he could teach. Thanks to Obama’s training, the women of the DCP were starting to feel confident enough to undertake projects on their own. Waste Management Inc., America’s largest trash hauler, operated the enormous landfill on 130th Street. The dump was a neighborhood blight. The tainted extract of sodden garbage leached into the groundwater through its porous clay lining. The gulls who perched on the Gardens’ ziggurat rooflines were strays drawn away from the lake by the feast inside the dump. Word got out that Waste Management planned to expand into land abutting the O’Brien Lock, which allows river-going barges to enter Lake Michigan—the source of Chicago’s drinking water. Alarmed, the DCP and the United Neighborhood Organization—a Latino group that goes by the acronym UNO—held a rally at Saints Peter and Paul Church in the South Chicago neighborhood. Two hundred people attended. That same night, Waste Management officials were meeting with community leaders in a conference room at South Chicago Bank, trying to win approval for the expansion. At seven o’clock, all two hundred demonstrators left the church and walked silently toward the bank. Once inside, they marched up the stairs and filed into the conference room without saying a word. The president of UNO read a statement about meeting behind closed doors to cut deals that would damage the far South Side. Then everyone left, as silently as they had entered.
Another rally, at the same church, was attended by the city’s new mayor, Eugene Sawyer. Sawyer had been appointed to replace Harold Washington, who died of a heart attack on the day before Thanksgiving in 1987. DCP and UNO wanted a task force to debate the dump’s expansion. Augustine prepared a speech. Since it was a bilingual crowd, she would have an interpreter. But she was asked to deliver one phrase in Spanish: vamos a decide. We will decide. Obama walked her through the presentation, including the pronunciation of those three words. When Augustine recited “vamos a decide” the room burst into cheers and chants of “We will decide!” For that performance, Augustine was appointed to cochair the task force, which succeeded in blocking Waste Management’s plans. Obama, she believed, had given her the confidence to speak before a crowd.
“I wanted to follow him,” Augustine would say years later. “I wanted to be part of the things that I felt he could make happen, and I really wanted to learn. He brought out something in me. I was never that outgoing before. I would feel like something needed to be said but I was afraid to say it. He changed that dynamic to the [point] that when I would be at these meetings, and I knew something needed to be said, it was something inside of me that overcame that fear of speaking up and out that went from ‘Needs to be said, but I’m afraid’ to ‘It needs to be said, and if I don’t say it, even though I’m afraid, I’m gonna die. I have to say it.’ ”
Johnnie Owens was surprised to hear Obama was quitting the DCP, even more surprised to hear he was quitting for Harvard Law School. Obama gave his assistant the news in a roundabout way that emphasized it would be a change for Owens, too.
“Are you ready to lead?” Obama asked Owens one day at the rectory.
“Lead?” Owens responded. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been accepted at Harvard.”
“What?”
Owens was thrilled for his boss. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he was ready to take over a community organization. He was going to have to run the fledgling Career Education Network and deal with two dozen pastors. And he’d be succeeding a leader who, in three years, had become beloved by his followers. Loretta Augustine, Yvonne Lloyd, and Margaret Bagby were as loyal to Obama as they were to the DCP.
To make the change easier, Obama took Owens around to all the DCP churches.
“I’m leaving,” he told his priests, bishops, and reverends. “John’s gonna take over. I have complete confidence in him. If you like what I did, you’ll like what he does even better.”
Some did. Owens ended up serving six years as the DCP’s director, twice as long as Obama. Alvin Love, who eventually became president of the group, thought Owens was the best community organizer he’d ever met. But, he always added, Obama had trained him.
It was different for the women of the DCP. None of them had expected Obama to stay forever—he was too smart, too talented, to