an inner-city neighborhood, taking over a Lutheran church left behind by the fleeing Dutch, so it represented Roseland’s changes, as well as its current problems: The church was often covered in graffiti, and burglars had stolen the PA system and the silverware.
When Obama sat down in Love’s study, the pastor didn’t take him as anything other than a young African-American. But Obama was self-conscious about his exoticness: his Muslim name, his lack of roots in Chicago or the black community in general.
“I know you’re wondering about this funny accent,” Obama said, even though Love hadn’t detected an accent. “My father is from Kenya and my mother is from Kansas. Some folks call me Yo Mama. Some folks call me Alabama.”
Love chuckled, then Obama asked him, “What do you think about the neighborhood? What do you want to see happen?”
“We’ve got a drug problem,” Love said, “and people here need jobs.”
The two men talked about their upbringings—Obama’s in Hawaii and Indonesia, Love’s in Mississippi during the civil rights movement and on the West Side of Chicago during the riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination. Obama, who had been reading Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, was fascinated by the civil rights movement, an episode in black history that he’d missed out on. This brother’s looking for a connection with our community, Love thought. He agreed to attend a pastors’ meeting at Holy Rosary. Most of his parishioners drove in from other parts of town, so it wouldn’t hurt to belong to something that connected Lilydale with Roseland. He thought it might be good for the church and the neighborhood. At the meeting, the pastors discussed how their churches could fight the neighborhood’s crime and drug problems. Only eight attended, and six were Catholic priests, but Obama was starting to build the DCP.
Obama was also working with the laid-off steelworkers whose plight had inspired Kellman to start a community organization in the first place. He and Loretta Augustine became fixtures at union halls, where he learned that steelworkers could be just as stubborn as inner-city pastors.
Steel had a century-long history on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. The steelworkers’ union had shed blood, when ten men were gunned down by police during a 1937 strike. Its sacrifices were rewarded with wages that made its members blue-collar aristocrats. The sons of those strikers lived in brick bungalows, towed powerful speedboats up to their Wisconsin cottages, and were proud to be part of an industry that called itself “the backbone of America”—the first step in building skyscrapers. They had inherited steelmaking from their fathers, and refused to believe they wouldn’t be able to pass it on to their children. Obama and Augustine interviewed men who wore diamond rings and heavy gold chains. Their plan: to ride out the layoffs on unemployment and union benefits. In the past, they’d always gone on strike, come back to work, and made more money than before. They had no skills that could be used outside a steel mill. One man ran a steel-straightening machine. He pushed a button, a bar of steel went in. He pushed the button again, the bar came out.
Obama talked to the workers about retraining and set up interviews with job counselors. Many of the steelworkers ended up as computer programmers. The less fortunate landed near-minimum-wage jobs at the Sherwin-Williams paint factory or the Jay’s Potato Chips plant, or Brach’s candy. Not even the most ambitious, though, made as much money as they’d earned pouring steel. As Obama listened to the frustrated workers pour out their stories, he tried to translate them into an “issue”—a project that would bring jobs to the South Side and prove to the local pastors that the DCP could deliver money to their neighborhoods. Augustine, Lloyd, and another DCP board member named Margaret Bagby helped him come up with one.
Barack Obama’s very first followers were a trio of middle-aged women who sat on the DCP’s board. Their backgrounds could not have been more different from Obama’s—or more similar to the great majority of blacks who had grown up in the segregated America of the 1940s and ’50s. Augustine was a native South Sider; Lloyd a Southerner, from Nashville; Bagby a country girl from a small Michigan town that was a remnant of the Underground Railroad. All three lived in Golden Gate, the neighborhood of aluminum-clad ranch houses alongside Altgeld, and all three were married to men with blue-collar jobs: Augustine’s husband was a postal clerk,