Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

Four weeks later, on the evening of December 6, Carlson traveled to the Trumbull Park Fieldhouse, on South Deering’s northwestern flank, to speak to a crowd of more than two hundred residents. Moriarty and his recruits had prepared carefully for the session. They were concerned, however, by the presence of Foster Milhouse, a well-known precinct captain in Alderman Vrdolyak’s 10th Ward political organization and a leader of the old-line South Deering Improvement Association (SDIA), a group that traced its roots back to an infamous August 1953 race riot. When the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) accidentally assigned one black family to the housing project that adjoined Trumbull Park, SDIA’s membership responded with violence. After more African American families moved in during the next four years, even greater violence erupted in July 1957. When Milhouse began heckling at the outset of the December 6 meeting, Moriarty’s recruits responded quickly. “We call him Judas,” Moriarty remembered, and “they just jeer him out of the hall … ‘Judas, Judas, Judas.’ ” Once Milhouse was dispensed with, Carlson quickly agreed to the residents’ requests, but it was Lena who emerged as the star of the evening. “I somehow kind of like blossomed in this room,” she remembered. “I actually enjoyed it,” and indeed “felt called to it.” Also present was her husband Ray, who “really had an interest in being a lead person” and who “seemed a little bit upset about it,” Lena explained, when his wife emerged as the residents’ lead spokesperson. Ray “was a decent guy, but really insecure,” Bob recalled, and Alma described it similarly: “jealousy.”19

Carlson’s appearance put their group on the map, and by the end of the year, they had chosen a name to distinguish themselves from the larger UNO: Irondalers Against the Chemical Threat, or IACT. In February 1983, a wary Alderman Vrdolyak met with them about WMI’s proposed landfill. Lena recalled that he “met with us on the site of Waste Management’s proposed dump and from where we stood, we could see our homes. He said, ‘Gee, I didn’t realize that it was this close to the houses.’ I said, ‘Does this mean you’re going to oppose it?’ And he said, ‘Oh no, I’ll reconsider and get back to you.’ Well, he never did get back to us.”

In the meantime, when incumbent mayor Jane Byrne, whom Vrdolyak energetically backed, finished second in the Democratic mayoral primary on February 22, Vrdolyak’s political fortunes took a turn for the worse. Byrne got 33 percent, and Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley—a son of the late Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s powerful mayor from 1955 until his death in late 1976—placed third with 30 percent. The upset winner was African American congressman Harold Washington, who rode a tidal wave of enthusiasm among black voters to a 36 percent plurality. Washington still had to win the general election against Republican former state legislator Bernard Epton, and the racial symbolism of Chicago electing its first black mayor—or white voters uniting to stop it—cast the contest in starkly racial terms.

Washington visited the IACT activists at Bright School on March 29, and on April 12, he narrowly edged Epton, winning 51.7 percent against the Republican’s 48 percent. Analysts concluded that only 12.3 percent of the city’s white voters, primarily from the generally liberal lakefront wards, voted for Washington. Seventeen days later, on April 29, 1983, Chicago’s first black mayor took office.20

Throughout the latter part of 1982 and the first five months of 1983, the outlook for Southeast Side steelworkers grew worse and worse. There was even more concern when word got out that PSW president Tony Roque had signed an agreement with Chase Manhattan in August 1980 that allowed the workers to recoup their bounced checks, but that also potentially released International Harvester from most if not all of its pension obligations to Wisconsin’s former workers. Roque had not understood the legal implications of what he had signed. Some families were becoming so desperate that SOJC had initiated free food distribution twice each month and received additional funding support via UNO.

For decades, U.S. Steel’s South Works, located well north of 95th Street, had been the unchallenged behemoth of the Calumet region’s steel mills. Its 1973 workforce of ninety-nine hundred had shrunk to seventy-four hundred in 1979, fifty-two hundred in early 1981, and then forty-eight hundred in the spring of 1982, but in September 1982, U.S. Steel chairman David M. Roderick announced that the company would build a new rail mill at South Works thanks to concessions from both USW Local 65 and the state of Illinois. The new facility would add up to one thousand jobs, and completion was targeted for late 1983. “If we were going to be shutting down South Works, we wouldn’t be building the rail mill here,” Roderick assured Chicago journalists and state officials. Six months later the USW accepted an openly concessionary contract, hoping that laid-off workers would be brought back. Then, in May 1983, Roderick reversed himself and told U.S. Steel’s annual meeting that South Works might indeed be closed due to the impact of environmental regulations on such an aged plant. The same week that Roderick spoke, a comprehensive survey of Southeast Side neighborhoods showed “a job loss rate of 56 percent since 1980” and “an unemployment rate of 35 percent.”21

In late May, more than 150 IACTers and other antidumping protesters descended upon WMI’s annual meeting in tony suburban Oak Brook. The protest drew significant press attention, and next the IACTers—who had revised their name to Irondalers to Abolish the Chemical Threat, rather than just “Against”—blockaded the entrance to WMI’s large Calumet Industrial District (CID) landfill south of 130th Street, creating a backlog of scores of garbage trucks. Chicago police, unsure whether the remote location was in Chicago or instead in Calumet City, made no arrests. In the meantime, Mary Ellen Montes, who was seeking an appointment with the city’s new mayor, met with his sewer commissioner on June 10, and six days later the IACTers again blocked the CID entrance. This time Chicago police had a map, and seventeen of the sixty protesters were arrested, including Lena. Her mother Petra spoke to reporters, and Moriarty and others went door to door in South Deering to raise bail money.

Everyone was released in time for a 10:00 A.M. meeting the next day with new mayor Harold Washington. At least one woman showed Washington the visible bruises she had from her arrest, and the mayor agreed to speak at an IACT meeting in South Deering. By midsummer, IACT had access to a crucial meeting place which previously had been denied it: St. Kevin Roman Catholic Church, on the east side of South Torrence, just north of the rusting Wisconsin Steel plant and by far the neighborhood’s largest church. Up until early 1983, St. Kevin’s pastor had been Father Bernard “Benny” Scheid, a notoriously hateful and sometimes drunken political ally of Alderman Vrdolyak. Two years earlier, when the Chicago Sun-Times had publicly exposed the extent of then-Cardinal Cody’s financial misdeeds, Scheid wrote a letter to the paper’s editor warning him to “get your affairs in order. We pray for your sudden and unprovided death every day.”

Fortunately for IACT and South Deering, Scheid’s successor was Father George Schopp, who for several years had worked with Greg Galluzzo and UNO as pastor of St. Francis de Sales Parish on the East Side. Schopp was inheriting a parish that included not only Lena and Alma, but, far more menacingly, Scheid’s buddies and Vrdolyak precinct captains like Foster Milhouse (“we used to call him Fester Outhouse,” Schopp recounted) who were “kind of a goon squad.” But Schopp was already familiar with Vrdolyak’s iron grip control of Southeast Side politics, and his arrival at St. Kevin dramatically altered the parish’s political role, as all of Chicago would soon see.

In late August, Harold Washington announced that he was blocking WMI’s attempt to open a landfill in Big Marsh as well as a proposed expansion of the nearby existing Paxton Landfill on East 120th Street. Then, on Wednesday evening, August 24, Washington came to South Deering to speak to an IACT-organized crowd of some six hundred people packed into St. Kevin’s large basement hall. As the Tribune’s headline the next morning put it, “Washington Invades Ald. Vrdolyak’s 10th Ward Turf.”

Both George Schopp and Dennis Geaney, Leo’s associate pastor from St. Victor, were worried about what Benny Scheid and Vrdolyak’s lackeys might try to do, so Schopp asked a number of supportive priests to stay close to Scheid. As reporters scanned the crowd and a television crew set up their camera, Scheid “assured me that he would work over the crowd by telling them that Washington was an ex-convict and still a big crook,” Geaney recalled a few weeks later. Once Washington arrived and the meeting got under way, Geaney happened to sit beside Petra Rodriguez, “who told me that the chairperson was her daughter, Mary Ellen Montes. This tiny woman steered the tight ship of 600 people like a seasoned sea captain. Benny and the 10th Ward Regulars never got an opening.” Scheid “got up and started blustering, trying to berate Mary Ellen,” Schopp recalled, but Lena was unbowed and the hecklers were silenced.

Washington was a powerful and emphatic speaker, and he took control of the crowd. “There is an over-concentration of waste facilities in this community” and the multiple dumps posed a significant danger. “I am appalled things have gone this far.” Washington singled out WMI by name: “I believe this company has a horrible record of violating the public trust and endangering the public health,” he said. “We’ll do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this. We’re investigating this now. Apparently Waste Management has quite a bit of influence over certain key people,” an obvious allusion to Vrdolyak, who had received at least $18,500 in political contributions from WMI.

As Washington concluded, the crowd rose to give him a standing ovation, but Lena, standing beside him, immediately intervened: “The meeting’s not over yet, Mr. Mayor. We’re not finished.” She then sternly insisted that Washington give a yes or no answer to each of five specific IACT demands for city action, and as she recited them, Washington smilingly said “yes” each time. After her fifth one—“Are you committed to stopping Waste Management?” to which Washington responded, “Yes, I am”—Lena reached up, “threw her arms around him and kissed him” on the cheek, as 10:00 P.M. news viewers all across Chicagoland soon witnessed. Washington looked smitten. “Now I know why she is your leader. She’s quite a politician,” he told the crowd. To Lena herself, the mayor was even more complimentary: “Boy, you’re a tough woman. I don’t want to mess with you. I’ll do anything you want me to do,” and Washington gave her his private home phone number.

Observers were blown away by Lena’s aplomb. “It was an impressive performance by Mary Ellen,” environmental expert Bob Ginsburg remembered. “She held him there until he agreed” and “it made UNO a citywide player” operating from the veritable backyard of a powerful city council figure who had already become Washington’s greatest political nemesis. “It was a big deal.” Dennis Geaney felt likewise: Lena “was too astute to let him use his charisma as a substitute for hard answers.” Phil Mullins, who had just succeeded Bob Moriarty as UNO’s IACT organizer, was astonished. “It was an awesome meeting…. It was amazing. It just changed everything.”22

George Schopp felt the backlash, “big time…. It sent Vrdolyak off the wall.” Former alderman and Vrdolyak ally John Buchanan told the priest, “You’re part of a Communist conspiracy.” Different repercussions came from beyond the neighborhood. The CID landfill below 130th Street received almost two-thirds of Chicago’s garbage. It and the older Paxton Landfill at 122nd Street were essential sites; after all, the city’s waste had to go somewhere. The chairman of the Zoning Board of Appeals saw the Southeast Side locations as simple common sense: “from a land use point of view, that is an area that has become dedicated to this type of business.” The other most relevant city official viewed WMI in economic development terms: “Their proposal is no different from a steel mill starting to expand. I’m looking at it as an industry expanding, and we need jobs.” The Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry agreed, which led to a Tribune headline saying “Dumping Ban Called Threat to Business.” Unlike with landfills, the city had no regulatory authority over the SCA incinerator at 117th Street, and in early October the Reagan administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave what the Tribune called “the largest commercial toxic waste incinerator in the United States” a permit to burn PCBs inside Chicago’s city limits. The chemical waste company confidently declared: “This is a state-of-the-art incinerator. It will not pose a health threat to residents.”23

But the most pressing threat to the Southeast Side’s well-being was the ongoing uncertainty of what U.S. Steel would do with South Works, where the active workforce was down to twelve hundred. Although the ongoing shrinkage of South Works’ employee roster was not as sudden or dramatic as the Wisconsin catastrophe, the cumulative job loss over time was almost three times greater, and it was the result of industry-wide trends, not a series of missteps. Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, the domestic U.S. steel market shrank dramatically, especially because of greatly reduced demand from the U.S. auto industry and a more than 50 percent growth in the import of steel from abroad.

Throughout the fall of 1983 and into early 1984, U.S. Steel’s leadership continued to threaten a possible shutdown of South Works unless environmental protections were seriously loosened and the United Steelworkers union surrendered even more far-reaching contract concessions. Two days after Christmas, U.S. Steel announced that it would shrink the plant to just its beam mill and one electric furnace, reducing the workforce to just eight hundred. Members of Congess were joined by Archbishop—and now Cardinal—Joseph Bernardin in denouncing U.S. Steel’s behavior, and Tribune business editor Richard Longworth wrote an angry column, declaring that U.S. Steel’s behavior “violated every standard of decency and broke every obligation to the workers and the community that made it rich.” The company had betrayed “every principle of economic fair play established over the last fifty years” and new federal legislation might be necessary “to protect the country from companies like U.S. Steel.” Indeed, “U.S. Steel is operating so far outside the rules of normal free enterprise that it is challenging the entire American industrial system.” Among those responding to the essay was St. Victor’s Father Dennis Geaney, who commended Longworth and rued the damage done to “people who are being treated like obsolete machinery.”24

While IACT and the Southeast Side steel crisis were making news throughout the summer and fall of 1983, Jerry Kellman reactivated CCRC in tandem with the Catholic parishes that stretched across Cook County’s suburban townships, the area that comprised the archdiocese’s Vicariate XII. Mary Gonzales and Greg Galluzzo also were expanding UNO’s organizational reach into three more predominantly Hispanic Chicago neighborhoods: Back of the Yards, Little Village, and Pilsen, where Danny Solis was transforming the Pilsen Neighbors Community Council into a UNO affiliate. Before the end of the year Mary and Greg also added to UNO’s staff Peter Martinez, a veteran IAF organizer. Martinez had known and clashed with Kellman a decade earlier, and his arrival not only increased tensions between Jerry and Greg, but it spurred Kellman’s gradual shift from UNO to Leo Mahon’s CCRC. Jerry sought support for CCRC from the archdiocese’s CHD, the Woods Fund, and Tom Joyce’s Claretian Social Development Fund, emphasizing that his congregational organizing would lead parishioners toward “understanding social action as part of a faith commitment.”

By midsummer, Kellman had visited pastors across the vicariate and had won the support of urban vicar Father Ray Nugent. Combining the vicariate’s numerical designation with the Book of Ecclesiastes’ (3:1–2) well-known invocation of “time,” Kellman and the pastors came up with “Time for XII” as the name for a program which would work hand in glove with CCRC to train lay leaders in each parish to listen to fellow parishioners’ thoughts about the region’s economic crisis.

Cardinal Bernardin gave Time for XII his enthusiastic support, and on August 29 he endorsed it at a meeting of three hundred parish leaders from across the vicariate. Kellman and Leo Mahon believed it would take until October 1984 to raise the necessary funds—in part through contributions from each church—to hire staff and begin work at the more than twenty parishes that said they would sign on. In the interim Kellman would kick off “pilot projects” at St. Victor and at Father Paul Burke’s Holy Ghost Parish in neighboring South Holland.

At St. Victor Parish, Leo’s—and soon Jerry’s—right-hand layman was the energetic Fred Simari. Under the tutelage of Leo’s first young associate pastor at St. Victor, Bill Stenzel, Fred had proceeded through the archdiocese’s three-year deaconate school. At almost forty years old, Fred was six years older than Kellman, who quickly impressed him as an “incredibly hard worker” who “was great at what he did.” Also involved at St. Victor were two other key parishioners, Gloria Boyda and Jan Poledziewski. Within St. Victor, “lots of laypeople got involved,” Jan recalled, another of whom was Christine Gervais. “We just went into different homes and spoke to the people and then kind of brought back all of our information,” Gervais remembered. We “just sat and talked,” especially about what families needed. People just “refused to believe that the steel industry was going down,” because for many families, the plants were the only jobs that three successive generations of breadwinners had known.

By the beginning of 1984, Kellman was expanding beyond St. Victor and Holy Ghost, and at Annunciata Parish on the East Side Kellman used a small retreat as an opportunity to explain Time for XII. Soon thereafter Jerry spoke with one young man from the parish, Ken Jania, about joining him to do further outreach. Jania, newly married and running a small, failing East Side restaurant, jumped at the chance, and by May 1984, Ken was CCRC’s second paid staff member.

“My job was to connect with the parishioners,” Jania recalled, “to make a presentation in front of church” and “organize and start the interview process with parishioners.” On the East Side, in predominantly Polish Hegewisch, Chicago’s southeasternmost neighborhood, in Calumet City and other southern suburbs, there were “hundreds of interviews that we documented.” The job was harder than it sounded, for “it was very difficult for me to come from that neighborhood and to go and do those interviews, because in many cases I knew the people” going back to high school. “It was very difficult with these families” since “they’d lost everything” when a father’s steel plant job disappeared. “He’s got nothing,” since “their skills didn’t translate to anything,” and that meant “absolute desperation,” with prolonged unemployment signaling how “the traditional blue collar nuclear family’s exploded.”

As IACT’s Alma Avalos explained, “I don’t think the reality really sunk in until after a couple of years passed.” As Christine Walley, the most poignant chronicler of the Southeast Side’s disintegration, later wrote, “it sometimes felt as if our entire world was collapsing.” Permanent closure of the mills, whether Wisconsin or especially South Works, “was simply unfathomable,” and for many men “the stigma of being out of work was deeply traumatic.” In her household, following the Wisconsin shutdown, “my dad became increasingly depressed, eventually refusing to leave the house…. He would never hold a permanent job again.” The Southeast Side’s economic demise also “caused untold social devastation” among neighbors as another former Wisconsin worker attempted suicide and a third drank himself to death. Her father lived on, wallowing in “the deep-seated bitterness of a man who felt that life had passed him by.” All across the Calumet region, it slowly dawned on people that a “world we thought would never change” had suddenly proven “far more ephemeral” than anyone had imagined possible.

Jerry Kellman’s reenlivened CCRC had an expanded geographic reach thanks to Vicariate XII’s archdiocesan links with neighboring Vicariate X, which encompassed all of the Chicago neighborhoods that comprised Greater Roseland. Far more crucial, however, in early 1983 Leo Mahon’s protégé and former associate pastor, Bill Stenzel, was assigned to the small, struggling Holy Rosary Church at the southwest corner of 113th Street and King Drive. Stenzel had spent some previous months with Father Tom “Rock” Kaminski at neighboring St. Helena of the Cross Parish on S. Parnell Avenue at 101st Street. One of Stenzel’s tasks was to merge an even weaker nearby parish, St. Salomea, a historically Polish church, into Holy Rosary, which had been traditionally Irish. Holy Rosary had some deeply committed parishioners, like Ralph Viall, a white man in his fifties, and Betty Garrett, an African American woman who had moved to Roseland in 1971, but the merger faced no opposition because there was hardly anyone either Irish or Polish or—excepting Ralph Viall and his friend Ken—indeed white left in Roseland.25

If any one neighborhood in America epitomized the experience of “white flight” in its most traumatic form, Roseland was it. The name went back to the earliest white settlers, Dutch immigrants who first arrived in 1849 to build homes and farms in the area around what would become 103rd to 111th Streets at South Michigan Avenue—the same street that fifteen miles northward becomes Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” shopping district. In 1852 the Illinois Central and Michigan Central Railroads interconnected just a little to the southeast, and the settlement that grew up there would be called Kensington. Over the next quarter century Chicago’s role as major rail hub grew dramatically, and in 1880 the already-famous sleeping car magnate George Pullman chose an area just to the northeast—between what later would be 103rd and 115th Streets—to build a new manufacturing plant as well as a company town he would name after himself. By the turn of the century, Pullman’s burgeoning plant employed many workers who lived in Roseland and Kensington, and in the coming decades and the World War II era, thousands of men—white men—who found well-paying jobs in the steel plants east of there, across the large geographic divide of Lake Calumet and its attendant marshes, made their homes in Roseland or the adjoining neighborhoods of West Pullman and Washington Heights, both of which, like Kensington, were often lumped into Greater Roseland.

Black people were almost nonexistent in those neighborhoods. To the north, between 91st and 97th Streets astride State Street, a small black community called Lilydale grew up in the years after 1912, and by 1937, its residents successfully protested for the construction of a neighborhood public school. At the time of the 1930 census, Kensington had 170 black residents. In 1933, when an African American woman purchased a duplex some fifteen blocks southwestward, near 120th Street and Stewart Avenue, white neighbors bombed the property. A decade later, when white real estate developer Donald O’Toole announced the construction of Princeton Park, a new neighborhood of primarily single-family homes for African Americans just west of Lilydale, eleven thousand whites petitioned unsuccessfully to block the development. The end of World War II created a serious housing shortage, and when the CHA moved the families of several black war veterans into a reconstructed barracks project on the east side of Halsted Street at 105th Street, it took more than a thousand law enforcement officers to finally end three nights of violent white protest riots.

Following World War II, Greater Roseland’s racial composition changed gradually, and then incredibly abruptly. Blacks were 18 percent of the population in 1950, but the proportion increased to 23 percent in 1960, to 55 percent in 1970, and then to 97 percent by 1980. But those statistics, while dramatic, nonetheless fail to convey how stark the transformation was. In 1960, West Pullman was 100 percent white; by 1980, it was 90 percent black. Washington Heights, 12 percent black in 1960, was 75 percent so by 1970, and 98 percent by 1980. In central Roseland, the dominant church presence, reaching all the way back to the original settlers, was the four congregations of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) and four more of the Reformed Church of America (RCA). One of the CRC churches considered reaching out to new African American residents in early 1964, but then dropped the idea in July 1968, concluding that the neighborhood was in “rapid decline” by the spring of 1969. As in other neighborhoods all across Chicago’s vast South Side, the onset of the real cataclysm could be dated quite precisely: April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. “From that day on, everything changed,” one resident told Louis Rosen, who wrote a powerful memoir of the transformation before becoming a successful musician. “It was rapid. It was awful,” one white person recalled. “It was an exodus.”