David Garrow - Rising Star - The Making of Barack Obama

The Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) is an Alinsky organizing project in the industrial heart of Chicago. This region was once a world leader in steel production. However, in the past four years, 50,000 jobs have been lost. CCRC has pulled together 60 churches from the far Southside of Chicago and suburban Cook County to address this economic crisis. Half of CCRC’s budget comes from local church dues. The project is also committed to church renewal.

APPRENTICE DIRECTOR

Duties: Help to supervise all organizing on the far Southside of Chicago, an area which is 95 percent black. Serve as consultant to local parishes; recruit and train lay leaders in listening skills, research, strategic planning, public action skills and (with local clergy) theological reflection.

Requirements: Experience with church-based or community organizing; or experience in leadership and church development; highly disciplined; confident; mature; reflective; able to think and act strategically; experience in black community preferred.

Salary: $20,000/year to start, negotiable for more experienced organizer. Automobile allowance; health insurance.

To apply: Send resume to Gerald Kellman, Director, CCRC, 351 E. 113th St., Chicago, IL 60628. 312/995-8182. Selected candidates will receive phone interviews. Finalists will have interview in Chicago (CCRC will cover travel expenses). Affirmative action position.

TRAINEE

Duties and Requirements: Same as for Apprentice Director but not expected to have skills in advance, must have ability to pick up skills and master them quickly.

Salary: $10,000/year to start. Similar benefits as Apprentice Director.

To Apply: Same as for Apprentice Director.

In early June 1985, the new issue of Community Jobs started landing on library shelves across the United States. 42

Chapter Two Chapter Two A PLACE IN THE WORLD: HONOLULU, SEATTLE, HONOLULU, JAKARTA, AND HONOLULU AUGUST 1961–SEPTEMBER 1979 Chapter Three SEARCHING FOR HOME: EAGLE ROCK, MANHATTAN, BROOKLYN, AND HERMITAGE, PA SEPTEMBER 1979–JULY 1985 Chapter Four TRANSFORMATION AND IDENTITY: ROSELAND, HYDE PARK, AND KENYA AUGUST 1985–AUGUST 1988 Chapter Five EMERGENCE AND ACHIEVEMENT: HARVARD LAW SCHOOL SEPTEMBER 1988–MAY 1991 Chapter Six BUILDING A FUTURE: CHICAGO JUNE 1991–AUGUST 1995 Chapter Seven INTO THE ARENA: CHICAGO AND SPRINGFIELD SEPTEMBER 1995–SEPTEMBER 1999 Chapter Eight FAILURE AND RECOVERY: CHICAGO AND SPRINGFIELD OCTOBER 1999–JANUARY 2003 Chapter Nine CALCULATION, COINCIDENCE, CORONATION: ILLINOIS AND BOSTON JANUARY 2003–NOVEMBER 2004 Chapter Ten DISAPPOINTMENT AND DESTINY: THE U.S. SENATE NOVEMBER 2004–FEBRUARY 2007 Epilogue THE PRESIDENT DID NOT ATTEND, AS HE WAS GOLFING Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments About the Author Also by David J. Garrow About the Publisher

A PLACE IN THE WORLD Chapter Two A PLACE IN THE WORLD: HONOLULU, SEATTLE, HONOLULU, JAKARTA, AND HONOLULU AUGUST 1961–SEPTEMBER 1979 Chapter Three SEARCHING FOR HOME: EAGLE ROCK, MANHATTAN, BROOKLYN, AND HERMITAGE, PA SEPTEMBER 1979–JULY 1985 Chapter Four TRANSFORMATION AND IDENTITY: ROSELAND, HYDE PARK, AND KENYA AUGUST 1985–AUGUST 1988 Chapter Five EMERGENCE AND ACHIEVEMENT: HARVARD LAW SCHOOL SEPTEMBER 1988–MAY 1991 Chapter Six BUILDING A FUTURE: CHICAGO JUNE 1991–AUGUST 1995 Chapter Seven INTO THE ARENA: CHICAGO AND SPRINGFIELD SEPTEMBER 1995–SEPTEMBER 1999 Chapter Eight FAILURE AND RECOVERY: CHICAGO AND SPRINGFIELD OCTOBER 1999–JANUARY 2003 Chapter Nine CALCULATION, COINCIDENCE, CORONATION: ILLINOIS AND BOSTON JANUARY 2003–NOVEMBER 2004 Chapter Ten DISAPPOINTMENT AND DESTINY: THE U.S. SENATE NOVEMBER 2004–FEBRUARY 2007 Epilogue THE PRESIDENT DID NOT ATTEND, AS HE WAS GOLFING Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments About the Author Also by David J. Garrow About the Publisher

HONOLULU, SEATTLE, HONOLULU, JAKARTA, AND HONOLULU

AUGUST 1961–SEPTEMBER 1979

Barack Hussein Obama departed Nairobi’s Embakasi Airport on the evening of August 4, 1959, bound for New York, via Rome, Paris, and London. He was twenty-five years old—not twenty-three, as he would later claim—and he was leaving behind a nineteen-year-old wife, Grace Kezia Aoko, who was three months pregnant with a second child, and a sixteen-month-old son, Roy Abon’go.

Obama’s dream was to have an education beyond what was available in colonial Kenya. A possession of Great Britain since the late nineteenth century, Kenya lacked any post-secondary educational institution aside from a newly opened technical college. Three years earlier, a dynamic young Kenyan politician, Tom Mboya—who, like Obama, was a Luo, Kenya’s third-largest ethnic group—had visited the United States and begun making it possible for young Kenyans to seek higher education opportunities there. Mboya was introduced to Bill Scheinman, a wealthy young businessman likewise interested in African decolonization, and thanks largely to Scheinman’s personal largesse, as many as thirty-nine Kenyan students enrolled at a variety of U.S. colleges and universities during the years 1957 and 1958.

By 1958, Barack Obama and his young wife were living in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi, yet the first twenty-four years of his life had been anything but easy. The second child, and first son, of Hussein Onyango Obama and Habiba Akumu, he was born near Kendu Bay in the Nyanza region of western Kenya, close to Lake Victoria. Hussein Onyango had served as a cook with the British colonial military forces, traveling widely. Hussein’s third child, Hawa Auma, later recounted that “he loved all the whites, and they loved him.” Another younger daughter, Zeituni Onyango, remembered Hussein as “unyielding and unapologetic…. My father never shed the attitude of a soldier,” nor his belief in corporal punishment for wives as well as children.

When Barack Hussein was nine years old and his older sister Sarah Nyaoke about twelve, Hussein Onyango moved the family—now including a second wife, Sarah Ogwel—from Kendu Bay to the village of Kogelo, well north of Lake Victoria in the Alego area of Nyanza, where his ancestors had historic roots. But Alego was wild and rugged, and within a few months, a pregnant Habiba Akumu escaped from her husband and three children and returned to Kendu Bay. In despair, Barack and Sarah soon tried to follow her but were returned to Kogelo to live with their stepmother, Sarah Ogwel, while their father increasingly worked in Nairobi. Decades later Sarah would tell her stepgrandson that his father “could not forgive his abandonment, and acted as if Akumu didn’t exist. He told everyone that I was his mother.”

In Kogelo Barack attended Ng’iya Intermediate School, and in 1949, at age fifteen, he took the Kenya Africa Examination. In early 1950, he was admitted to Maseno Mission School, Kenya’s oldest secondary institution. School records initially described Barack as “very keen, steady … reliable and outgoing,” but during his senior year school administrators took a strong dislike to him and effectively expelled him. Classmates acknowledged that Obama had become “rude and arrogant” toward teachers, and the white English principal fingered him as the primary author of an anonymous letter criticizing the school’s practices. Wherever the blame lay, Obama was out of school without having graduated, and a furious Hussein Onyango instructed him to move to Mombasa, Kenya’s eastern port city, to earn his own living.