At Stanback’s insistent urging, Orenstein also tried to convince some hard-core landfill opponents like Marian Byrnes to take part in the new process, but Byrnes realized that this was all leading to two predetermined ends: a new landfill at O’Brien Locks that the city desperately needed, and a $20 to $25 million community trust funded by Waste Management that would be controlled by UNO and DCP, not Jim Fitch and the wider community.
Angry but determined, Marian, Hazel Johnson, and others picketed St. Kevin that evening, distributing a no-more-landfills flyer that invoked the title and featured song from the Eyes on the Prize civil rights documentary that had aired a year earlier. UNO members tried to obstruct the leafleting, and when Hegewisch News editor Vi Czachorski, a UNO opponent, tried to enter the basement, UNO’s Phil Mullins physically blocked her. “As I descended St. Kevin’s stairs, Mullins put his arms across the narrow stairway and said ‘You can’t attend this meeting.’ I tried to continue, crowds pushed. Mullins said ‘I’m getting the police. I’ll charge assault!’ ” Czachorski wrote in the next issue of her weekly newspaper. “I left.”
UNO and DCP’s own dueling flyer demanded that Sawyer name a new task force “made up entirely of residents who live in communities affected by landfills.” Only such a group can “take this issue out of the backrooms and into the light of day.” DCP also distributed a statement in Loretta Augustine’s name denouncing “backroom deals that ram landfills down the communities’ throats and send the enormous profits from such dumping into corporate and city coffers.”
As a crowd of more than six hundred filled St. Kevin’s basement, Orenstein paced nervously while Barack was “relaxed and cool.” Sawyer carried with him a briefing memo summarizing the remarks that Loretta and Mary Ellen would make as well as his own speech, typed out in large, bold capital letters. A seven-piece mariachi band provided entertainment as multiple TV camera crews set up their equipment. DCP president Dan Lee and St. Kevin pastor George Schopp joined Loretta, Lena, and the mayor on the stage.
DCP’s Loretta Augustine opened the meeting. “We, as residents, have had no control over what has happened in our community. We are tired of being victims. We are taking control of our own community.” Then Lena spoke, followed by Sawyer. “Waste disposal and landfill decisions will no longer be made in the back room, at a table full of politically connected financial opportunists,” the mayor read, his text sounding far more like Bruce Orenstein than Gene Sawyer. “Whatever happens here will be because you decide.”
With Lena and Loretta flanking the mayor, Lena then took charge of the traditional IAF-style colloquy with Sawyer, just as she had with Harold Washington almost five years earlier on that same stage. UNO and DCP had encouraged their supporters to be boisterous, and one reporter called the crowd “raucous.” Lena enjoyed her role to the hilt, and she began reciting the formal demand that the mayor appoint a new task force within ten days. She warned Sawyer to “be careful how you respond because this is an angry group of people tonight.” The mayor stuck to his script and pledged full acceptance of UNO and DCP’s demands. At that point, Lena turned to the cheering crowd and declared, “I’m going to take it for granted that we will have all the power we want!” As one veteran organizer later remarked, five years as a quintessential Alinsky leader had made Mary Ellen Montes into “one of the most macho women I had ever met.”
As the gathering concluded, Bruce and Barack were ecstatic about the meeting. But UNO and DCP’s Alinsky-style power grabs—first blowing up the Fitch talks, then bringing a sad sack mayor to heel before an excited crowd—had fractured the Southeast Side community. Bruce, Lena, and Barack had succeeded in infuriating and alienating the local business leadership and the true environmentalists, two groups that just weeks earlier had been prepared to join forces in a true community consensus. Ed Vrdolyak quickly put Sawyer on notice, objecting to the city allowing UNO and DCP to control negotiations with Waste Management: “For certain community organizations who without question do not truly represent the vast majority of homeowners, residents, and taxpayers to submit their community buyout (sellout) wish list is totally and completely wrong.”
But Vrdolyak’s public protest bore no political fruit, and a week later, Sawyer and Stanback announced a new sixteen-member Task Force on Landfill Options: Mary Ellen Montes led a group of five UNO supporters, including Father George Schopp; five other appointees were DCP members: Loretta Augustine, Dan Lee, Marlene Dillard, Margaret Bagby, and Father Dominic Carmon. Bob Klonowski was another ally, and no more than three appointees, including Marian Byrnes and Hazel Johnson, were likely dissenters. It was hard to imagine a more politically unrepresentative group.75
In late March Barack announced his upcoming departure. He went to see Loretta first. “He told me he was leaving and he needed to go back to school.” Most DCP members learned the news at a meeting where Barack spoke of a smooth transition to Johnnie Owens as his successor. Dan Lee recalls that “I wanted to cry” and “we all got teary-eyed…. He was like a brother.” Tommy West called out, “No, you can’t go,” but they all realized that Barack’s potential reached well beyond Roseland. “We hated to see him go,” Yvonne Lloyd remembered. “It was very sad,” but they all appreciated, as Betty Garrett explained, that “if he could better himself, then we wanted him to go.” Barack remembered overhearing Yvonne remark how different he seemed now than he did on that August day two and a half years earlier when Jerry Kellman had first introduced him. “He was just a boy. I swear, you look at him now, you’d think he was a different person.” Of course, in many ways indeed he was.
Cathy Askew was the most emotional about Barack’s announcement. “I was really upset,” she recalled. “I thought we were friends.” Barack remembered Cathy expressing her disappointment and saying. “What is it with you men? Why is it you’re always in a hurry? Why is it that what you have isn’t good enough?” Yet they all understood how frustrating the past year had been for Barack. “For the leader or organizer who feels expected to bring some change and improvements to the community, the day-to-day litany of roadblocks and resistances makes it hard,” one close observer of Chicago organizing wrote that spring.
Marlene Dillard had watched Barack experience repeated setbacks while always trying to hide his disappointment from DCP’s members. The outreach to Local 1033 at Republic LTV had gone for naught, the efforts in Altgeld Gardens had led to little, and only now was a tiny version of CEN getting under way. Again and again, “I always felt that it was a disappointment to him.” Whenever she and Barack visited a funder like Woods, “he was trying to project how great we were doing.” Then, “when we were leaving,” he would turn to her and apologize for his braggadocio: “Well, we’re trying.” Overall, “I think it weighed very heavy on him…. He was leading people, and he was getting nowhere.” Indeed, Marlene came to believe “that he felt ‘If I could just become the mayor of Chicago, I would be able to do this.’ ”
Ernie Powell saw the same thing. “I think Barack got a little frustrated with that, and he felt like he had to get into the seat of power.” The DCP pastors who interacted regularly with Barack understood likewise. With CEN operating out of Reformation Lutheran, Tyrone Partee saw Barack almost daily and remembered him saying, “I’m going to law school.” Barack knew Tyrone was from a political family, and to him, Barack was “clear that he wanted to go into politics. ‘I believe that’s what I’m called to do.’ ” Alvin Love was caught off guard by Barack’s announcement, but he realized Barack was “frustrated