman’s outreach to Local 1033 lessened. “It didn’t lead to any lasting working relationship there,” Richards remembered.
The ripple effects were everywhere. A small-business owner in south suburban Dolton who had lost $1,000 when Wisconsin closed in 1980 told the Daily Cal that LTV owed him $8,000 he was unlikely to recoup. At a 1033 meeting, with members anxious that the local would lose its union hall for nonpayment of rent, the official minutes recorded an incident in which one agitated officer “threatened M[aury] Richards with physical harm.” A Chicago Tribune feature story, referring to what had happened at Wisconsin Steel, South Works, and now LTV, described “chilling levels of alcoholism, emotional stress, and physical illness” among the unemployed and their families. There was no denying that over the past six years “the deterioration of the Southeast Side has been catastrophic.” The Daily Cal’s superb steel reporter, Larry Galica, toured the largely silent South Works and pronounced it “a modern ghost town,” and Richards blamed the steel companies’ “failure to reinvest in their facilities to modernize them” as the reason why tens of thousands of people had suffered so traumatically since March 28, 1980.25
Amid this latest steel crisis, Harold Washington formally kicked off his reelection campaign before a crowd of four thousand supporters at a Loop hotel. Weeks earlier, in late April, Washington had reiterated his opposition to any new landfills, even though he knew there was no solution to Chicago’s garbage crisis other than finding additional landfill capacity somewhere. In late May he quietly approved what the city insisted was a “reconfiguration,” and not “an expansion,” of the huge CID landfill just east of Altgeld Gardens. Environmental purists like Hazel Johnson were understandably not happy, but a heavy majority of his administration’s Task Force on Solid Waste Management endorsed his action, including IACT’s Mary Ellen Montes.
An even more imminent threat to what remained of the Southeast Side was the disappearance of gainful employment. Washington’s aides reported, “Stores and local businesses are closing down because the only purchases are for bare necessities. The area is becoming blighted and people’s attitudes are of hopelessness.” Additionally, “there is a great need for more police coverage,” since “there are not enough police officers on the street patrolling the neighborhoods.”26
In August, Maria Cerda, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training (MOET), finally appeared at a community meeting in Altgeld Gardens to respond to DCP’s request that MOET open an office within reasonable travel distance of the Gardens. Obama had prepared Loretta Augustine to chair the meeting, but almost immediately, Cerda became “very aggressive and domineering,” according to Loretta. “I was supposed to introduce the issue, and she tried to take over,” and became openly patronizing, asking Loretta, “Do you even know what we do?” Then, from the back of the room, came Barack’s voice: “Let Loretta speak! We want to hear what Loretta has to say!”
Obama was determined to avoid another breakdown like the Zirl Smith session, so he put aside his own rule about remaining quietly in the background, and this time intervened forcefully if anonymously. Loretta remembered that “people kind of picked it up,” chanting “Let Loretta speak!” In the end, Cerda agreed that MOET would open an office on South Michigan Avenue in central Roseland, a ten-minute bus ride from the Gardens, before the end of November.
By midsummer, Greg Galluzzo and Mary Gonzales were expanding UNO’s reach by linking up with and reactivating the Gamaliel Foundation, founded in the 1960s but long dormant. Greg had been seeking funding for this new vision since early 1986, and he believed that Gamaliel could serve as a training institute that would “generate a flow of leadership for the city’s future.” Mary and Greg saw community organizing as “the way people can move from a sense of helplessness and isolation to active participation in the decisions affecting their lives.” Greg felt that Chicago’s vibrant “movement” activity in earlier years had “distracted people” from pursuing long-lasting change. “Compared