Outside of Chicago, Illinois’s largest concentration of African-Americans is in the region known as Metro East—the trans-Mississippi suburbs of St. Louis. East St. Louis, hometown of Miles Davis and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, is the blackest city in the United States—97 percent African-American.
Through his old friend Reverend Alvin Love, president of the Developing Communities Project, Obama had an in with the area’s black pastors. As Obama had risen in politics, Love had advanced in ecclesiastical influence. By 2003, he was head of the state’s Baptist Convention, which covered four hundred churches. That spring, Love invited Obama to address the convention’s annual meeting, in Danville. After giving a biblically-themed speech—“A lot of people say this campaign is impossible, but with God, all things are possible”—Obama collected business cards from two hundred preachers.
Obama’s Metro East coordinator was Ray Coleman, a state park supervisor who had been recruited to the campaign by Michael Pittman, a Springfield real estate developer Obama knew through a lobbyist. Downstate blacks never questioned Obama’s racial authenticity. They had other reservations about his candidacy. Living in communities where whites were openly bigoted (the 1909 Springfield Race Riot is still a divisive issue in the state capital), they doubted their Caucasian neighbors would vote for Obama, and some even worried they’d look “too black” by supporting him. Springfield isn’t Chicago, where blacks have their own machine-within-a-Machine. Dan Hynes and Rod Blagojevich controlled thousands of state jobs in Springfield. The first time Pittman met Obama, he thought, This guy is sharp. Then he thought, If this guy wasn’t black, he could be president. Pittman held a fund-raiser for black professionals, which raised several thousand dollars, and he called black political junkies all over Central Illinois, spreading the word about Obama.
When Ray Coleman heard from Pittman, he, too, was skeptical.
“Mike,” he said, “the guy can’t win with a name like that. It’s too close to ‘Osama.’ It’s still close to Nine/Eleven.”
“I’m gonna send you an article from the Chicago Sun-Times,” Pittman replied. “It says if eighty-five percent of African-American voters support Obama, he’ll win.”
Coleman read the article, was impressed with Obama’s credentials, and agreed to run the local operation. When Obama and Shomon arrived in Metro East, Coleman took them around to the churches. At St. John Missionary Baptist, in Centerville, Obama got a few minutes in the study of Reverend Robert Jones. His first words to Jones were, “How are you doing? Alvin Love is a friend of yours. He said you’re a good man to meet in this part of the state.”
Black pastors are used to politicians using their churches for campaign speeches. They usually allow it, but they’re not always enthusiastic. Obama, though, had the endorsement of Reverend Love. That went a long way with the Baptist clergy. Jones invited Obama to speak at a youth revival at Mt. Zion Baptist in East St. Louis—the church where Jesse Jackson began his first presidential campaign in 1984. A crowd of fifteen hundred, Jones promised.
The church was packed. Obama started with his shopworn stump joke—“Some people call me Yo Mama, some people call me Alabama”—and the crowd roared with laughter. When he told them, “I’m not asking you to work for me because I’m African-American, but don’t we deserve to have at least one in the Senate?” they nodded, and when he talked about folks who’d grown up in the age of Jim Crow but believed America could be a better place, they stood and cheered.
The powerful St. Clair County machine was supporting Hynes, and Hull was paying workers $10 an hour to staple his signs to every telephone pole in the American Bottom, as the area’s alluvial lowlands are known. But Obama and Shomon thought the campaign could do at least as well as Carol Moseley Braun had in Metro East. Shomon asked Coleman if he could turn out four thousand votes in St. Clair County, which includes East St. Louis. It seemed like a reasonable goal, since Obama’s only important local supporters were the state senators James Clayborne and Bill Haine.
“Dan, I’ll get you that,” Coleman promised. “I think we’re going to do better. I think we can get six or eight thousand.”
When Coleman started talking up Obama, in September 2003, people were asking him, “Who is this guy? Omar?” As the election drew closer, he was hearing from a lot of people who weren’t supposed to be for Obama but had decided that electing a black senator was more important than obeying the county machine.