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.The community group wasworking in white, Latino and African American areasaffected by the rash of steel mill closings.The DCP wouldtarget African American neighbourhoods.In spite of the meagre salary only $10,000 a year Obamaaccepted the job and moved to Chicago in 1985.Apart fromhis three years at Harvard Law School (1988 91), Obama haslived in Chicago ever since for nearly a quarter of a century.The previously itinerant Obama found a home and com-munity there.In this sense, he can be called a rooted cosmo-politan.Chicago shaped his identity as well as his politics.He bonded with the African American community and hisexperience of community organizing would influence theway that he perceived politics not as top-down managementbut as a bottom-up endeavour based on volunteerism.Chicago has a rich history of social work, labour agita-tion and African American politics.The black populationof Chicago was at the end of the nineteenth century a paltry2 per cent.That changed during the first decades of thetwentieth century.The deteriorating state of race relationsin the South in the post-Reconstruction era, along withthe social and legal segregation instituted in the formerstates of the Confederacy and accepted by the federal gov-ernment and the Supreme Court in the name of nationalreconciliation, coupled with hard times for the backwardeconomy, prompted many African Americans to seek theirfortune in the rapidly industrializing Northern states.In thefirst decades of the twentieth century, African Americansmigrated north in large numbers.During what came tobe called the Great Migration from 1916 to 1970, around7 million African Americans left the Jim Crow South for thepromised land of the North.Half a million came to Chicagoalone.By 1970, the black population of Chicago was at 33 percent.It currently has the second largest African Americanpopulation (after New York City) in the US.9364 GrassrootsEven though the manufacturing sector of Chicago grewprecipitously in the first decades of the twentieth century,African Americans had to compete with the growing immi-grant population for jobs.Ethnic and racial tension oftengave rise to social unrest.One of the worst riots occurredjust after the end of World War I.From 27 July to 3 August1919, the South Side of Chicago witnessed violence andarson that left fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks dead.The Jamaican American poet Claude McKay wrote IfWe Must Die in response to the riot.The poem, with itsdefiant last lines Like men we ll face the murderous,cowardly pack,/Pressed to the wall, dying, but fightingback! became a symbol for black resistance in the faceof oppression.94 Although the ostensible reason for the riotwas the drowning of an African American teenager whohad crossed the invisible line separating white and blackbeaches, the underlying cause was competition over jobs,especially white resentment of employers using AfricanAmericans as strikebreakers.Organizing for ChicagoAfrican Americans were disproportionately affected bythe onset of the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s.By 1932, the year Franklin D.Roosevelt was elected presi-dent, almost half of African American workers in the city ofChicago were unemployed.African Americans did benefitfrom New Deal largesse, however.As part of the PublicWorks Administration, a housing development named afterIda B.Wells was built in 1941, the largest of its kind.After World War II, another housing project on theSouth Side, the Altgeld Gardens, was built to accommodatereturning African American war veterans.It was here, in the1980s, that Obama was sent to help residents secure grantsfor a jobs programme and work for asbsetos removal.Obama came to Chicago during a period of transition.65 Obama s AmericaWhen Martin Luther King, Jr decided to bring his cam-paign for racial justice to the North in 1965, he encoun-tered unexpected resistance in Chicago, which was knownfor carving out racially segregated districts by redlining.Chicago radicalized King, causing him to advocate funda-mental institutional changes to promote economic equal-ity.One of King s closest associates, Jesse Jackson, setup Operation Breadbasket to pressure businesses to hireAfrican Americans and to create black-controlled finan-cial institutions.African American political and economicpower grew in subsequent years and in 1983, two yearsbefore Obama arrived, Harold Washington was elected thefirst African American mayor of Chicago.95 Washington hadthe misfortune of governing Chicago in the era of Reagan sNew Federalism, which drastically cut direct aid to cities.96Obama could experience first-hand the consequences of theReagan administration s starving of urban areas.In Chicago, Obama encountered not only the effects ofthe African American migration that had produced largeinner-city communities and the sometimes bitter legacy ofracial politics in the city.He was also exposed to the com-munity organizing that was part of a long tradition of socialwork in the city.Obama was quickly introduced to the strategy for com-munity organizing developed by Saul Alinsky.Alinskywas something of a legend in Chicago.In 1906, the novelistUpton Sinclair had portrayed in The Jungle the poverty andhorrendous working conditions in the meatpacking plantsin the Back of the Yards district of Chicago.Alinsky formedthe The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) in1939.The BYNC became a model for the kind of communityorganizing that Alinsky advocated to improve social condi-tions.This tradition for social work in Chicago goes backto the beginning of the Progressive era with the settlementhouse movement started by Jane Addams.97Sinclair s vivid description of the Back of the Yards66 Grassrootsdistrict focused on the lives of Lithuanian immigrantsworking under horrendous conditions in the meatpackingplants and his muckraking novel had an impact beyondits wide readership.Meat sales dropped by half and therewas a public outcry against the lack of oversight in themeatpacking industry.As a direct result of Sinclair s expo-sure of substandard and unhygienic working conditions,Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Foodand Drug Act which effectively created the Food and DrugAdministration.In an article written in 1988, three years after he came toChicago, Obama offered an effective brief for the value ofcommunity organizing.He saw community organizing as avital part of political empowerment for African Americansat a time when black inner-city communities were sufferingfrom economic cutbacks imposed by the Reagan adminis-tration.He recognized the problems facing black politicalleaders like Harold Washington in trying to govern withlimited resources.While Obama applauded the surge ofpolitical empowerment that grew out of the Civil Rightsmovement and which in Chicago resulted in the electionof Washington, and while Obama welcomed economicdevelopment strategies promoted by local entrepreneurs,they alone could not solve the problems facing inner-citycommunities:In my view, however, neither approach offers lastinghope of real change for the inner city unless undergirdedby a systematic approach to community organization.98Although he does not mention Saul Alinsky, Obama cer-tainly had him in mind when he wrote that Chicago was thebirthplace of community organizing.99 His article attests tothe influence Alinsky had on his thinking.He clearly agreeswith Alinsky s dictum that it is necessary to deal with theworld as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as67 Obama s Americait should be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]