Sawyer also inherited Chicago’s landfill problem, with Howard Stanback seeking to quickly explain the city’s O’Brien Locks strategy to the new mayor. Environmental activist James Landing realized that Washington’s death would not alter the situation, and even he wondered whether the opponents should give up and join Jim Fitch’s effort to agree on what the Southeast Side neighborhoods should demand from WMI. Senator Emil Jones’s special legislative committee concluded its investigation by ruing “the lack of one centralized authority to address all environmental problems” in the area, but also bluntly acknowledging that continuing Chicago’s ban on landfill expansion “is irresponsible unless the city is able to implement a successful citywide waste-disposal plan” through massive recycling.
At DCP, Barack and Johnnie were preparing the CEN tutoring program to start in early 1988, in both Roseland and Altgeld, undeterred by the December murder of an eighteen-year-old Gardens youth by five fellow teenagers, all members of the infamous Vice Lords gang. Weeks earlier Barack had asked Sheila to go with him to Honolulu for the Christmas holidays so that his relatives could meet her, the first time Barack had ever introduced a girlfriend to his family.
Madelyn had just turned sixty-five, and a year earlier had retired from the Bank of Hawaii. Stanley, almost seventy, was now retired too. Ann Dunham, still struggling to complete her dissertation, told her mentor Alice Dewey how much she was looking forward to meeting Sheila, and Sheila would always remember how exceptionally warm Ann was to her throughout the couple’s visit to Honolulu. Ann was fascinated that Sheila had written her master’s thesis on Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Sheila remembers the two of them “talking about that thesis, my time in Paris, and my work at Chicago.” Ann was “genuinely very interested and warm and inquisitive. She was extremely generous with us and treated Barack with reverence. She really admired him and thought the world of him.”
Even though Ann and Sheila liked each other very much, Sheila felt that Ann was not in favor of her and Barack getting married. She wondered if Ann “sensed what we already knew, that we were too isolated and would sophisticate each other.” Sheila was especially struck by how everyone in Hawaii—Gramps, Toot, Maya—called Barack either “Bar” or “Barry.” In Chicago, only Asif used “Barry.” When Sheila called him “Barry for fun one day, just because everyone else was calling him that name,” Obama’s reaction was unforgettable. “He got so angry at me. Irrationally furious, I’d say. He told me that under no circumstances was I ever to use that name with him.” Perhaps Obama had some deep boy-versus-man association to the two names, but Sheila understood that he “was very sensitive about this aspect of his life and wanted me walled off from it—like a lot of other things in his life.”66
Back in Chicago, the mayor’s Parent Community Council moved toward recommending that each Chicago public school be controlled by a locally elected governing board, but without Harold Washington present to embrace its conclusions, school reformers started arguing over which of several just slightly different proposals should be introduced in the state legislature. DCP participated tangentially, following UNO’s lead, with Danny Solis in charge and Johnnie Owens rather than Barack following developments most closely.
In late January Barack wrote to Phil and Karen Boerner to apologize for missing their wedding, and updated them on his plans: “I’ve decided to go back to law school this fall—probably Harvard.” At the end of the month, Barack also wrote to Anne Hallett at Wieboldt to submit DCP’s 1988 grant application, but he gave no indication that he might be leaving DCP anytime soon. He wrote that “DCP has come a long way in the past year,” most notably in hiring Owens, “someone with both the talent and background to become a lead organizer in his own right.” Because of DCP’s “success with the education issue … we have the potential in the coming year to become a truly powerful advocate for change not only in the area, but citywide,” Barack boastfully asserted. “Whether we fulfill that potential will depend on two things: how well we parley the Career Education Network into a vehicle for organizing parents and community, and whether the relationships we have established with the major Black churches in the South Side translate into their making a full commitment” to DCP by contributing financially so that the organization could begin to wean itself from outside funders. “If we succeed, I envision us having 30 new churches involved by the end of 1988.”
That was optimistic, because Obama’s ongoing efforts to connect with dozens of black pastors had garnered polite conversations but few enlistments. If CEN was to grow beyond a small pilot program in which DCP housewives tutored dozens of high school students in a trio of church halls, funding was necessary for “significant expansion of the program by the State Legislature.” Barack also still hoped that Olive-Harvey could reallocate resources “to create a comprehensive job training program with specific emphasis on Public Aid recipients and with the outreach and satellite facilities necessary to target the Altgeld Gardens population.”
DCP would soon hire a CEN project coordinator, thanks to Emil Jones’s state money and the Woods Fund, and hoped to approach major corporations through Chicago United. Barack’s success at fund-raising had let him raise his own salary to $27,250 and Johnnie’s to $24,000. Ideally Olive-Harvey would foot the bill to house CEN, but expanding the program for the 1988–89 school year depended on state board of education officials and state legislators.
Obama believed that “parents and churches” were “the most crucial ingredients” for “a long-term process of educational reform.” Gamaliel and Don Moore’s Designs for Change, now a top player in the citywide school reform movement, could be asked to provide parental training. The city’s community colleges were responsible for vocational and general educational development (GED) training, but their actual track record was even worse than that of Chicago Public Schools. “Only 8 percent of the 19,200 persons enrolled in GED preparation classes in 1980 actually received certificates,” Barack had discovered, and “only 2.5 percent of those enrolled in City College basic education programs end up pursuing additional vocational or higher education.” Instead, just as at CPS, “funds go into central administrative tasks rather than student instruction.”67
Barack’s church-recruitment efforts continued throughout the winter of 1987–88. One successful visit was to a small church on West 113th Street just across from Fenger High School. Thirty-two-year-old Rev. Alvin Love had arrived at Lilydale First Baptist Church four years earlier, inheriting an “elderly congregation” that was “comfortable sitting and doing nothing.” Love wanted to “get this congregation engaged in their community,” and he was happy when Obama “just walked up to the door and rang the bell” and asked if Love would tell him what he thought Roseland needed. Love, like other pastors before him, asked Barack which church he belonged to. Love warned Barack that his standard response—“I’m working on it”—wasn’t going to be acceptable to all black clergymen. Barack invited Love to a box-lunch gathering of other interested pastors, and he was slowly beginning to expand DCP’s ties to freestanding Protestant congregations.
The clergymen with whom Barack was having the most contact, however, were not involved at all in DCP. One was Jeremiah Wright at Trinity United Church of Christ, whom Barack continued to visit on a regular basis. Barack also began speaking with Sokoni Karanja, a longtime Trinity member whom he had met through Al Raby when Karanja emerged as one of the most outspoken African American voices calling for school reform. Barack “was trying to think about ministers and how to organize ministers across the whole city—African American ministers—because he felt like the power that was needed for the community to get its just due was through that,” Sokoni remembered. “He was trying to think about churches and how to organize the churches.” Barack also told Sokoni about his plan to attend law school. “One of the things I notice is that a lot of these politicians get in trouble because they don’t know the law,” Barack commented. Becoming a politician was indeed his goal. “He was talking about becoming mayor of Chicago,” Sokoni—just like Mike Kruglik—remembered. “We had a lot of conversations about it,” and “that’s what he emphasized to me. It sounded like a good idea.”