Young Mr. Obama (5 page)

Chapter 3

THE ASBESTOS PIECE

T H E   W O R K M E N   B E G A N
appearing at Chicago Housing Authority buildings in the spring of 1986. Linda Randle, an organizer at the Ida B. Wells Homes, a weary complex of cruciform apartment houses on the Near South Side, first noticed the men in white jumpsuits and breathing masks when she came to work one morning. A big white machine sat in the weed-scored concrete courtyard, and a yellow tarp hung from a seven-story-high roof. Cascading pebbles struck Randle in the face. She walked over to a man wearing a hazmat suit, knocked on his mask, and asked what he was doing.

“Removing asbestos,” he told her. But he was removing it from only the first floor, where the tenant service office was located.

Every Tuesday, Randle met with her fellow organizers at the downtown offices of the Community Renewal Society, a nonprofit devoted to eliminating racism and poverty. At the next gathering, she began talking about the mysterious new project at Wells. Obama overheard the word “asbestos” and sat down next to Randle.

“We've got the same thing going on at Altgeld,” he said. An Altgeld resident had discovered a newspaper ad soliciting bids to remove asbestos from a single building: the office.

When the Chicago Housing Authority began building its vertical ghettoes in the 1950s, asbestos was considered the safest, most modern insulation available. Not until the 1970s did medical researchers discover that its fibers, if inhaled, clung to the lung, scarring tissue and impairing respiratory function. Asbestos exposure was the second leading cause of lung cancer, after cigarette smoking. CHA apartments were permeated with the material. Asbestos was wrapped around water pipes that ran along kitchen floors. It was in the floors themselves, as part of the tile.

Randle also shared the asbestos story with a friend named Martha Allen, who wrote for the
Chicago Reporter
, a muckraking urban affairs magazine. They peeled up a floor tile and took it to a laboratory, which found it contained between 30 and 50 percent chrysalite asbestos. Allen used that test as the basis for an exposé on asbestos in the CHA. Her story, which appeared in the
Reporter
's June 1986 issue, included interviews with Ida B. Wells residents who told of constantly sweeping up white dust that drifted from decaying pipe insulation. One mother wrapped her pipes in plastic, because “that stuff was flying everywhere.” “I was always cleaning it off the furniture and the floor, she said. “My kids were getting it on them, and they were itching.”

Randle had lived in public housing and knew that CHA bureaucrats didn't give a good goddamn about residents' complaints. Their attitude was “Don't keep bothering us or we're going to find out what your kids are doing or what's going on in your apartment.” But Allen's story was picked up by big media outlets. The
Chicago Tribune
ran a story, and Walter Jacobson, a bombastic local anchorman, started his own investigation. That gave the tenants some leverage.

At a Community Renewal Society meeting, Obama and Randle hatched a plan: They would bus Wells and Altgeld residents downtown to CHA headquarters, to demand a meeting with the agency's director, Zirl Smith.

This time, Obama would be dealing with a much larger, more obdurate bureaucracy than the Mayor's Office of Employment and Training. The CHA was far more than a landlord for poor black Chicagoans. It exercised a seigneurial power over its tenants. Terrified of eviction, they were reluctant to complain about even life-threatening problems. Many had waited years for an apartment. Losing it would mean moving back in with relatives or searching for a slumlord who would accept a public aid family. The projects were ruled by the Vice Lords or the Gangster Disciples, the elevators were broken, graffiti stained the stairwells, and steel mesh covered the balconies to prevent people from hurling objects into the courtyards. Still, the CHA was a step up from the cold-water flats in which many residents had been raised.

The bus trip would be pure Alinsky: the powerless using their moral authority to embarrass the powerful. Alinsky had done the same thing to Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1960s, busing a caravan of blue-collar South Siders to city hall to force a compromise on the University of Chicago's plan to gentrify its surrounding neighborhoods.

“No one can negotiate without the power to compel negotiation,” Alinsky wrote in
Rules for Radicals
, his manual for sticking it to the Man. “This is the function of the community organizer. Anything otherwise is wishful non-thinking. To attempt to operate on a good-will rather than on a power basis would be to attempt something that has not yet been experienced.”

Obama sent out a press release and chartered a school bus from Altgeld to the Loop. Since it was an early morning trip, he even brought coffee, orange juice, and doughnuts. One of the passengers was Hazel Johnson, who had lived in Altgeld since the early 1960s. Johnson led a group of environmental activists that had battled the steel mills and a sewage treatment plant over dumping toxins in the Calumet River. She believed asbestos had contributed to her husband's death from lung cancer seventeen years before. The ride up the Dan Ryan Expressway took an hour and forty-five minutes in rush-hour traffic, so the residents were agitated by the time they got off. They were even more agitated when they were forced to wait in a hallway for two and a half hours.

“The director is busy,” an assistant repeated, over and over.

Randle, whose Mississippi grandfather had taught her never to back down from a conflict, told Obama she wanted to bust through the doors and drag Smith out by his necktie.

“Linda, the only thing you're doing is getting up your blood pressure,” Obama responded. “Calm down. We have to take the high road.”

(While Obama taught Randle to keep a cool head around authority figures, Randle taught Obama how to behave in the ghetto, advising him not to wear his usual preppy attire when he knocked on doors in the projects. “Wear jeans,” she advised. “No one's going to open the door if you look like a public aid caseworker.”)

When the CHA staff realized reporters were waiting in the hallway, too, they invited the protestors inside for coffee and doughnuts.

“We want the director!” the residents shouted.

Smith never emerged, but through his aides, he agreed to attend meetings at Wells and Altgeld Gardens, where he would reveal the results of tests on pipe insulation.

The bus trip was a triumph, but Smith's visit to the Gardens turned out to be a fiasco. Obama reserved OLG's old, high-raftered gymnasium for the meeting and printed out leaflets, which were wedged into doors all over the housing project. More than seven hundred people crowded onto the pullout wooden bleachers, eager to hear just how bad their asbestos problem was. Obama assigned a young woman named Callie Smith to chair the meeting. Smith wasn't a DCP board member, but she did live in the Gardens, and it's a tenet of organizing that the powerful should be confronted by the people they're trying to screw over.

The CHA director was half an hour late. Then he was forty-five minutes late. Then an hour late. As the gymnasium grew restless, Obama walked around the room, urging people to stay in their seats.

“We need to keep this meeting together!” he lectured into the microphone.

Seventy-five minutes after the hour announced on the flyer, Zirl Smith finally arrived in his chauffeur-driven city car and took the stage before an angry, impatient crowd. The people of Altgeld Gardens felt they were getting the brush-off. Smith only magnified the insult with his first answer.

“Do you have a plan to remove the asbestos that's in our homes?” Callie Smith asked him.

Zirl Smith shrugged.

“I don't know,” he replied. “We have not yet completed all the tests on the apartments. As soon as that is complete, we will start the abatement process.”

The room erupted. “No,” the residents shouted. “No! No!” The director tried to continue, but Callie Smith wrestled him for the microphone stand. Then someone in the gym suffered a seizure. The CHA director had been in the room less than fifteen minutes, but he used the medical emergency as an excuse to flee. Making a break for his car, he promised to call an ambulance on the two-way radio. But Altgeld Gardens wasn't ready to let Zirl Smith go. It hadn't gotten a straight answer about the asbestos in its floors and on its pipes. People leaped from the bleachers and surged out the door in pursuit, chanting “No more rent!” The crowd nearly surrounded Smith's car before the driver made an escape. The angry mob was completely beyond Obama's control, full of people he'd never trained to “calm down” or “stay focused.”

After Smith rode away and the residents went home to their tiny apartments, a dispirited Obama asked the DCP members to stay behind and help him clean up. He blamed himself for the meeting's disintegration. Yvonne Lloyd convinced him that the ruckus hadn't been his fault.

“It wasn't us,” she said. The DCP members had stayed true to Obama's training. They hadn't stood up and hollered when everyone else in the gym was acting the fool. “Sometimes, you can only control your own people. When you got a lot of other people throwing in, then you got a problem.”

Even though the asbestos meeting ended in chaos, the asbestos piece was a success. The publicity from the
Reporter
article and the public meetings prompted the CHA to request an $8.9 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to clean up asbestos in Ida B. Wells, Altgeld, and three other housing projects. In the winter of 1988, a year and a half after the story broke, residents were shuffled into vacant units and motel rooms while the white-suited workers—some of them CHA residents—vacuumed asbestos particles from their furniture, stripped the insulation from the pipes, and retiled kitchen floors.

Even as a poorly paid organizer working in some of the city's most obscure neighborhoods, Obama was attracting the attention of powerful mentors—a skill that would later be essential to his political rise. First, he caught the eye of Al Raby, who had run Harold Washington's campaign for mayor and now headed the city's Human Rights Department. Raby was always on the lookout for young talent. After meeting Obama through a DCP project, he was inviting the young man out for beer and pool, and introducing him to fellow South Side liberals. Raby squired Obama into the office of Jacky Grimshaw, director of the city's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and dropped him off there for an hour.

“Al had this habit of finding young people who he thought might amount to something, and he would bring them into my office and introduce me and then leave,” Grimshaw would recall. “I figured out my job was to talk to these folks and figure out if they were somebody of substance.”

To Grimshaw, Obama was just another of Al's kids, “but you did get that you were talking to somebody who had a brain, who was easy to talk to. Nice sense of humor, that kind of thing, but I can't remember substantively what we talked about.”

Raby also introduced Obama to his best friend, Stephen Perkins, who worked for the Center for Neighborhood Technology, an urban environmental group. They ate breakfast at Mellow Yellow, a Hyde Park diner, where Obama impressed Perkins as “smart and committed and strategic.” After that, they saw each other every six months or so.

Those meetings sound insignificant, but they were the beginning of one of this country's greatest social climbs, a climb that took Obama to the pinnacle of Chicago—and then American—politics. When Obama moved to the city, he knew no one except a great-uncle who worked at the University of Chicago library. So he set out to meet anyone who could help his career. Sometimes, he cultivated relationships for years before they paid off. Raby would write Obama a letter of recommendation for Harvard Law School. After Obama returned from Harvard, Perkins would ask him to sit on his organization's board. Jacky Grimshaw supported Obama's U.S. Senate campaign. After Obama won the election and signed a lucrative contract to write
The Audacity of Hope
, he bought the $1.7 million house next door to Grimshaw's.

As impressive as his ability to forge these friendships was the way he made influential people think
they
were cultivating
him
. John McKnight, a professor of urban studies at Northwestern University, was a cofounder of the Gamaliel Foundation, which trained community organizers. McKnight often attended the foundation's meetings, but in fifteen years, he'd never thought of getting to know an organizer socially. Then he met Obama. The young man stood out not just because of his inquisitiveness but because, unlike most Alinsky disciples, he was interested in understanding the motivations of powerful people. Most organizers saw the world in black and white. They equated compromise with selling out. Obama thought more like a lawyer, wanting to see “all the blacks and whites and grays.” McKnight invited Obama to his house in Evanston and then his cottage in Wisconsin. In long talks, Obama told McKnight that he was beginning to think of Alinsky's methods as “limiting,” because they focused on external institutions.

“You're organizing people in the neighborhood to confront institutions outside the neighborhood,” Obama argued. “Shouldn't you also be training them to come together effectively to deal with problems in the neighborhood?”

That conversation was the beginning of Obama's decision to leave organizing for law and politics.

When Obama met Johnnie Owens, he was already thinking about finding a successor at the DCP. At the time, Owens didn't realize that. He thought Obama just wanted to be pals. In 1987, Owens was working as a community planner for Friends of the Parks, and Obama was working to bring more facilities to Palmer Park, the grassy quadrangle across the street from Holy Rosary. Obama walked into Owens's office, looking to do some research, and they began to talk about Roseland's problems. Owens told Obama he'd grown up nearby, in Chatham, a neighborhood of middle-class bungalows closer to the lake. That seemed to pique Obama's interest.