Shore Country Club, a once-segregated institution on the lakefront, just south of Hyde Park. By marrying Michelle, he was binding himself to black Chicago, where he’d chosen to make his home and career. The Obamas would eventually become members of the city’s black elite, a community of entrepreneurs, doctors, publishers, attorneys, and politicians. Their Harvard degrees would help them conquer that world, but they hadn’t conquered it just yet. Michelle had grown up middle-class, in the Highlands, an enclave of South Shore: Her father worked at the city’s water filtration plant, and she attended Whitney Young, a public high school for overachievers.
Obama had two best men: his Kenyan half brother, Malik, and Johnnie Owens. The guest list represented both the life he was leaving behind and the one he was about to enter: Jerry Kellman was at the wedding. So were Loretta Augustine, Yvonne Lloyd, and Margaret Bagby. The only elected officials present were Sam Burrell and Toni Preckwinkle, a pair of aldermen who’d worked on Project Vote! Jesse Jackson Jr. attended because his wife, Sandi, was a childhood friend of Michelle’s.
The DCP women were thrilled to see Obama marry Michelle. They’d been worried that their promising young man would be prey for “some jezebel or some bimbo.” But Michelle was clearly as brilliant as Barack. When the couple made the rounds at the reception, Bagby told Michelle that her new husband was destined for the White House.
“Ahh, yeah, right,” Obama laughed, the same as he’d always done when Margaret insisted he’d be president someday. Then he moved on to the next table. As a law student, he’d visited Roseland whenever he returned to Chicago, and as head of Project Vote!, he’d enlisted DCP members as volunteers. But after the wedding, those three women would rarely see him again.
Chapter 5
THE YOUNG LAWYER
I N E A R L Y 1 9 9 3, Obama went to work full-time at Davis, Miner. He was given a narrow office at the head of the stairwell on the second floor, right next to Judd Miner’s. He hung up a photo of Harold Washington—the same tinted studio portrait seen in so many South Side parlors—and set about doing the late mayor’s unfinished business.
Davis, Miner carried the banner for Chicago’s white liberals and black nationalists. A decade before they had united to put Washington in office. Now, they were out of power. In 1989, Richard M. Daley had been elected to complete Washington’s unfinished term, defeating Alderman Timothy Evans, who skipped the Democratic primary to run as the candidate of the Harold Washington Party. It was another racially divisive election. Unable to hold Washington’s multiethnic coalition together, Evans got only 7 percent of the white vote, a third of what his party’s namesake had received. With the Daleys restored to the mayor’s office, battles once won in the city council had to be argued in court.
“Judd Miner basically made his living by suing the city,” said a man who served as an expert witness in one of his cases.
That’s exactly what Miner was doing when Obama joined his firm. One of Obama’s first cases was Barnett v. Daley, which alleged that the city’s 1991 ward map was racially biased and should be redrawn to ensure the election of more black aldermen. This was essentially a continuation of “Council Wars”: Harold Washington had won his council majority in a special election, after a federal judge ordered that the 1980s ward map be reconfigured for racial balance. The plaintiffs were members of Washington’s old council bloc, the defendants mostly white ethnic aldermen who had sided with Edward Vrdolyak.
The 1990 census was the first in which blacks outnumbered whites in Chicago. Yet the city council had twenty-three whites, twenty African-Americans, and seven Latinos. The new Daley administration had maintained a white majority by creating wards where blacks made up more than 90 percent of the population, the suit argued. The Southwest Side—one of the city’s most bitter racial battlegrounds—was 68 percent African-American. Yet it had two white wards and two wards that were 98 and 99 percent black, respectively.
“To this day, electoral politics in Chicago is infected by racial bias and racial appeals, and it has touched on the right of African-Americans to participate in the electoral process and to elect candidates of their choice unless they have voting control of a ward,” argued Miner’s brief, which charged that the redistricting violated the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act.
On Barnett v. Daley, Obama did associate