On February 18, the same day that the Sun-Times gave the proposal prominent coverage, UNO and DCP brought busloads of members to a school reform hearing at board of education headquarters, but the overflow crowd intimidated officials and the meeting was adjourned. Soon a third major plan, this one backed by Fred Hess’s Chicago Panel, Gwendolyn LaRoche from the Chicago Urban League, and Patrick Keleher from Chicago United, joined the confusing fray. DCP concentrated on getting its Career Education Network off the ground, with Obama and Owens hiring an African American woman in her early thirties, Cassandra Lowe, who had been working as a college recruiter for nearby St. Xavier University, to oversee it. By early March, afternoon counseling sessions for fifty or so high school students were finally under way at Reformation Lutheran and at Our Lady of the Gardens. Asked about DCP’s 1987–88 change from an employment emphasis to its new concentration on secondary schooling, Owens explained that “the focus shifted to the more fundamental question of preparing people for jobs in a changing society.”72
By the end of February, Barack had to decide both about law school and about making his long-mulled trip to Kenya before the fall 1988 academic year began. His sister Auma had returned home from Heidelberg and would eagerly host a midsummer visit.
Barack later would write that he applied to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, but he also applied elsewhere, including to Northwestern University’s law school, right in downtown Chicago. Acceptance letters had arrived from both Harvard and Northwestern, but with one huge difference: Harvard’s financial aid package would require him to take out loans of well over $10,000 a year, while Northwestern’s offer, the Ronald E. Kennedy Scholarship, would allow him to attend a top-twenty law school in Chicago for free. Debating his choice of school, Barack asked Jean Rudd and Ken Rolling at the Woods Fund about attorneys from whom he could seek advice. Jean’s husband Lionel Bolin was a descendent of a famous African American family, a 1948 graduate and now a trustee of prestigious Williams College, and a successful broadcast executive who, after serving in the U.S. military, had graduated from low-cost New York Law School. Woods Fund board member George Kelm, a low-key civic activist, had been managing partner of a prominent Chicago law firm, Hopkins and Sutter, before becoming president of the Woods family’s Sahara Enterprises investment firm.
Barack “was trying to make a strategic choice about which school,” Jean Rudd recalled, and Jean and Ken remember Barack telling them about Northwestern’s full-scholarship offer. George Kelm was a Northwestern Law School alumnus and a past president of its alumni association, and he strongly advised Barack against attending Harvard. Northwestern was so interested in persuading Barack to accept its Kennedy Scholarship, named after an African American faculty member who had died four years earlier at the age of forty-two, that the admissions office asked the law school’s dean, Robert W. Bennett, to speak with Obama. “The admissions people came to me and they said, ‘We’ve got a fantastic prospect for this scholarship’ ” and “ ‘we want you to try to talk him into taking it,’ ” Bennett recounted. “Barack was brought to my office” and “I tried to talk him into taking this Ronald Kennedy Scholarship.” Bennett was a 1965 cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, and Barack was “the only applicant that the admissions people ever” asked him to help recruit during a full decade as dean.
Neither Kelm and Bennett’s efforts nor the full three-year scholarship were sufficient to outweigh Barack’s belief in his destiny. Harold Washington had graduated from Northwestern’s law school, and only once had a Harvard law graduate become president—Rutherford B. Hayes, in 1877. Northwestern law alumni had been major party presidential nominees five times, but William Jennings Bryan was a three-time loser and Adlai Stevenson had lost twice. It would be a costly decision for Barack—a cumulative difference of more than $40,000—but his choice was evidence of how deeply he believed what he so far had shared only with Sheila and Lena.
The only person in Barack’s workday world, other than Lena, to whom he spoke about leaving was Johnnie Owens, whom he had recruited to DCP with at least half an eye toward this decision. Johnnie remembered the moment clearly. “I didn’t have a clue until one day he asked me, ‘Are you ready to lead?’ I’m like ‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’ ‘I’ve been accepted at Harvard Law School,’ ” and he would be leaving DCP to attend its three-year J.D. program. “And I’m like ‘What?’ ” Owens remembered, for there had been no prior indications that Barack was contemplating such a future. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing: about applying, that he was interested, anything like that. And so he began explaining to me how he’d been struggling with the thought of maybe going into the ministry versus law school.” Neither Sheila nor Lena ever heard him talk about the ministry, but as Johnnie remembers it, Barack “said he had ideas and thoughts about going into the ministry and that he had actually talked to Reverend Wright about some of this.”
Barack asked Johnnie to succeed him as DCP’s executive director, promising not only to work with the members on the transition, but also to introduce Owens to the trio of women who were DCP’s most important funders: Jean Rudd at Woods, Aurie Pennick at MacArthur, and Anne Hallett at Wieboldt. Owens agreed, but several weeks passed before Barack was ready to tell DCP’s volunteer leaders about his upcoming move.73
On March 5, ten days before Democratic ward-level and congressional primary elections across Chicagoland, the Chicago Tribune reported that Waste Management had fired two managers at its SCA chemical waste incinerator at 11700 South Stony Island Avenue for repeatedly disconnecting air-monitoring devices designed to measure the facility’s destruction of highly toxic PCBs. WMI insisted that the misconduct “did not threaten health or safety,” but Marian Byrnes, Hazel Johnson, and congressional candidate Mel Reynolds picketed the plant, demanding it be closed. Metropolitan Sanitary District officials pulled back from a plan to dump eighty thousand cubic yards of sewage sludge in a wetlands property five blocks south of SCA.
Howard Stanback, Bruce Orenstein, and Barack were working on plans to have Mayor Sawyer attend a postelection March 17 rally at St. Kevin to announce publicly the city’s strategic alliance with UNO and DCP regarding landfills. On Election Day, four African American ward committeemen who were allied with Sawyer were defeated, an unsurprising verdict on the process that had made Sawyer Harold Washington’s successor. Two successful challengers were forty-eight-year-old educator Alice Palmer in the 7th Ward, who defeated organization loyalist William Beavers in a virtual landslide, and young West Side activist Rickey Hendon in the 27th Ward. Another winner, in a South Side state representative contest, was 8th Ward precinct captain Donne Trotter, who a year earlier had turned out such an impressive victory margin for Harold Washington at London Towne Homes. One of the few challenges to a Sawyer loyalist that failed was Salim Al Nurridin’s 9th Ward committeeman contest against Bill Shaw, whose twin brother Bob, the 9th Ward alderman, bizarrely alleged that Salim operated a harem full of welfare recipients. Only slightly more uplifting had been Emil Jones and Mel Reynolds’s unsuccessful challenges to incumbent 2nd District congressman Gus Savage.
When the Tribune reported that the thirty-six-year-old Reynolds had voted only twice since he turned twenty-one, Reynolds claimed that plotters had altered his voting records. Tribune political reporter R. Bruce Dold commended Reynolds for running “a surprisingly effective first-time campaign” and praised him as “a walking role model for black achievement.” But when the votes were tallied, Reynolds received only 14 percent, Jones 24 percent, and Savage won renomination with just 53 percent.74
Stanback, Orenstein, and Obama carefully scripted the St. Kevin evening rally where Gene Sawyer