loud as any cheer for a Bears touchdown in Soldier Field, a few blocks to the south. Mathematically, Ohio didn’t clinch the election, but that was the moment everyone knew, because Ohio had tripped up John Kerry in 2004.
It became official at ten o’clock Central Time. Obama’s partisans counted down the seconds until the polls closed on the West Coast: “Ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one.”
It’s not the jubilation from that moment that remains in people’s minds. It’s the tears. Jesse Jackson, who had grown up in segregated South Carolina, moved to even more segregated Chicago, and sought this same office when it was impossible for a black man to win, watched his protégé with reddened eyes. Oprah Winfrey, born in Mississippi, pregnant at fifteen, leaned on a stranger’s shoulder. Out in the meadow, Amie Sipp cried too, after she gave up trying to call her father, who was celebrating on the South Side.
“It means change,” the thirty-year-old woman said. “Equal opportunity. No matter what color you are, you can do whatever you want to do, no limitation.”
When Obama finally emerged for his victory speech, his first words were “Hello, Chicago!” It was both a greeting to the city where he had made his political career and a note of gratitude. Obama is a remarkable politician, but if he hadn’t come to Chicago, he wouldn’t have been standing on a stage, about to address the entire world. His home state of Hawaii is more diverse, the California of his college days more tolerant, New York more cosmopolitan, and Massachusetts more sophisticated. But only in Chicago could a black man have become president of the United States. His rise to power had begun just a few miles away, on the South Side, in the midst of the largest black community in the United States. It couldn’t have happened anywhere else.
Chapter 1
THE GARDENS
A L T G E L D G A R D E N S—known to its older residents as “the Gardens,” to its younger residents as “the G,” and as “Alligator Gardens” to the cops who have to deal with its drug trade and its shootings—is a housing project in the remotest reaches of Chicago’s South Side. Long, low, two-story apartment buildings, built of mud-brown Chicago brick, cover acres of bottomland along the banks of the Calumet River, which defines the city limits. The Gardens looks more like a military camp than a high-rise slum. In fact, it was built in the 1940s, to house blacks with wartime jobs in the nearby steel mills. It was a first home for upwardly mobile laborers, many just arrived in Chicago from Arkansas or Mississippi who would move on to bungalows and two-flats in the city’s Black Belt.
Forty years later, Altgeld was something much less hopeful: a reservation for Chicago’s poorest blacks. Most housing projects are in the inner city. Altgeld’s location seemed designed to keep its residents unemployed and destitute. The Loop was twenty miles north, the Sears Tower invisible over the horizon. The L had never made it down this far; the nearest station was forty blocks away. Half the residents didn’t own cars, which made it nearly impossible to find a job that might allow them to buy a car. Babies were born to public-aid mothers and grew up to raise their own children on public aid. There was a grocery store in a crumbling strip mall, but its aisles were so dirty and disorganized, its meat and vegetables so close to spoiling, that anyone with the means left the Gardens to shop at an A&P in Roseland, the closest real neighborhood.
In a way, Altgeld Gardens was the perfect place for Chicago’s poorest. It was part of the Calumet region, a crescent of South Chicago and northwest Indiana that collects whatever the rest of Chicagoland doesn’t want to look at, touch, or smell. The steel mills were here, broadcasting soot so thick it sifted onto cars and stuck in steelworkers’ throats, to be washed away in mill gate taverns. The Gardens lay along a kink in the Calumet River called the Acme Bend, after the tin-roofed factory that lay across the channel and tainted the water with its waste. The dumps were here, too, so when the wind blew in from Lake Michigan, it carried an acrid, mulchy odor that weakened the residents’ lungs.
Toward the end of South Langley Avenue, near where the street dead-ends into the river, was the poorest church in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Our Lady of the Gardens was nicknamed OLG