But one Friday Barack drove north with Sheila, and McKnight remembered Barack calling him from the Penguin, a working-class bar in nearby Sauk City, to say that his shabby Honda had broken down. John drove in to pick them up, and Barack introduced him to Sheila, whom McKnight thought was “absolutely stunning.” The regulars at the Penguin “must have been pretty surprised when that couple walked in,” McKnight suggested.
That weekend, like others, was spent mostly “talking about ideas,” McKnight recounted. Barack had a “set of things he was concerned about that he didn’t think he could talk with Kellman or Greg about that was outside the true faith.” McKnight, as a longtime Gamaliel board member, knew how “absolutely rigid” Greg was about the Alinsky model’s view that the way to make people “feel powerful was their anger,” instead of feeling “powerful because of their contributions.” Barack was deeply averse to anger and confrontation, and therein lay his difficulty with the attitude that Alinsky organizing sought to inculcate in its young initiates. McKnight remembered these discussions were “mostly my … responding to him about questions he had,” with McKnight talking about how his asset orientation differed from the “really true faith people” like Greg. McKnight had just written a powerful new paper, “The Future of Low-Income Neighborhoods and the People Who Reside There,” addressing what he termed “client neighborhoods.” Anyone who had spent time in Altgeld Gardens would have appreciated McKnight’s analysis. Such areas are “places of residence for people who are not a part of the productive process” and “have no hopeful future.” What was needed was “a new vision of neighborhood that focuses every available resource upon production.” In a sentence that reached directly back to the quintessential lesson of the 1960s’ southern freedom movement, McKnight insisted that for a group like DCP, “it is the identification of leadership capacities in every citizen that is the basis for effective community organization.”
As McKnight and Obama continued to talk throughout 1987, what became “very clear to me was that I was talking to a young man who had not bought the true faith,” McKnight remembered, one who had come to realize that Alinskyism “is ultimately parochial” and offered no prospects whatsoever for attaining large-scale social change. As the best historian of Chicago racism, Beryl Satter, would incisively note, Alinskyism’s “insistence on fighting only for winnable ends guaranteed that” community organizing “would never truly confront the powerful forces devastating racially changing and black neighborhoods.”
McKnight’s long-term impact on Obama would be profound, irrespective of how much Barack later remembered of their conversations or how few commentators were knowledgeable enough to hear the readily detectable echos. “If you want to see an intellectual influence on Obama’s thinking, it’s John McKnight,” citizenship scholar Harry Boyte told one Washington audience two decades later. “A lot of things started in part through John McKnight,” observed Harvey Lyon, a Gamaliel board colleague whose political roots also reached back to the 1960s. Stanley Hallett, an influential urban development pioneer, a onetime theology school classmate of Martin Luther King Jr., and the husband of Wieboldt’s Anne Hallett, was also deeply influenced by McKnight. For Hallett, directing public funds to service poor people’s professionally identified needs is “money spent to maintain people in a condition of dependency,” Hallett told one interviewer. Progressive public officials needed to stop “looking at people in terms of their problems instead of their capabilities.”57
The People’s Coalition for Educational Reform issued its demands in advance of the mayor’s Sunday, October 11, summit. Calling for local school-based management, greater parental involvement in schools, a requirement that 80 percent of students perform at or above grade-level standards, and deep cuts in CPS’s huge central bureaucracy, PCER made clear its student-centered focus: “We do not want cuts to affect anyone providing direct service to students.” On Sunday, almost a thousand people packed UICC’s Pavilion as the mayor slowly made his way through the crowd. The Tribune described the almost four-hour program as having a “town-meeting atmosphere,” and called it “the most remarkable gathering to focus on the Chicago public schools in at least 25 years.” Washington proclaimed that “a thorough and complete overhaul of the system is necessary,” promised to appoint a fifty-member parent/community advisory council within two weeks, and pledged to present a unified reform plan within four months.
Washington soon convened the first meeting of his Parent Community Council, promising it would begin holding neighborhood forums before the end of November. The city’s most influential biracial coalition of business leaders, Chicago United, also shared its own school reform plan with the Tribune. Angry at Manford Byrd for his arrogance and disinterest in meaningful change, Chicago United had adopted the belief of Fred Hess and Don Moore that the best path toward improved student performance was through parental and community control of local schools. Patrick J. Keleher Jr., Chicago United’s public policy director, said, “we think the leadership could be found” and that organizations such as UNO could recruit and train interested parents.58
At the same time, Barack’s DCP work remained often frustrating. Some Saturday mornings he met with the Congregation Involvement Committee at Rev. Rick Williams’s biracial Pullman Christian Reformed Church, while he and Johnnie Owens also met with two Chicago State University (CSU) professors who had just started a Neighborhood Assistance Center. The only result of that was Barack being invited to join a CSU-sponsored panel at a mid-October conference on “Developing Illinois’ Economy.” One of his fellow panelists, CSU’s Mark Bouman, addressed “the spectacular fall of big steel,” and another speaker was Chicago Tribune business editor Richard Longworth, who had written so forcefully about Frank Lumpkin’s efforts on behalf of Wisconsin Steel’s former workers. Whatever Barack contributed to the session was unmemorable, for Longworth, looking two decades later at a photograph of himself and Obama sitting side by side, had no recollection of the event whatsoever.
In Roseland, significant economic development news came from the low-profile Chicago Roseland Coalition for Community Control (CRCCC), a twelve-year-old organization that had successfully followed through on the interdenominational protests against Beverly Bank that Alonzo Pruitt and Al Sampson had mounted seven months earlier. When the bank announced plans to open a new branch in suburban Oak Lawn, the little-known Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 allowed CRCCC to petition the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC) to block that expansion. Three years earlier Beverly Bank had stopped making home mortgage loans, leaving it vulnerable to FDIC enforcement of the CRA’s community service requirements that proscribed disinvestment in older neighborhoods. Advising and guiding CRCCC’s strategy was the similarly low-profile Woodstock Institute, a nonprofit fair-lending organization created in 1973 by five founders, three of whom were John McKnight, Al Raby, and Stan Hallett. Woodstock vice president Josh Hoyt, an organizer who previously had worked under Greg Galluzzo and Mary Gonzales at UNO’s Back of the Yards and Pilsen affiliates, brought the Beverly situation to the attention of U.S. Senate Banking Committee chairman William Proxmire’s staff, and Proxmire wrote to FDIC chairman William Seidman. Soon Beverly Bank was in negotiations with CRCCC president Willie Lomax, and the national American Banker publicized the tussle. By mid-September Beverly had agreed to commit $20 million worth of loans to low-income Far South Side neighborhoods over the next four years and to open central Roseland’s first ATM. “We made use of some tools of the law to get the bank here,” the courageous Lomax told the weekly Chicago Reader’s excellent political reporter Ben Joravsky. “We had to play hardball.”59
The “tools of the law” were increasingly on Barack’s mind by October 1987. Going to law school had been a possibility for years, ever since his