At OLG, Father Dominic Carmon, the Blessed Word priest who had succeeded Stanley Farier as pastor, appointed Loretta Augustine and Yvonne Lloyd—two middle-aged mothers who helped the church sodality raise its meager budget by putting on plays and organizing fund-raising cruises on the lake. Augustine was the grade school’s Girl Scout leader, sang in the choir, and sat on the school’s board.
“I can’t think of any two people I’d rather have than the two of you,” Carmon told the women.
The Calumet Community Religious Conference, as Kellman’s new organization was called, was an immediate success, winning a $500,000 state grant to open a job bank at a local college. But Augustine and Lloyd felt out of place at the meetings, which were held at a suburban church. The job bank was nice, they thought, but the Gardens didn’t have any steelworkers. The Gardens had people who had never held a job in their lives.
“Loretta and I would go to the meetings, and we’d sit there, and we knew what was needed,” Lloyd would recall years later. “The Gardens was going down and there was so many problems over there. But they were focused on stuff suburban people focused on, like how much you fine someone if they didn’t cut their grass, and the garbage cans had to be put out on the curb. I didn’t care about that. I had enough kids to pick up garbage cans and put ’em in the yard.”
Father Carmon was concerned about the landfill. The residents constantly complained that the fumes made them ill. One of his fellow priests had developed cancer.
Kellman agreed that his South Side and suburban churches were unequally yoked. He decided to split the urban parishes into a separate group, which he named the Developing Communities Project. He realized the group needed a black organizer. While he searched for one, he placed it under the aegis of a colleague named Mike Kruglik. Kruglik was an experienced organizer, but he was also Jewish, Princeton educated, and spoke with a sharp-voweled white ethnic accent. Even though the DCP’s board members knew Kruglik was temporary, they bridled at his leadership.
“I know you’re trying,” Lloyd told Kruglik, “but you’re in the city, and most of the churches in the city are black, and they’re not gonna listen to what you say, because they feel like you’re not in tune with the things that we need to survive.”
Throughout early 1985, Kellman was searching frantically for a permanent organizer, taking out ads in the Chicago papers, trade journals, even the New York Times. He brought more than one black candidate before the board, but none of them had the right combination of brains and idealism. The problem, Kellman reflected, was that anyone smart enough to be an organizer was too smart to be an organizer. The bright ones had better opportunities. He was frustrated, the women were frustrated, the priests were frustrated.
“I have some people in mind,” he told a board meeting, “but so far, I haven’t found a black organizer.”
“You’re gonna have to go back,” a black priest told him, “ ’cause there’s somebody out there.”
In a reading room at the New York Public Library, an unemployed, twenty-three-year-old Barack Obama picked up a magazine called Community Jobs, a “do-gooder publication,” as he thought of it, that carried classified ads for community organizers. He had quit his job as an editor at a business news service because it made him feel like a corporate sellout and was trying to break into organizing by taking part-time gigs in Harlem with the New York Public Interest Research Group, an organization affiliated with Ralph Nader.
Obama had tried once before to get a job in Chicago, writing to the city’s newly elected black mayor, Harold Washington. He never heard back. If he couldn’t work in city hall, close to the mayor, maybe he could work on the South Side. Obama was looking for a job in an African-American community, and the South Side—home to nearly a million blacks—was the largest African-American community in America. He mailed his résumé to Kellman.
Kellman was impressed enough to schedule an interview with Obama the next time he visited New York. They met in a Lexington Avenue coffee shop, where Kellman was relieved to see that, in spite of his foreign-sounding name, Obama was an African-American. It was immediately obvious to Kellman that he’d found the right candidate, so he started pitching Obama on the job, telling him about the devastation in the Calumet region.