By November 1987, Mike and Barack had known each other well for more than two years, and with Mike Barack could be spontaneous and frank to a degree he rarely was with other organizing colleagues. Even a quarter century later, Mike remembered some of what Barack said to him that week. Barack’s time in Roseland had placed him “in the armpit of the region, as far away from the center of power as you can get,” and he saw a prestigious law degree as the first step on the road to true power. Mike disagreed, telling Barack not to leave organizing and instead to commit himself to building a citywide network of organizations broader than UNO’s set of community groups, a network so sweeping that it would represent the fulfillment of what King and Al Raby had hoped the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement would become.
Barack demurred. A top law school would give him entrée to the corridors of power. “I can learn from these people what they know about power,” and a legal education would allow him to understand “financial strategies and banks and how money flows and how power flows. Then I can come back to Chicago and use that knowledge to build power for ordinary people.” But Barack was imagining more than just building a powerful network of community groups, Mike recalled. “He said to me, ‘I’m going to become mayor of Chicago. I’m thinking I should run for mayor of Chicago.’ ”
Barack believed that Chicago’s mayor was the most powerful of any U.S. city’s, one who with widespread grassroots support could begin the rebirth of neighborhoods like Roseland. “ ‘At the end of the day, the question is, How do we lift people out of poverty? How do we change the lives of poor people, in the most profound manner?’ That’s what he was interested in,” Kruglik recounted.
And by November 1987, Barack had a specific political template in mind. “Harold was the inspiration,” Mike recalls. “Obama saw himself in a very specific way as following in the footsteps of Harold Washington … following the path to power of Harold Washington.” Ever since the mayor’s appearance at the opening of the Roseland jobs center, Barack’s attempts to win direct access to Washington had foundered. “It’s almost like he was saying to himself … ‘I’m limited by the power of Harold Washington the mayor. Therefore the answer is, I’ll be Harold Washington.’ That’s what happened,” Kruglick explains. “The Harold path was to become a lawyer, become a state legislator, become a congressman, then become mayor. That’s the Harold path.”
Barack was “fascinated with Washington,” Mike believed, and “replicating Washington step by step” was his game plan. “That was in his mind. He talked about that.” Barack “was constantly thinking about his path to significance and power,” and “Harold Washington inspired him to think about becoming a politician.”61
The next Thursday was the launch of what Barack and DCP were now calling the Career Education Network’s “Partnership for Educational Progress,” a label borrowed at least in part from Chicago United’s blueprint for improving the employment skills of public high school graduates. Ever since DCP’s May decision to make education and particularly high school anti-dropout efforts a priority, Barack, Johnnie, and top DCP education volunteers like Aletha Strong Gibson, Ann West, and Carolyn Wortham had been in contact with Far South Side high school principals and guidance counselors and with officials at both Olive-Harvey College and Chicago State University. Thanks to Al Raby, who had just left his city human relations post so he could work for school reform at a newly founded consultancy called the Haymarket Group, Barack had recently met reform proponents Patrick Keleher, of Chicago United, and Sokoni Karanja.
In a fall proposal Obama would submit to multiple funders, he wrote that “the condition of the secondary school system called for a wider and more intensive campaign than we originally envisioned.” But beyond the initial $25,000 that Emil Jones had obtained from the state board of education, CEN’s only other support would be an additional $25,000 that the Woods Fund would soon officially announce.
Ever since early summer, Obama had met ambivalence among DCP’s congregations about forcefully targeting the sorry state of Chicago’s public schools. He later acknowledged that “every one of our churches was filled with teachers, principals, and district superintendents,” or, as UNO’s Phil Mullins more pungently yet properly put it, “if you removed every education bureaucrat from Reverend Wright’s church, it would go under.” Barack spent much of the last months of 1987 trying to expand DCP’s base by approaching the pastors of largely Protestant, and mainly Baptist, Greater Roseland churches. He realized that these congregations “have had no direct involvement in the issues surrounding the public school system,” and DCP wanted to enlighten them about “the need for broader reform in the school system.” Jerry Kellman knew that Mary Bernstein’s father, a senior Teamsters official, was a close colleague of Robert Healey, a former Chicago Teachers Union president who was now head of both the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Mary arranged for Obama to meet with Healey, but Healey had no interest in aiding a movement that would empower parents.
Roseland’s five high schools were in sorry shape. One study revealed, “High school students in Roseland are testing more than ten percent below the city-wide average,” and that average was more than 30 percent below grade-level norms. The dropout rates at the two weakest schools, Harlan and Corliss, were rapidly increasing. Corliss’s principal published an essay in the Journal of Negro Education describing her efforts to combat “gang activity and vandalism,” “low teacher morale,” “disrespectful attitude and behavior of students,” and “student apathy and high failure rate” at her school. Julian, named after the pioneering black chemist Percy Julian, was considered to be the best of the five, but the principal there, Edward H. Oliver, still had a serious problem with ganglike female “social clubs.”
A crowd of three hundred showed up for CEN’s November 17 kickoff rally at Tyrone Partee’s Reformation Lutheran Church. The Defender covered the event, where DCP announced it would begin offering tutorial and counseling services at both Holy Rosary and Reformation in early 1988 to students referred by Carver, Fenger, and Julian high schools. Olive-Harvey College president Homer Franklin as well as Chicago State University vice president Johnny Hill pledged their institutions’ assistance, and Chicago United policy director Patrick Keleher said that his organization would arrange for employment internships.62
Barack was also keeping up with the city’s landfill crisis. When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a report attributing the South Side’s poor air quality to highway traffic and wood-burning stoves without mentioning landfills, the Tribune said that UNO’s Mary Ellen Montes “laughed when told of the EPA’s findings. ‘That’s crazy. Wood-burning stoves? Are there any left?’ ” Then the Sun-Times revealed that the Paxton Landfill had been operating without the necessary permits since 1983. The newspapers had a field day at the Washington administration’s expense, but mayoral aide Howard Stanback remained focused on the O’Brien Locks issue.
On November 16 South Chicago Savings Bank president Jim Fitch convened an initial meeting of all interested parties, ranging from South Deering’s Foster Milhouse to Bruce Orenstein and Mary Ellen Montes from UNO and hard-core landfill opponents Marian Byrnes and Hazel Johnson, who did not like anything they heard. Four days later Lake Calumet environmentalist James Landing distributed a letter warning that the Washington administration “is making prodigious attempts” to win over opponents of a new O’Brien Locks landfill.63
On Wednesday morning November 25, the day before Thanksgiving, a Chicago Tribune headline announced “948 School Jobs Axed for Teachers’ Raises.” In order to meet the pay raises in CPS’s new union contracts, 167 elementary school teachers had been terminated. Then, at 11:01 that morning, Harold Washington collapsed with a heart attack in his City Hall office. The sixty-five-year-old mayor was seriously overweight, and attempts to revive him were unsuccessful. An official announcement was delayed for more than two hours, but word that Washington had died spread rapidly throughout the city, with tearful crowds gathering outside City Hall.
“Mayor’s Death Stuns City” read one headline the next day. Black Chicago’s loss was especially painful and heartfelt. Seven months earlier, when Washington was reelected, the Tribune editorialized that “he has been a symbol