Young Mr. Obama - By Edward McClelland Page 0,19

Even his girlfriend was white.

Six months or so after they’d met, Obama invited Owens to Los Angeles for a two-week leadership training retreat put together by the Industrial Areas Foundation, the group Alinsky had founded. Owens was skeptical. In spite of his friendship with Obama, he thought of community organizers as impractical radicals standing on street corners and shouting, “Let’s storm the Bastille!” Those two weeks changed his mind. He began to understand how an organized community, trained in the acquisition of power, could determine its own destiny. When they returned to Chicago, Obama asked Owens to come to work for the DCP, as his assistant. Owens accepted. This, he realized, was why Obama had cultivated him so avidly. The man always had an agenda, no question about it.

One of Owens’s first DCP meetings was a training session at a hotel in the south suburbs. It was memorable not because of anything Obama said that weekend, but because of what he did. It was the only time any of the DCP’s members saw their punctilious organizer cut loose.

“Barack, how did you even find this place?” Loretta Augustine asked when they pulled up in the Honda. “You musta worked really hard. This place is away from everything. Why are we here?”

“I wanted to eliminate all the distractions,” he said.

That’s Barack, Augustine thought. All business, all the time.

“However,” he added, “at the end of training on Saturday night, we’re going to have a party.”

That was not the Barack she knew. Augustine couldn’t wait to see Obama party. After the training session, Obama actually ate a full dinner, then set up a portable stereo and slotted in a tape of his beloved R&B. As soon as Obama began swaying to the bass, Owens tried to bust his chops.

“Barack, what you doin’ out there on the floor?” he chided. “You know that ain’t the place for you.”

“What?” Obama shot back. “Who said I can’t dance? I’ll bust all y’all out.”

Obama threw his hand over his head and spun it like he was twirling a lasso. Yeah, their director could write a funding grant and get a bureaucrat down to the Gardens. But he could dance, too.

As the leader of a church-based community group, Obama was attending a lot of Sunday services. Recruiting pastors was part of his job, and there’s no better way to flatter a preacher than to sit through one of his sermons. Obama had arrived in Chicago unchurched, having been raised by a family whose attitudes toward religion ranged from indifferent to hostile. When his grandparents fled Kansas for the West Coast, they left behind the stringent prairie Methodism of their youth, exchanging it for Unitarianism, a less demanding and less judgmental brand of Protestantism. Once they reached Hawaii, they were far enough from their mainland origins to quit church altogether. Obama’s mother, who married two men with Muslim backgrounds, would have fallen into the category of “spiritual, but not religious.” A compassionate, nonacquisitive woman, she tolerated all faiths but embraced none. Her son would write that she was “skeptical of organized religion.” Obama’s father rejected Islam for atheism, making him the family member with the most conviction on religious matters.

Because he’d had no religious upbringing, and because he’d never lived before in an African-American community, Obama was only vaguely aware of the role the church played in black life. He knew, from his reading, that black Christianity had provided the spiritual underpinnings of the civil rights movement. But he didn’t know that the typical black church also provided its parishioners with social services—food, clothing, and housing assistance—as well as political guidance. The pastors he met were African-American rabbis, as concerned with the temporal advancement of an oppressed people as they were with its salvation. Obama was put off by the political jealousies of some older preachers, but the more time he spent on the South Side, the more he began to see the importance of joining a church.

While Obama was determined to succeed as an organizer, it would be cynical to say he became a Christian to smooth his relations with the pastors. He was spending all his time working with religious people and seeing how churches could uplift a neighborhood. Every DCP meeting began and ended with a prayer. After a while, faith began to sink in.

Early on, Obama had several long talks about his spirituality with Reverend Alvin Love. Like his mother, he believed in God but wasn’t sure he could fit into the mold of religion.

“I pray,”

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