Simultaneous to his work with Mary-Ann Wilson, Barack was conducting one-evening-a-week training for DCP members at Holy Rosary, while also drafting his own initial grant applications. The trainings, informed by what he had learned during his ten days with IAF, involved DCP veterans such as Dan Lee and Betty Garrett plus relative newcomers such as Aletha Strong Gibson. They also attracted new faces such as Loretta’s neighbor Margaret Bagby and Aletha’s close friend Ann West, a white Australian whose husband was black and president of the PTA at Turner-Drew Elementary School. Another important PTA figure, Isabella Waller, president of the regional Southwest Council, brought along her best friend, Deloris Burnam. Ernest Powell Jr., the politically savvy president of the Euclid Park neighborhood association and someone Barack had recruited over the summer, came as well. Close to twenty people attended the weekly sessions, at which Barack always took off his watch and put it on the table so he could see it during the training.
For Obama, the grant applications were a major concern. The first would go to Ken Rolling and Jean Rudd at the Woods Fund, which he hoped would renew the $30,000 given to CCRC for DCP in 1986. The ten-page, single-spaced document offered a retrospective account of the past fourteen months, and made clear, as he had stressed previously, that the Far South Side’s “two most pressing problems” were a “lack of jobs, and lack of educational opportunity.” Obama had one especially audacious goal for 1987: a “Career Education Network to serve the entire Far South Side area—a comprehensive and coordinated system of career guidance and counseling for high school age youth” with “a centralized counseling office” augmenting in-school counselors so as to reduce the dropout rate and channel more black high school graduates into higher education. “Youth in the area,” he warned, “are slipping behind their parents in educational achievement.”
Obama already knew that to build DCP two types of expansion were necessary: an outreach to congregations beyond the Roman Catholic base that Kellman had developed and the recruitment of more block club and PTA members like Eva Sturgies, Aletha Strong Gibson, Ann West, and Ernie Powell. DCP’s neighborhoods, from Altgeld northward to Roseland, West Pullman, and even solidly middle-class Washington Heights, were ill served by their elected officials, who “have generally poured their efforts into conventional political campaigns, with almost no concrete results for area residents.” Obama spoke of the need to “dramatize problems through the media and through direct action,” but DCP’s most pressing need was funds to hire another African American organizer. He realized a $10,000 entry-level salary would not attract experienced candidates, so DCP’s proposed 1987 budget called for $20,000 for that position and an increase in Barack’s salary to $25,000.
Ken and Jean at the Woods Fund told Barack to introduce himself to Anne Hallett, the new director of the small Wieboldt Foundation, whose interests closely paralleled those of Woods, and also to consider applying to the larger MacArthur Foundation. Obama visited and spoke with Hallett in November, and soon thereafter a front-page story in the Chicago Defender highlighted MacArthur’s announcement of $2.4 million in grants to community organizations, including $16,000 to Frank Lumpkin’s Save Our Jobs Committee. Before the year’s end, Obama submitted to Wieboldt a formal request for $10,000 that was virtually identical to the one he had sent Woods. Boasting that DCP was “an organization equal to any grass-roots effort going on in Chicago’s Black community right now,” Obama admitted that his employment and educational opportunities agenda represented “an ambitious program.” He said DCP needed “about two years” to recruit enough churches to be self-sustaining, and he told Hallett that DCP would soon reach out to MacArthur too.30
The Far South Side’s two most notable developments in fall 1986 were both environmental. In late September, Waste Management Incorporated withdrew its long-pending application to open a new landfill west of South Torrence Avenue and would instead target the 140-acre O’Brien Locks site on the west bank of the Little Calumet River, surrounded on three sides by WMI’s huge CID landfill. UNO treated this news as a huge victory, infuriating environmental activists Hazel Johnson and Vi Czachorski, whose Altgeld Gardens and Hegewisch neighborhoods were just west and east of the O’Brien site. Johnson and Czachorski’s organizations, along with Marian Byrnes, formed a new antidumping alliance, Citizens United to Reclaim the Environment (CURE). Together with Sierra Club members, CURE organized a well-covered protest outside City Hall. As officials continued to seek the least bad solution to Chicago’s looming landfill crisis, UNO and CURE would be on opposite sides wherever the battle line was drawn. A few weeks later, 10th Ward alderman Ed Vrdolyak, a nemesis of Harold Washington as well as UNO, threw his support behind CURE.
That dispute seemed mild compared to a front-page headline in the October 25 Chicago Tribune: “South Side Facility Burning ‘Superwaste.’ ” The incinerator at 117th Street and Stony Island Avenue, little more than a mile from South Deering’s Bright Elementary School to the north and Altgeld Gardens to the southwest, was one of just five nationwide that was licensed to burn highly toxic PCBs. Although a front-page 1985 Wall Street Journal story ominously headlined “Plants That Incinerate Poisonous Wastes Run Into a Host of Problems” had cited the plant’s location, neither UNO nor most anyone else in Chicago had taken note that it was operating close to capacity, burning more than twenty thousand gallons of PCBs seven days a week. Experts agreed that incineration was much better than burial, but neither Illinois EPA nor Chicago officials had objected to this facility’s location.
In early November, United Neighborhood Organization held its annual dinner at an East Side banquet hall. Frank Lumpkin was one of two honorees, and the guest speaker was George Munoz, the new young president of the Chicago Board of Education. Newspaper photographs showed two of Chicago’s most promising Hispanic political stars—Munoz and Maria Elena Montes, as Lena’s name now sometimes appeared—seated on the dais. UNO and Gamaliel’s expansion had elevated Danny Solis to UNO’s executive director and Southeast Side organizer Phil Mullins to a supervisory role, and in Mullins’s stead, Bruce Orenstein, a young IAF veteran who knew Greg Galluzzo, took charge of UNO’s Southeast Side work.31
As Barack was drawn into Greg Galluzzo’s UNO and Gamaliel network, one Gamaliel board member, John McKnight, stood out as the most intellectually intriguing voice at the regular gatherings, where most participants adopted a macho tone. Throughout the mid-1980s, McKnight had continued the same powerful themes he had voiced in earlier years. “Through the propagation of belief in authoritative expertise, professionals cut through the social fabric of community and sow clienthood where citizenship once grew,” he told one audience while warning of the danger that “a nation of clients” posed to a democratic state. In an article entitled “Community Organizing in the ’80s: Toward a Post-Alinsky Agenda,” McKnight and his younger colleague Jody Kretzmann declared that “a number of the classic Alinsky strategies and tactics are in need of critical revision.” Rather than confronting some “enemy,” the emphasis should be on “developing a neighborhood’s own capacities to do for itself what outsiders will or can no longer do.” The focus should shift public dollars away from salaries for service providers to investment in “local productive capacities” that will strengthen rather than weaken communities.
A year earlier, in November 1985, Chicago Magazine—a monthly not easily mistaken for a social policy journal—had devoted six glossy pages to a lengthy interview with McKnight. In the article, he said Chicagoans needed to recognize that “the industrial sector of America has abandoned us,” and that a new future loomed. “We’re turning out young people from universities right and left who really are looking for something to do. In the elite universities what do we offer them? We offer them the chance to become lawyers.” On the other hand, a sizable population of heavily dependent poor people was necessary to support the “glut” of professional servicers “who ride on their backs.” Public funds should be used to employ low-income people rather than pay servicers to patronize them. “To the degree that the War on Poverty attempted to provide services in lieu of power or income, it failed,” McKnight argued. “Poor people are poor in power.” For poor Chicagoans to become citizens rather than clients, “shifting income out of the service sector into economic opportunity for poor people is absolutely essential.”
In