The steel mills were hot, dangerous, and dirty, he said, but people desperately wanted to work there, because it was a job for life. Now that the mills were gone, disillusionment and bitterness were corroding the community. The worse he made it sound, the more Obama would feel needed there, Kellman figured. Obama was so desperate to become an organizer in a black community that Kellman could have talked him into a job in Newark. They struck a deal at the table: Obama would start at $10,000 a year, plus a car allowance. A week later, he was headed to Chicago in a $2,000 Honda beater.
Loretta Augustine and Yvonne Lloyd first saw their new organizer at a rally in a suburban high school, thrown to celebrate the CCRC’s half-million-dollar job grant. It was a big night, with eight hundred people packed into the gym to hear a speech by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago.
Oh, my God, Augustine thought as Kellman introduced her to the gangly young man, he’s got this kid. Is he even going to be up for this? He looks so young.
Obama won her over quickly. In the short time he’d had to prepare, he’d done some research on the South Side. As soon as he started talking, describing his vision for the neighborhoods, Augustine looked at Lloyd and they nodded to each other.
“Loretta, that’s the one,” Lloyd said.
“Sure is,” Augustine replied.
Obama admitted to the women that he knew nothing about community organizing, but at least he was honest about that, they thought, and he was respectful. In spite of his obvious intelligence and his Ivy League degree, he didn’t condescend. Later, Lloyd and Augustine took him on a tour of the neighborhood’s boarded-up houses. They could tell he was going to fit in at the Gardens when he sat down with an OLG nun who was a notoriously bad cook and ate her pie. Not even the church ladies would do that.
Obama’s new office was two rooms in the rectory of Holy Rosary Church, on 113th Street. A soaring, vaulted church, with its own convent and grade school, Holy Rosary had once been a cornerstone of the Roseland neighborhood, filled with prosperous families. Now it was struggling to serve a multiracial congregation composed of blacks, Latinos, and older whites. In the 1970s, no Chicago neighborhood changed from white to black more rapidly than Roseland, which had taken its name from the flowers planted by its original Dutch settlers. The shopping strip on Michigan Avenue told the story: The tall marquee of Gately’s Department Store was still bolted to a brick storefront, but the business had closed a few years before, unable to compete with suburban malls. The shoe emporium followed, then the hardware store, then the restaurants. They were replaced by wig shops and sneaker boutiques, owned by Koreans who drove in from the suburbs each morning to raise the gates on their ghetto businesses—like a daily invasion of locusts, some residents thought resentfully. While the streets west of the railroad tracks still maintained a middle-class, even stately appearance, the drug trade was part of the new commerce on Michigan Avenue.
Kellman told Obama to spend his first month conducting “one-on-ones,” interviews with neighborhood residents and with pastors who might be enticed to join the DCP. The idea was to learn the far South Side’s story and identify an issue that might become the basis of a “piece”—organizer-speak for a project. At first, as he made the rounds of churches, spending ten or twelve hours a day chatting up pastors and trying to set up appointments over the phone, Obama felt as frustrated as his hapless grandfather back in Hawaii, peddling insurance to unwilling customers. He didn’t know the first thing about politics or the black church, whose pastors can be independent, entrepreneurial, and jealous of the power they hold over their congregations. To grow in the black community, DCP would have to enlist Protestant churches—who mistrusted the organization’s Catholic roots. Older pastors were unimpressed with Obama. The kid was just out of college, he had a funny name, and when they asked him the all-important question “What church do you belong to?” he didn’t have an answer.
Obama found his first ally at Lilydale First Baptist Church. Reverend Alvin Love had arrived just two years before as a twenty-eight-year-old in his first pulpit, so he could relate to Obama’s problems with the well-established pastors. The old bulls hadn’t welcomed him, either. Lilydale’s congregation had migrated from