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