Early in the summer Barack decided that he and Sheila should acquire a new Macintosh SE computer, which had debuted just three months earlier. “It was the latest model and very fancy,” Sheila remembered, and as with their rent, Barack happily footed the bill. “Barack said we both needed it,” and they each used it a lot, but when it first arrived, Barack had no idea how to operate the mouse. A call to Asif resulted in the dispatch of Asif’s other best friend, Doug Glick, a fellow linguistic anthropology graduate student who quickly showed Barack that you do not hold the mouse up in the air.
By the end of June, with Sheila away from Chicago and Asif up in Madison, Barack and Doug on several weekends made the three-hour drive up to where Asif was housesitting in some Wisconsin professor’s lakefront home. Obama years later would publicly joke that he had had “some fun times, which I can’t discuss in detail,” on those visits and “some good memories,” but Glick clearly remembered the long drives in Barack’s noisy Honda. Barack was “just a regular guy,” an “incredibly friendly guy” with “a great sense of humor.” During the road trips, Barack talked “about wanting to write the great American novel…. I spent an awful lot of time in the car with him. These are long drives, he can talk,” and “he doesn’t shut up.” At least once Obama mentioned an interest in law school, but he rarely talked about his DCP work. “I never heard him talking about community work and public service as the driving force of who he was.” Sometimes “I’m making fun of him,” asking, “ ‘If I whisper “shut up,” will you hear it with those ears?’ ” But Barack clearly had “tremendous intelligence, tremendous charisma,” and indeed “a certain kind of aura to him,” Glick thought. Doug, like Asif, felt that “Barack is not that black,” but it also seemed as if “he was ideologically loaded a little.”
During one drive, Glick recounted, “we had a god moment. The strangest thing that has ever happened to me in my life happened with him.” Every trip included a pit stop to get gas and pick up something to drink, and on one occasion Barack was “sitting in the car in the driver’s seat” with the window open as Doug returned carrying snacks and bottles. “I tripped. The Snapple goes flying…. We both watch as it hits the ground, breaks like an egg, goes up through the air, goes through the window and both of the things land on his legs face up.” Yet somehow Obama was completely dry. “We’re never going to forget that,” Barack said to Doug. “Religions start at moments like that.”52
In Chicago, the battling intensified over the Southeast Side landfills and their toxic impact on nearby residents. The Sun-Times published a six-part, front-page series of stories titled “Our Toxic Trap” which focused on CID, the Metropolitan Sanitary District’s (MSD) “shit farm” just north of Altgeld Gardens, and older, more mysterious dumps like the Paxton Landfill. Hazel Johnson was quoted on the “nauseating stench” of sewage sludge permeating Altgeld and said, “it smells just like dead bodies.” In response, the state legislature created a special joint committee to investigate the problems, and the MSD’s board pledged its own study after an angry public meeting during which Johnson called one African American MSD commissioner an “Uncle Tom.” After a large illegal dump was discovered in a remote corner of Auburn Gresham, four city sanitation workers who were excavating the waste for transfer were “overcome by noxious garbage fumes” and hospitalized.
On June 30, WMI’s Mary Ryan proposed to Chicago’s city council that if the city would set aside its existing moratorium on landfill growth, WMI would move forward with an “economic and community development assistance program” that could be a huge “ ‘catalyst’ toward revitalizing” the entire Southeast Side. But Ryan’s proposal only intensified the fury of local activists like Marian Byrnes, Vi Czachorski, and Hazel Johnson over a possible deal between the city and WMI to expand landfill capacity. “Perhaps Washington is Vrdolyak in disguise on dump issues,” James Landing, the chairman of the Lake Calumet Study Committee (LCSC), told his fellow allies.
With a new and energetic Chicago chapter of the international environmental group Greenpeace eagerly joining in, Southeast Side activists prepared for a July 29 blockade of all dumping at CID. A large rally drew media coverage, and a dozen or more Greenpeace members and local activists would chain themselves together to CID’s entrance gate to block waste trucks from entering the landfill. By the morning of the twenty-ninth, DCP’s Dan Lee, Cathy Askew, Margaret Bagby, Loretta Augustine, Betty Garrett, and Obama joined the protesters. Cathy recalled years later, “He led that. He led that in the background. He had to be there to bail them out.”
The day was “beastly hot,” one young Greenpeace member remembered, and “wearing a media-friendly buttoned-down shirt” became a sweaty mistake. But the blockade was a grand success. The Daily Calumet reported that a crowd of 150 people gathered and said it was “the largest environmental protest in years.” As many as a hundred waste trucks were backed up on the nearby expressway and unable to enter CID, as protesters chanted, “Take it back!” They blocked the entry gate from 10:00 A.M. until midafternoon. One photo caption said: “Wearing a gas mask, Deacon Daniel Lee of the Developing Communities Project … makes a point about odors and toxic wastes.”
Some reporters lost interest as the day dragged on, and the next morning’s Sun-Times erroneously reported that “there were no arrests.” Leonard Lamkin, an East Side activist who joined the chain-in, said that “when the media went away, that’s when they made the arrests.” Hazel Johnson and Marian Byrnes were among the sixteen participants taken into custody, and the women remained jailed for six hours even though the men were released in less than two. Scott Sederstrom, the young, overdressed Greenpeacer, thought “it was almost an act of mercy by the Chicago police to take us into their air-conditioned precinct house for booking…. The Cubs game was on TV in the station” and comments about baseball leavened the fingerprinting process. “As a further act of generosity, they let me stay in the air-conditioned area watching a little more of the game” instead of moving Sederstrom to a holding cell. Given the Cubs’ all-too-typical performance, though—they were trailing 10–0 by the seventh-inning stretch—interest in the game understandably waned. Weeks later the charges were dropped against defendants who agreed not to enter any WMI properties for one year.53
Before the summer ended, Hazel Johnson and Marian Byrnes staged three more protests near the CID entrance, taking care not to get arrested. They also testified before the special joint legislative committee, chaired by Emil Jones. Assisting Hazel was a thirty-five-year-old black man who had just returned to Chicago after working toward a master’s degree at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and who had earlier won a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University in England. Like Jones, Melvin J. “Mel” Reynolds was eyeing a challenge against incumbent U.S. congressman Gus Savage in the spring 1988 Democratic primary, and both men—like Savage—were eager to raise their profiles among district residents angry over authorities’ inability to take meaningful action against the Southeast Side’s multiple toxic threats.
Several months earlier, Harold Washington had elevated Howard Stanback to an influential post as his assistant in charge of the city’s infrastructure. An African American economist, Stanback had taught at New York’s New School for Social Research until he came to Chicago as Maria Cerda’s deputy at MOET. His new appointment made him the mayor’s primary adviser on Chicago’s landfill crisis, and in late summer 1987, Stanback gave Washington a memo that laid out the city’s options. Chicago had done “very little