Just before midnight on February 25, Byrne conceded defeat after mounting a “powerful challenge” to Washington, whose 53.5 to 46.3 percent victory “was much closer than the mayor’s strategists had been counting on,” the Tribune reported the next day. But the headline “Mayor’s Tight Win Just Half the Battle” pointed to the April 7 general election, when Washington would face two white Democrats running as independents: Cook County assessor Tom Hynes, a relative “Mr. Clean” by Chicago standards, and 10th Ward alderman Ed Vrdolyak, the mayor’s worst nemesis. Fewer white voters had turned out to support Byrne than had voted against Washington in 1983, though the mayor’s own white support had barely risen from four years earlier. A larger, more heavily white electorate was possible on April 7, but Washington was “a heavy favorite” as long as both Hynes and Vrdolyak remained in the race.40
On the Far South Side, Obama was trying to generate more grassroots support for his Career Education Network idea. Five high schools drew students from major portions of DCP’s neighborhoods: Harlan at 96th Street and South Michigan Avenue, Corliss on East 103rd Street, Julian at 103rd and South Elizabeth in Washington Heights, Fenger on South Wallace Street at 112th Street, and Carver down in Altgeld Gardens. Barack and a number of DCP’s most active members, including Dan Lee and Adrienne Jackson, began staging modest street corner demonstrations near the troubled high schools to draw attention to the schools’ horrible dropout rates, especially among young black men. One morning that spring, they held a rally on busy 111th Street a block north of Fenger, where one year earlier a Defender photo of the school’s top academic achievers had pictured one dozen African American women. Among the passersby was Illinois state senator Emil Jones Jr., whose office was less than two blocks away. “I stopped to see what they were out there for,” Jones later explained. He knew Adrienne Jackson, and she introduced Jones to Obama. “Barack was part of the group,” Jones recalled. “I met him on the corner.” But Jones was not happy to see protesters just down from the 34th Ward headquarters. “You have a lot to learn,” he told Adrienne and Barack. “You’ll get more flies with honey than you will the way you all are doing this.”
Jones viewed them as an “in-your-face type of group,” but invited them to his office, where they laid out their dropout prevention goals, and particularly Obama’s hope of winning state funding for his Career Education Network. Jones thought Obama was “very bright and intelligent and very sincere” but also “very aggressive and somewhat pushy.” More seriously, Jones thought Obama “was naive as related to the political situation.” He did not know that in most any Chicago ward organization, real power was with the ward committeeman, who often doubled as alderman, and not with state legislators, even one with the grand title of senator. In addition, the Illinois legislature was made up of two very separate chambers.
“We can work together,” Jones told Obama, but “you haven’t got a deal on the House side” until a supportive state representative was recruited. But with Jones’s backing, Barack now had a significant state political figure, in addition to Al Raby’s City Hall connections.41
But still Obama’s biggest challenge was expanding DCP’s base beyond Roman Catholic parishes like Holy Rosary and St. Catherine and PTA groups from middle-class Washington Heights. His first significant recruit was Rev. Rick Williams, the Panamanian-born pastor of Pullman Christian Reformed Church (PCRC) on East 103rd Street. PCRC had been founded in 1972 as a “mission” church when Roseland’s four long-standing Christian Reformed churches left the neighborhood in the wake of its rapid racial turnover. Williams arrived at PCRC in 1981, and by early 1987 PCRC possessed the most racially integrated congregation on the Far South Side.
One day Obama and Adrienne Jackson called on Williams, who was immediately impressed by Barack’s “humility” and “his ease with people.” Williams also saw that Obama’s focus on growing DCP was rooted in an IAF-style worldview: “they wanted to work with churches because churches have values and churches have people and churches have money.” But Williams also knew that building an ecumenical base for DCP would be difficult because “these churches are of different persuasions, denominations, ways of thinking…. Creating community out of these churches” would be “a very complicated thing,” and even more difficult for some pastors because Barack himself was “not a church-going person.” But because Obama was “a principled person,” Williams readily signed on, telling Barack, “You are wise beyond your years,” when he and Adrienne departed.
Just a block west of Holy Rosary was Reformation Lutheran Church. One young woman from that congregation, Kimetha Webster, had been active in DCP for months, and sometime that spring, she took Barack and Bill Stenzel there and introduced them to the church’s new young pastor, Tyrone Partee, as well as her father, John Webster, a congregation mainstay and the church’s caretaker. If Obama’s Career Education Network became a reality, its after-school counseling and tutoring efforts would require more space than Holy Rosary alone could offer. Obama explained DCP’s aspirations before asking, “Pastor, do you think it’s possible that we could do some things here at the church?”
Partee was, like Barack, just twenty-five years old, and he came from a politically active family. His uncle Cecil Partee, the longtime committeeman of the 20th Ward, had served for two decades in the Illinois state legislature, including one term as president of the state Senate, a landmark achievement for an African American in the thoroughly white Illinois state capitol. Cecil Partee also was a crucial supporter of Harold Washington and now served as city treasurer. Tyrone immediately offered Barack Reformation’s support and space in its Fellowship Hall. “I believed in what he was doing for our community,” Partee said. But getting to know John Webster was even more valuable because he offered to show Barack around Roseland. “Everybody knew Mr. Webster,” Partee recalled. “He knew the good and the bad on everything.”
A third pastor Barack called upon was Alonzo C. Pruitt, a former Chicago Urban League community organizer and now the young vicar of St. George and St. Matthias Episcopal Church on 111th Street. St. George was known for its weekday program that each morning fed about forty hungry people, some of whom lived at the nearby Roseland YMCA and others in the neighborhood’s abandoned buildings. Pruitt was also impressed with Obama and agreed to lend his name to DCP’s efforts.42
Among Roseland’s many churches, the faith most widely represented was not Catholic, Lutheran, Christian Reformed, or Episcopal; it was Baptist. Baptist churches were freestanding and independent, not tied to any denominational hierarchy or bishop, and their pastors could be as iconoclastic as they chose to be. By early 1987, central Roseland’s most immediately pressing problem, as Pruitt’s feed-the-hungry program highlighted, was the increase in the number of homeless people. That problem had its roots in the foreclosed loans and boarded-up homes that had increased dramatically in the past seven years due to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, in the steel mills and also at previously vibrant manufacturing firms, from Dutch Boy and Sherwin-Williams paints to Carl Buddig meats and the Libby, McNeill & Libby food cannery.
Late in 1986 the Daily Calumet’s superb steel reporter, Larry Galica, in an article about the human costs of unemployment, quoted Alonzo Grant, a black Roseland homeowner with a wife and three children who had lost his job at South Works and not found a new one. “I have no income whatsoever. I can’t receive public aid. I’m three months behind in my house mortgage payments, I’m two months behind in my car payments, and I’m behind in my utility bills.”
Starting in late 1985, Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS), a ten-year-old foundation-supported organization whose mission was to help homeowners in declining, heavily minority neighborhoods, began planning a Roseland program at the request of Ellen Benjamin, executive director of the Borg-Warner Foundation. Benjamin had been interested in Roseland for several years, and within six months, the Borg-Warner Foundation committed $450,000 to NHS Roseland. Chicago’s Department of Housing soon matched that with $500,000 in city funds,