Chapter 1

Roots

Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961, less than eight months after John F. Kennedy’s inauguration as the nation’s thirty-sixth president. By the time he left his adopted city of Chicago twenty-seven years later to attend Harvard Law School, Obama had already lived an extraordinary life. Growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii, he and his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (Ann), had been abandoned by his Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. After she got remarried to an Indonesian businessman, Lolo Soertoro, Ann chose to pursue her own fulltime career in Indonesia, leaving it to her parents in Hawaii, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, to raise Barack (Barry). Notwithstanding the love he received from his mother and grandparents, he often felt lonely and abandoned by both his parents. Complicating matters was his sensitivity to being biracial. Much of his young adult life was spent on a redemptive search for his roots and his own sense of racial identity. Although he left for Harvard still conflicted about issues of race, he no longer felt rootless. Quite the contrary. For someone his age, he was already unusually well grounded with a clearly defined sense of purpose and confidence in his own ability to achieve the goals he set for himself.

Childhood

At the time of Barack Jr.’s birth, the United States was enjoying the greatest prosperity in its history. Jobs were plentiful and the number of college attendees and graduates was growing at record levels. Even working-class families could look forward to a better life for their children. The civil rights movement, which had begun during the 1950s, was gaining momentum and social mobility was increasing. As a result, a transformation of thinking was taking place among many young African Americans. By the 1970s, things that had been unimaginable in the 1950s seemed possible.

Yet what characterized the 1960s was not widespread optimism but pessimism about the soundness and stability of the US economy, about the gains of the civil rights movement, about the lack of opportunities for those entering the marketplace, and even about the United States’ place in the world. Kennedy had been elected on a campaign promise to get America “moving again.” This was a thinly veiled reference to the widespread belief that President Dwight Eisenhower, while still enormously popular, had allowed the country to stagnate economically and militarily. He had also permitted its most dangerous adversary, the Soviet Union, to spread its influence almost to the shores of Florida by providing large amounts of economic and military aid to the Communist dictator of Cuba, Fidel Castro. There were even references to a “missile gap” in Moscow’s favor. Rumors spread that the Soviet Union was building missile bases in Cuba with rockets powerful enough to launch a nuclear strike against targets along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and to strike most major cities east of the Mississippi River. Eisenhower was personally depicted as a lackluster president whose administration was actually run by his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, or by his chief of staff, Sherman Adams.¹

Barack’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, shared these views of Eisenhower and the 1960s and was an admirer of John Kennedy. ² In 1956 she wore a campaign button for the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson. In 1961 she was attracted to Kennedy’s idealism, sense of purpose, and commitment to making the world a better place through such proposals as the Peace Corps, which matched her own values and overriding commitment to working with the world’s poor.³

At the time Ann gave birth to Barack, she was living with her husband, Barack Obama Sr., a Black student from Kenya, in a small apartment in Honolulu. Born on November 29, 1942, she was only eighteen years old at the time of her marriage. Growing up, Ann had been, in many ways, a typical adolescent. She always had a close group of friends, participated in youth groups, enjoyed her share of slumber parties and record hops, and took pleasure in sometimes annoying her parents, especially her overprotective father whom she liked to tease.⁴

There was, however, an entirely different side of Ann that became even more pronounced as she grew older. She has often been described, even by her own son, as naively idealistic—almost as a flower-child of the 1960s. She was, indeed, a romantic and a dreamer, but these were not her most defining characteristics. More accurately, she was deliberative, disciplined, and targeted. She was also bookish, witty, curious, and opinionated. As an indication of just how smart she was, she won early admission to the University of Chicago; but she had to turn down the offer because her father thought she was too young to leave home.⁵

Most notably, though, Ann was unconventional. She liked jazz, refused to babysit, shared the wanderlust of her parents, and regarded education as the key to her future. Her friends at Mercer High School in a mostly affluent suburb of Seattle regarded themselves as being on the cultural cutting edge. The fact that she married a Black man, who was the first African exchange student at the University of Hawaii, at a time when miscegenation was still a crime in many states, was the strongest indication of her willingness to defy convention. Even in Hawaii’s polyglot culture a Black and white couple was an oddity.⁶

An only child, Ann had already lived a nomadic life. After he married her mother, Madelyn, in 1940, and then served in the army, her father, Stanley, had moved his family from Wichita, Kansas, to California, where he attended the University of California at Berkeley before dropping out and taking a job as a furniture salesman in Ponca, Oklahoma. Always in pursuit of better opportunities, he went from job to job, first to Vernon, Texas, then to El Dorado, Kansas, then to Seattle, Washington, and, finally, to Honolulu, where he retired. He died in 1992. Madelyn was the real breadwinner of the family. Even though she never went to college, she held a number of responsible administrative positions and eventually retired as a vice president of the Bank of Hawaii. She died on November 4, 2008, on the eve of the election of her grandson as the nation’s forty-fourth president.⁷

Despite being one of the nation’s most conservative states, Kansas had always had a progressive streak going back to the Farmers’ Alliances and Greenback Movement of the last third of the nineteenth century. In their beliefs and outlook, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham reflected this progressive stream in Kansas politics. Although they were not especially political, they came from a background that scorned the more traditional and conservative values of the state. Stanley’s ancestry included antislave settlers and his great-grandfather was a veteran of the Union army. Following the suicide death of his mother, he was raised by his grandparents. Former teachers who were secular and worldly, they surrounded Stanley with great literature and took him and his older brother Ralph to Civil War battlefields and places like Yellowstone National Park. Although Stanley struggled through high school, he appreciated and valued good books and placed a premium on education.⁸

Born in the small farming community of Peru, Kansas, near the Oklahoma border, Madelyn came from a more traditional background than Stanley. Yet even her parents were not typical of most farm families in Kansas. A Roosevelt Democrat in the 1930s, her mother passed that leaning on to her children. Although she and her husband went to church on occasion, they were only nominally religious and placed no religious strictures on Madelyn and her two siblings.⁹

Madelyn yearned, nevertheless, for the amenities of modern life. Her wish was partly met when her father took a job in the oil industry in Augusta, a town just southwest of El Dorado, which claimed to have the best neon-lit movie theater west of the Mississippi River. Madelyn, however, wanted more and often traveled with friends to Wichita, about thirty miles due west of Augusta, where she loved to jitterbug at one of the city’s many dance halls. Although she was in the top tier of her class in high school and yearned to go to college, her parents could not afford the expense. At the time she graduated, she seemed destined for some menial employment in rural Kansas.¹⁰

When Madelyn had the opportunity to escape her surroundings by marrying Stanley, she grabbed it. She had met him while he was working on a construction crew in Augusta. Tall and handsome with wavy brown hair, he swept her off her feet with tales of ventures to California and claims that he had written plays and scripts for Hollywood. Four weeks after meeting Stanley, she married him over the objections of her parents and friends.¹¹

Their marriage of nearly fifty-two years was often rocky and strained, in part because they always lived in financial straits and in part because they had conflicting personalities. Stanley never seemed satisfied with his life. He was opinionated, stubborn, argumentative, and prone to fits of anger. Sometimes he exploded when Ann’s teasing became too much for him. In contrast, Madelyn was proud of her success as a bank vice president, less complaining of the money she earned, and wiser, more focused, and responsible. Even though she began to drink heavily, she was the one who put food on the table, paid the bills, and disciplined Ann.¹²

If Stanley was disappointed with his life, however, he hid it under a veneer of mirthfulness and good humor. A doting father, he enjoyed being with Ann and her friends, amusing them with the tales he told, some woven from whole cloth. Although his stories and pretensions with her friends sometimes embarrassed Ann, she inherited his imagination, curiosity, opinionated views, sense of longing, and even verbosity. In contrast, Ann looked to Madelyn as her rock of stability in her otherwise chaotic life, moving as she did from town to town and denied by another of her father’s searches for Eldorado from the fulfillment of her dream to attend the University of Washington.¹³

At first, Madelyn and Stanley had difficulty adjusting to the fact that their daughter had married a Black man from Kenya and had given birth to a biracial son, especially at such a young age. For the most part, however, they were racially tolerant, especially for their times. While living in Vernon, for example, they came face-to-face with Texas’s system of segregation. Once, after Stanley gave his attention to a Black couple during regular store hours, he was instructed to do business with “coloreds” only at the end of a day after white customers had left the store. Another time, after Ann played with an African American child, Madelyn was told by a school principal and group of white mothers that her daughter should not play with Black children. Both Stanley and Madelyn were repelled by this treatment of Blacks as second-class citizens. Stanley even claimed he left the state because he and his wife could not put up with its racial intolerance.¹⁴

Ann had married Barack Obama Sr. in part to explore the world and get away from her strong-willed parents. But she had also been attracted to his racial and cultural background, his deep intellectualism, and his charismatic personality. He charmed people with his self-confidence, friendliness, and obvious intelligence. Ann also found him good looking, similar in appearance to the Black singer Nat King Cole.¹⁵

By all accounts Obama Sr. was a remarkable student who was determined to complete his education in the United States and then to serve in an influential position in Kenya in economic development or international trade. Unfortunately, he was also unreliable. He enjoyed partying, drinking, and frolicking. He was also a serial liar. He skipped from job to job, mostly because he had been fired from the previous one. Privately, he could be arrogant, domineering, and mentally abusive. At the time he married Ann, he was already married and had a child living in Kenya. Obama was a member of the Luo tribe in Kenya, which allowed polygamy. But he lied when he told Ann that he had divorced his Kenyan wife.¹⁶

After two years at the University of Hawaii, Barack Sr. was accepted with a scholarship into the PhD program in economics at Harvard University. He did not, however, have enough money to take Ann and their son to Cambridge. Although he promised Ann, who had already left the islands to enroll at the University of Washington in Seattle, that he would send for her and Barack Jr. as soon as he could save enough money, he never did. He would not see them for the next nine years.¹⁷

Unable to make it on her own financially, Ann returned to Honolulu to be with her parents, who helped raise Barack while she completed her degree in anthropology at the University of Hawaii. In 1964 she divorced Obama. While still married and working on her degree, she had met Lolo Soertoro from the Indonesia island of Java who, as a civilian employee working for the Indonesian army, had been sent by the army to obtain a master’s degree at Hawaii’s newly established East-West Center. Unlike Obama Sr., Soertoro was a responsible person who was also easygoing, kind, patient, and amusing. In March 1965 he and Ann married. Three months later, he received his master’s in geography. For the next year he remained in Hawaii, but following an attempted coup in Indonesia in the fall of 1965, he was ordered home by the army along with all other students studying abroad on government grants. A year later, in 1967, Ann and Barack joined him in Jakarta after she completed her degree.¹⁸

Ann embraced the mixed and varied cultures of Indonesia and the tapestry of villages that made up Jakarta. She often dressed in the colorful skirts of Indonesia. Because Lolo had been conscripted into the military and was earning a low salary, Ann, Lolo, and Barack, whom she came to calling “Barry” (the more common American name), lived at first in one of Jakarta’s more undesirable neighborhoods with unpaved streets, open sewers, and spotty electricity. But after Lolo completed his service, he took a job in the Jakarta office of the Union Oil Company. By the 1970s he was earning enough that they were able to rent a three-bedroom house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. The owners of the house lived in a large home on the same grounds with a full staff of servants, who cleaned, cooked, and shopped for the Soertoros and even cared for Barry.¹⁹

Freed of most domestic duties, the career-minded Ann was soon able to find employment. After a couple of years in a job she did not like supervising a group of Indonesians teaching English, she took a more responsible and innovative position working for a private nonprofit management training school started by a Dutch priest. On August 15, 1970, shortly after Barry’s ninth birthday, she gave birth to Maya Kassandra Soertoro.²⁰

Even before then, Ann’s marriage to Lolo had begun to fall apart. Much of the problem was work-related. Although an important part of Lolo’s job was to socialize with oil company executives and their wives, Ann begged off going to these functions, where she was expected to converse with people whom she found boring and inane. “They are not my people,” she told an increasingly angry Lolo, who also resented the fact she refused to conform to his cultural expectations. He started drinking heavily and barely spoke to Ann. Though she remained married to Lolo until 1980 when she divorced him, she was lonely in the marriage and spent most of her time working and living apart from him.²¹

In addition to her increasing concern over her estranged relationship with Lolo, Ann grew worried about Barry’s education. Indonesian schools were notorious for providing their students with a poor education. The government controlled the curriculum and the teachers were inadequately trained. To give Barry a better and more varied education, Ann sent him first to a Catholic school and then to a government-funded Muslim one. After work, she went over his homework, and in the morning, she woke him early to tutor him. She always encouraged him to read books.²²

By the time Barry reached the age of ten and was about to enter the fifth grade, Ann felt she had to send him back to Hawaii to get a proper education. Although Barry did not stand out as a student, she thought he was gifted and had unlimited potential. In 1971, she put him on an airplane to live with his grandparents and to attend the Punahou School in Honolulu, a prestigious private preparatory school where many of Hawaii’s elite sent their children. The school was also within walking distance of the Dunhams’ apartment. Ann promised Barry that she and Maya would be joining him soon in Hawaii. Although she came back the next year, she left three years later to return to Indonesia.²³

Even before passing her qualifying exams for a PhD in anthropology from the University of Hawaii, Ann found employment with the Agency for International Development (AID). As part of her job, she conducted research on rural credit for women in cottage industries in the villages surrounding Yogyakarta, a city about 320 miles southeast of Jakarta. She later used her research as the basis of her dissertation. In the field, she spoke the local dialects, ate the native food, and followed local customs while making many friends. The work she did—serving as an adviser to small-scale craft industries, all the while building trust by being sensitive to the way local businesses were conducted—was similar to the work her son would do later in Chicago as a community organizer.²⁴

Barry, meanwhile, continued to live with his grandparents while completing his high school education at the Punahou School. By the time he graduated in June 1978, he had gone through a set of experiences unusual even for someone twice his age. He had been uprooted by his mother. He had moved from Hawaii to Indonesia where he had lived in two economically different neighborhoods and had gone to two culturally and religiously different schools. He was biracial as was his half sister Maya. Although his father visited in 1971 to spend Christmas with him (a visit that did not go well) and occasionally wrote him letters, he had mostly abandoned his son. His mother loved him dearly and often visited him during the holidays and his summer vacations, but she was absent most of the time.²⁵

Early photographs of Barry living in Hawaii reveal a happy child with a big smile, posing with his grandfather, walking barefoot along Waikiki Beach, playing in the sand, and riding a tricycle with red, white, and blue streamers dangling from the handlebars. His life in Indonesia, however, was different. Although he still maintained his happy disposition, he was chubby with big ears that stood out. More important, he was light-brown-skinned with brown eyes, and black curly hair common to children of African descent. As a result, he was constantly teased and picked on by Indonesian children, who, like their parents, scorned Blacks. Once a classmate asked him if his “father ate people,” and he constantly had to endure racial epithets. Although he did not give much thought to his own identity until he returned to Hawaii and entered his teenage years at Punahou School, he was sensitized to his race at an early age. While he was an eager and intelligent student, who in the second grade was put in the first of four sections and who tried to fit in, he always sat in the back row and felt like a misfit who did not belong.²⁶

Living most of his first ten years in Indonesia, Barry was bound to be influenced by its culture, which placed a great premium on self-control and self-sufficiency. He also learned as a young boy growing up in a foreign land to be culturally aware and adaptable. At the same time, he found that life was complicated and disparate and could be unpredictable and cruel.²⁷

His iconoclastic mother was the one, however, who had the greatest influence in shaping his values and understanding of the world. Commitment, determination, empathy, resiliency, a strong work ethic, the value of education, and a love of books were some of these values he learned from his mother. She also taught him to be respectful, polite, and courteous but not to be intimidated by the racial epithets he constantly had to endure. At home, she even tutored him about his racial heritage, playing recordings ranging from Mahalia Jackson to Sam Cooke and reading books to him on Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent Black figures. Believing that Barry should have a sense of obligation, she also worked to instill in him ideas of public service. “If you want to grow into a human being,” Obama recalls her telling him, “you’re going to need some values.”²⁸

Over the next seven years, Barry’s grandparents reinforced the belief system that their grandson had begun to develop while living in Indonesia. Once they accepted the facts of an interracial marriage and a biracial grandson, they accepted Barack Sr. into the family—or at least as much as they could for a son-in-law whom they regarded as being untrustworthy.²⁹

As for Barry, they gave him their unconditional love. Having grown up and gone to school in Indonesia and having only seen his grandparents on holidays and during the summer, he felt at first as if he were living with strangers. But that quickly changed as they showed their love for him in different ways. Stanley, whom Barry called “Gramps,” was constantly at his side. Later he introduced Barry to his many friends. Madelyn, who was called “Toot” or “Tutu,” the Hawaiian term for “Grandparent,” played the same responsible role as parent as she had with Ann. Believing that Barry was intellectually gifted, she paid for his expensive education at the Punahou School.³⁰

As Barry spent the next seven years living with Gramps and Toot, he sensed the tension in his grandparents’ marriage. He also felt his grandfather’s disappointment with his career. One reason Gramps had moved to Hawaii was his conviction that the newly established state’s beaches and weather would attract a migration from the west coast and open up new opportunities for him to sell furniture. When that did not happen, he decided to sell insurance, but with no better luck. “As he was unable to convince himself that people needed what he was selling and was sensitive to rejection,” Obama later wrote, “the work went badly. Every Sunday night, I would watch him grow more and more irritable [as he tried] to schedule appointments with prospective clients over the phone.” When he was able to arrange an appointment or sell a policy, his mood changed. He would come into Barry’s room smiling and tell him stories from his youth or read a joke from Reader’s Digest. Sometimes, he even showed Barry a book of poems he had started to write, or a sketch of a painting he planned to paint, or the plans of a house he intended to build.

Barry sensed the anguish his grandfather continued to feel. Although he feigned delight at Gramps’s plans and encouraged him to complete them, he understood that Stanley’s romanticizing about the future was his expression of regret about the present. Just as he had learned from his mother to dream about the future, he learned from his grandfather’s experience to approach tomorrow not as a blind-eyed romantic but as a realist and pragmatist.³¹

Barry adjusted quickly to life with his grandparents in their small, cramped, but well-kept apartment near both Waikiki Beach and Punahou School. Years later, as he matured into adulthood, Obama developed a number of unattractive characteristics, including peevishness, prickliness, and even ruthlessness. But these were not apparent while he grew up in Hawaii. Despite the melancholy of his grandfather, his grandmother’s growing drinking problem, the ongoing bickering between Gramps and Toot, and the absence of his mother, he had learned even as a young child to adjust to changing circumstances. He also had been taught by his mother and his experience in Indonesia the virtue of self-control, a trait which only strengthened his naturally serene personality. He fit in easily, therefore, with the laid-back culture of his school with its imposing lava rock buildings, tree-covered hills, and verdant lawns.

As a teenager at Punahou, Barry seemed little different from most of the rest of his classmates. In fact, what stands out about Barry’s teenage years was how little he stood out. He was a good but not outstanding student. Some of his teachers thought he did not live up to his academic potential. A few even commented that he was a deep thinker, but this was not the consensus.³²

Nor was Barry a class leader. Athletics rather than student government consumed his interest. As he later wrote, “for the world beyond my family—well what they would see for most of my teenage years was not a budding leader, but rather a lackadaisical student.” In his freshman year at Punahou, he played football, but his real passion was basketball. He tried out and made the basketball team at Punahou, which, in his senior year in 1979 won the state championship, but he was a benchwarmer rather than a starting player. He grew to be 6ʹ1ʺ tall, but he became thin as he grew taller, and he lacked both the height and the brawn of a standout player to whom Division I colleges normally gave athletic scholarships. He worked hard to be a good defensive player. But he lacked quick moves and was weak on both offense and defense.³³

Unlike his mother, who chose to associate with the more intellectually oriented and culturally nonconventional students at Mercer High, Barry selected as his friends at Punahou mostly his basketball teammates, who, like the rest of the student body, were almost all white. When not on the basketball court, they were often on the beach drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and pot, and engaging in teenage talk about sports, girls, and music. Barry even experimented with cocaine, but except for that, he seemed typical of most high school students.³⁴

As he was going through adolescence, however, Barry began to wrestle with the issue of his own racial identity. Gramps introduced him to one of his Black friends, who had long talks with him about racial matters. He also had intense discussions with a Black teammate, who emphasized the prevalent nature of racism in society, something that Barry doubted at first but on which he began to reflect. He was deeply affected by a story his grandfather told in which Tutu asked Stanley to drive her to work the next day because she had been annoyed by the presence of a panhandler while waiting for a bus to take her to work. What bothered Barry was the emphasis that Toot placed on the fact that the panhandler was Black. “Never had they given me reason to doubt their love,” Obama later wrote. “I doubted if they ever would. And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.”³⁵

Although loving his grandparents and later describing his childhood and adolescent years in Hawaii as idyllic—a place where he would vacation every year even as president—Barry missed the counsel his absent father might have given him on racial matters. He rebelled against his mother, who fearing that her son might wind up like her father, scolded him for not living up to his academic potential and being irresponsible even in applying to college. He went through the inner turmoil and confusion that teenagers often experience as they mature into adulthood, except that his issues were compounded by the fact that he was biracial. While often ignoring or skimming class assignments, he immersed himself in Black literature, reading such authors as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, W. E. B. DuBois, and Malcolm X. He grew a thick Afro, and in his senior year, he criticized his basketball friends for playing a “white” style game. He also became annoyed by the obvious discomfort of two of his white friends while attending a mostly Black party.³⁶

In its curriculum, the Punahou School stressed multiculturalism, but by his senior year, Barry concluded that Hawaii was too insular and isolated to find the answers to the questions he was asking about his racial identity. What did being biracial mean? Was he more Black than white? Did it matter? Should it matter? Were all whites inherently racists? These were some of the questions with which he wrestled.³⁷

Although Hawaii was known for its multicultural population and racial tolerance, its African American population was small. At Punahou School, Blacks constituted only 5 percent of the student population. Much like his venturous mother, he wanted exposure not only to a larger African American population but to other ethnicities and to the variety of experiences offered mostly in cities much larger and more diverse than tourist-oriented Honolulu. He wanted to go to a big city on the mainland for his college education.³⁸

Occidental College (Oxy), in Los Angeles seemed ideal. Widely rated as one of the best small colleges in the country with a highly respected faculty and rigorous academic programs, it attracted students from throughout the nation and abroad. Since it was located on the west coast, Barry was closer to home than he would have been had he chosen to study at a more inland or east coast institution. Although the campus was located in a predominantly white suburb, it was not far from the downtown area in a city made famous by its film industry but also known for its economic and cultural diversity. But according to Obama the decisive reason why he chose Occidental over other colleges that accepted him was to be near a girl he had met while she was vacationing in Hawaii. She had first told him about Occidental.³⁹

Collegiate Years

At Oxy Barry began to change from the lax, indifferent student he was at Punahou, whose interest were more on the basketball court than in the classroom. He still could be found in a pickup game on Occidental’s basketball courts or, at night, at the student union. Photographs continued to show him with the broad smile that would become famous. But they also displayed a cocky young man wearing a straw hat with a colorful band of stripes around the rim, a bomber jacket, white shirt, and tight-fitting black jeans, dragging on a cigarette and blowing out puffs of smoke. Although the bomber jacket and black jeans would stay staples of his wardrobe through Harvard Law School, he pulled away from the foolishness of high school, cut back his big Afro, and started to reinvent himself. His first year at Occidental, he later wrote, had been “one living lie, hampered by self-consciousness and insecurity.” He sought to change that.⁴⁰

While Barry could still hardly be accused of working too hard, he read more extensively and broadly than he had at Punahou. It was embarrassing for him, he later wrote, “to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to know.” Yet he also studied and thought about politics and world events. He became interested in social movements and was inspired by the “young leaders of the civil rights movement—not just Dr. King but John Lewis and Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash.” Nighttime discussions with his friends became heated. Often focused on the United States’ role in the world, they revealed also Obama’s increasing ability to comprehend the complex patterns and nuances of global politics.⁴¹

The courses Barack preferred were those in political science, history, and literature. Influenced in particular by one of his professors, Roger Boesche, who held a distinguished chair in the political science department, he read many of the classics on political theory and philosophy. A testimony to the impact Boesche had on him was the fact that after he became president, he invited the professor and his wife to the White House, where Obama announced that Boesche had “taught me all I know about politics.” Then he added, “But he gave me a ‘B’ on a paper!”⁴²

Obama also took in more of the life around him. He fully embraced the multiculturalism that had been such an integral part of his life. He decided to be called by his given name, “Barack” instead of “Barry.” He chose as his friends politically active Black students and Chicanos, but he found foreign students to be the most interesting. He lived in his first year with a student from Pakistan, and his closest friends and subsequent roommates came from South Asia. He also displayed his developing talent as a writer by publishing two poems in the campus literary magazine, and, in what may have been his first political speech, he spoke out at a demonstration against the college’s practice of investing in South Africa’s apartheid regime.⁴³

Yet Barack never became radicalized even on matters of race. He was Black. Of that he was certain. He grew annoyed by how fast and thoroughly minority students on campus assimilated into Occidental’s predominantly white culture. But he continued to struggle with the question of what being Black meant. Despite reading such radical writers as Malcolm X, who impressed him more than other writers for the poetry of his words and his belief in Black pride and assertiveness, he thought Malcolm X went overboard in his view about white deviltry. He was taken aback especially by Malcolm X’s statement that he wished he could expunge the white blood that ran through his veins, a position biracial Barack could never accept.⁴⁴

Obama’s transient and multicultural upbringing pointed him in the opposite direction. He had difficulty understanding how people learned to hate, and he longed for order and community. He saw no inconsistency between taking pride in his race and wanting to live in a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural world. His identity might start with the reality of his race “but it didn’t, couldn’t end there,” he believed.⁴⁵

By the time Barack decided to leave Occidental College in 1981 to attend Columbia University, he had become involved in the anti-apartheid movement and other causes dealing with Latino and African American students. In doing so, he burnished the personal skills that later powered him into politics. He left Occidental because most of his friends were either leaving or transferring to other colleges and universities. Like them, he found Occidental to be too small, too white, too apathetic, too limited in its curriculum, and too inaccessible to the city without a car. As a learning experience, he felt he had gotten all he could out of the college. “What I needed,” he wrote in Dreams from My Father, “was a community.” He was attracted to Columbia, which had a transfer program with Occidental, because of its size and the diversity of its student body, faculty, and curriculum. At Columbia he would have the opportunity to choose courses taught by some of the nation’s most respected academic minds at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. He also wanted to live in and explore one of the world’s major cultural centers and the nation’s most populous and diverse city.⁴⁶

Yet Obama never availed himself of the opportunities that Columbia and New York offered him. Although he roomed his first year with a friend from Occidental near the campus on the city’s Upper West Side, he failed to participate in Columbia’s campus life or take full advantage of the city’s cultural scene. A jazz fan since high school, he went to nearby night spots featuring jazz. He attended what he referred to as “socialist conferences” at Cooper Union college in the city’s East Village and to African cultural fairs in Brooklyn and Harlem. He also wandered the city aimlessly as he continued to cope with issues related to his racial identity and as he thought increasingly about his future. He even kept a detailed journal, in which he recorded his observations, including the economic disparity that he witnessed. But he had little money to spend in an expensive city, and he became more withdrawn and bookish than he had been at Occidental. In Dreams from My Father, Obama barely mentioned Columbia, and only a few of his classmates could later remember anything about him.⁴⁷

During the summer between his junior and senior years, Barack visited his mother and half sister, who were living in an exclusive area of Jakarta reserved for officers of the Ford Foundation with whom Ann had landed a position as a program officer. Her expertise in small-scale economies helped her win the job. In Jakarta, he was able to reconnect with his mother, who had been writing him almost every day and proudly boasted to friends about his brilliance, and Maya, who was attending a highly regarded international school.⁴⁸

After a pleasant but uneventful visit with his mother and half sister, Obama flew to Pakistan where he stayed with two of his friends from Occidental, Wahid Hamid and Hasan Chandoo, both from the upper economic strata of Karachi. At Oxy, Barack had bantered with them about their indolent lifestyle even as they spoke out against the wrongness of wealth inequality. During his three weeks in Pakistan, Barack witnessed both abject poverty and enormous wealth as he saw the hovels of Karachi and visited the mansions and estates of Chandoo’s and Hamid’s relatives and friends. Even more than his experience as a child in Indonesia, he was deeply disturbed by what he saw. The harmful effects of the income inequality he witnessed in Karachi remained permanently burned into his mind. He committed himself to what he called “a regimen of self-improvement” that he “never entirely shed.”⁴⁹

Back in New York, Barack moved to the Upper East Side, over two miles from Columbia where he roomed with Sohale Sidiqqi, a Pakistani whom he had met at Occidental. Once settled in his apartment, Barack sought to take more control of his future. He envied his high school and Pakistani friends, whose futures seemed secure in the sense that they were either headed into the business world or, as he put it, “toward the mainstream.” “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me,” he later reflected. “The only way to assuage my feeling of isolation are [sic] to absorb all the traditions [and all the] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”⁵⁰

News that his father had been killed in a car accident in Kenya after several earlier crashes involving his consumption of alcohol only underscored his sense of loneliness and his need to take control of his life. He read and reread Ellison’s Invisible Man, which, as one of his Pakistani crowd remembered, “became a prism for his self-reflection.” He also began to run more, stopped using marijuana (but not smoking because he feared he would gain weight if he did) and ate more healthy foods. Sidiqqi even called him “a bore.”⁵¹

A political science major, Obama was interested primarily in international relations. He even wrote articles for Sundial, the college’s weekly news magazine, including one, “Breaking the War Mentality,” in which he said that students across the United States were trying to “enhance the possibility of a decent world.”⁵²

Although receiving mostly As in his major and an overall 3.7 average, Obama did not stand out as a student. Unlike most of his graduating class in 1983, he had no plans to go to graduate or professional school or to begin a career with some high-powered firm. Instead, he took employment as a research assistant for a firm, Business International Corporation (BI), that collected and analyzed business statistics. The quality of the reports he prepared so impressed management that it promoted him to the position of financial writer with his own tiny office and a substantial salary increase.⁵³

Gap Years

While working at BI and now living on the Upper West Side, Obama had a lengthy affair with a white woman, Genevieve Cook, an Australian who, like Obama, had grown up in Indonesia. Earlier he had had an affair with another white woman, Alexandra McNear, an undergraduate friend from Occidental, who was living in New York over the summer. In both cases the women expressed their deep love for Barack, even keeping journals of their relationship with him. Barack expressed similar feelings, often in long letters to them. Whether with them or in his letters he engaged in a type of wide-ranging but dispassionate discourse about the arts, literature, racial identity, and purpose of life that made the women realize they could not get past his aloof personality during the most existentialist stretch of his life. Eventually the women and he drifted apart.⁵⁴

Adding to Barack’s problems in his relationship with Genevieve was the fact that he became bored by the routine of his job with BI. He found no satisfaction in helping wealthy clients become more wealthy. He had an aversion to accumulations of wealth in the control of the few at the expense of the many. He referred to his job as “working for the enemy.”⁵⁵

Although Obama was not even able to describe to other students what the job entailed, he had decided to become a community organizer while he was still a student at Columbia. Comparing himself to “a salmon swimming blindly upstream,” he concluded that the conservative administration of Ronald Reagan was guilty of “dirty deeds,” that Congress was “compliant and corrupt,” and that top-to-bottom change in Washington was needed. Change would only come from “a mobilized grass roots.” ⁵⁶

As a graduating senior, Barack had applied for a position with civil rights and social service organizations throughout the country, but without any luck. He took the job with BI because he needed an income and wanted to build up his savings, knowing all the time that his future lay in grassroots organizing and aware of how little organizers were paid. But he did not decide to resign until after he received a call from his half sister in Kenya, Auma Obama, about the death of their half brother, David, in a motorcycle accident. Following the call, he left his office for the day and wandered the streets of Manhattan. Auma’s call, he later said, changed his life. It reignited his search for redemption by becoming a community organizer. A few months after the call, he resigned from BI and began looking in earnest for an organizing job.⁵⁷

The search was not easy. Barack was offered a position in New York, which involved organizing and facilitating conferences on drugs, unemployment, and housing. But he felt the job was not grassroots enough. He needed to be “closer to the streets.” He also took a few temporary jobs. While waiting for the “right” job to come his way, he depleted his savings. He was, he recounted, down to “eating soup from a can,” when he received a call from an organizer in Chicago, Jerry Kellman, who had placed an ad to fill the position of a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago. Was Barack still interested in the position? he asked. After Obama expressed an interest, they agreed to meet each other the following week in New York.⁵⁸

Kellman had reservations about hiring Barack. He was impressed by his intelligence, and he wanted someone for the position who was Black. But he was concerned that Obama might be too young, too elitist (being a graduate of Columbia), and too inexperienced for the position. Never having lived in the city, he knew nothing about Chicago and its ward-based politics. Weighing these factors, Kellman decided, nevertheless, to take a chance with him. He offered him the position at $10,000 a year (a major decrease from what he had been earning at BI) plus a $2,000 travel allowance to be used to purchase an automobile.

Obama had his own reservations about Kellman, whom he found to be brash. Obama also drove a hard bargain. “He questioned me on whether we could teach him anything,” Kellman remembers. “He wanted to know things like ‘How are you going to train me?’ And ‘What am I going to learn?’ ” But after some thought, he decided to accept Kellman’s offer.⁵⁹

He had been to Chicago when he was ten years old. He remembered it as being cold and gray. This time he was struck by how pretty it was. More important, he was attracted to the nation’s second largest city by the fact that it had recently elected its first African American mayor, Harold Washington, who defeated the incumbent Jane Byrne. A progressive, Washington had served in both houses of the state legislature and in the US House of Representatives, where his most notable achievement was helping win an extension of the Voting Rights Act. By promising to address the problems of Chicago’s inner city, Washington had racked up insurmountable majorities among Blacks in Chicago’s South and West Sides. Obama was so excited at Washington’s victory that, shortly after his election, he applied (unsuccessfully) for a position with the administration.⁶⁰

He took quickly to his new job in the nation’s largest concentration of African Americans. His main responsibility was growing the newly formed Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-funded effort to help residents of the Altgeld Gardens housing project on Chicago’s South Side get needed improvements from the city. He also worked to establish a college tutoring and preparatory program, a jobs-training program for laid-off steelworkers, and even a tenants’ rights organization. His efforts at Altgeld Gardens were his first immersion into a Black community. “It was the best education I ever had,” he later recounted. “I fell in love with the city.”⁶¹

Obama chose not to live close to the people with whom he worked. Instead, he took a small, dumpy apartment in Chicago’s more upscale Hyde Park area, near the University of Chicago. Outside of work, he continued to lead an austere life, never inviting anyone to his apartment, looking and acting more like a graduate student than a community organizer, and mostly spending his free time reading biographies and books on subjects like theology. His chosen lifestyle underscored one of the great paradoxes of his entire career. He became a politician and ultimately reached the highest office in the land. He did so partly by his charm and great mass appeal. But he disliked politics and much preferred contemplation and quiet to back-slapping.⁶²

Also known as “Alligator Gardens” to the police who had to deal with its drug trade, Altgeld Gardens was located in the remotest regions of the South Side. Housing some of Chicago’s poorest residents, it was built in the 1940s for Blacks with wartime jobs in the nearby steel mills. Forty blocks from the nearest train station and miles from the Sears Tower in downtown Chicago, it looked like a military camp with row after row of two-story mud-brown brick apartments.⁶³

Not only did Altgeld’s residents lack adequate public transportation, half of them did not own automobiles. This made it extremely difficult for them to find jobs even if jobs were available. But most of the steel mills had closed, and the rest were cutting back their operations. Soot remaining from the mills continued to penetrate buildings and people alike. Many residents were single young mothers on public assistance. Job skills were limited. Drugs were big business. The project recycled poverty and dependence.⁶⁴

Obama’s responsibility was to break this vicious chain. Kellman was a disciple of the highly controversial sociologist, Saul Alinsky. Widely regarded as the founder of community organizing, Alinsky was criticized by his conservative opponents as a radical provocateur for his outspoken public support of leftist organizations and movements and for his views calling for so-called have-nots to gain political power by organizing against entrenched power. Like Alinsky, Kellman believed that power at the top could be toppled by organization at the bottom.⁶⁵

Successful organization, however, required professional organizers to mobilize the community around immediate, and winnable, issues. Its ultimate object was to bring about social reform and a democratic revival. Since churches attracted the loyalty of their adherents, one of Alinsky’s strategies was to gain the support for his agenda of a community’s religious leaders. Given the fact that much of the life of African Americans centered around their churches, Kellman expected his new hire to establish close relationships with the clergy of the Altgeld community.⁶⁶

As Obama quickly discovered, developing a close working relationship with the community’s religious leaders proved difficult. Alinsky—and Kellman—assumed that they would be united in their grievances. After all, the organization that Kellman headed consisted of a group of Latino churches. What might have worked elsewhere, however, did not work in the poverty-stricken Black community to which he was assigned. Religious leaders in the Altgeld community defended their turf. They also questioned Obama’s name, youth, and lack of religious affiliation, and mistrusted the fact that the parent organization of DCP was Catholic and that his offices were in the rectory of a Catholic church.⁶⁷

Obama became frustrated at the negative reception he received from these pastors and ministers, who pointed proudly to their own social and educational programs and openly disputed the need for another layer of bureaucracy that might undo what they had already accomplished. Of the leaders he visited, only one, a Baptist minister, Reverend Alvin Love, who was new to the community and young like Obama, agreed to work with him.⁶⁸

Of the Altgeld residents he met, a few were openly hostile to someone they regarded as an outsider. Most were either uninterested, afraid, or had no time to become part of any movement. But three middle-aged women, Yvonne Lloyd, Loretta Augustine, Margaret Bagby, all of whom resided just outside the Altgeld projects but were members of the DCP board, were impressed by the sincerity of the gangly young person they met. They were also surprised by his knowledge of the South Side and by his honesty in admitting that he knew nothing about community organizing. Despite his Ivy League education and outsider status, they agreed to join him in organizing residents of the Altgeld community.⁶⁹

Obama remained at DCP for three years. He learned from his failures and grew on the job. As a new organizer, he made a number of mistakes, including calling the religious leaders together in a failed effort to get them to agree upon a common agenda. The meeting annoyed, rather than united, the church leaders. The only thing they agreed upon was that they did not need some young, inexperienced outsider representing an organization they did not like interfering in their daily lives. Obama left the poorly attended meeting feeling rejected and demoralized in a way that he had never experienced.⁷⁰

Realizing the need for a different approach, he turned to the Reverend Love and to Bagby, Lloyd, and Augustine, whom he found to be the most dependable of the three women, to knock on doors and persuade the community to come to DCP meetings. They also convinced the city to open a branch office of the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training (MET) and persuaded Obama’s idol, Mayor Washington, to attend the ribbon cutting ceremony. Being told by Love that he might better connect with the community by belonging to a church, he joined the large Trinity United Church of Christ after hearing its pastoral leader, the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, speak on faith’s power to inspire underdogs.⁷¹

In attempting to organize the Altgeld community, Obama adopted an Alinksy-style strategy of rallying the community around a single issue that would outrage the public and embarrass city hall. When he learned that there was asbestos in the Altgeld project, he launched a public relations campaign that brought to the community the city’s top public housing official, Zirl Smith. Like all meetings in which he was involved, he prepared meticulously for this meeting with scripted roles for the participants. Much to his regret, the large and increasingly impatient crowd of about seven hundred became unruly after Smith arrived seventy-five minutes late in his chauffeur-driven city car and then appeared to give the gathering the brush-off by his snide comments. The meeting left him once again deeply dispirited and despondent. But it served the purpose of making Smith appear indifferent to community needs and forced the city to begin the process of removing asbestos from all Altgeld’s buildings.⁷²

By his third year in Chicago, Obama could point to a record of accomplishment sufficient to have his salary doubled to $20,000 a year. He was also attracting the attention of powerful figures within Chicago’s political circles. He had even persuaded a group of younger pastors to make their churches members of the DCP. But he was not happy. Although he had gotten the city to begin the process of removing asbestos from the Altgeld’s buildings, the project would not be completed until after he left Chicago to attend law school. Getting the city to make such basic repairs in the apartment as fixing toilets and furnaces also proved slow and tedious.⁷³

The Kellman-Alinsky organizational approach of confrontational politics and Alinksy’s radical agenda and language, moreover, did not comport with his own style of mediation and conciliation in search of a common ground. More important, he concluded that while grassroots organization might achieve limited objectives, it could not bring about the type of systemic change that Kellman and Alinsky believed it made possible. What was needed was the building of a community culture and a long-term vision.⁷⁴

Instead of a career as a community organizer, Obama reflected on the possibility of a career in law and politics. To effect fundamental change, even on the most local level, he felt he had first to obtain a law degree at a top law school, which would provide him with more skills and give him entry into the corridors of power. As an additional benefit, becoming a lawyer would put him on the road to the economic security his father never had.⁷⁵

When Obama decided to become a politician is not entirely clear. In December 2016, he stated in an interview that the decision to become a politician was not the result of one transformative event, but began when he became more socially conscious as a student at Occidental. It was also mixed with his search for his racial identity. If there was no transformative event that bent him toward a political career, however, Harold Washington’s successful career as a politician deeply affected him. Although Washington’s mixed record of accomplishments in his more than four years as mayor disappointed him as it did others who backed the mayor, his success in motivating Chicago’s Black community and even some of its liberal, socially conscious white community on Chicago’s upscale North Side inspired him. So did Washington’s promise to uplift the lives of the city’s poor through the political power he wielded. Obama may even have considered becoming the city’s mayor someday.⁷⁶

Having decided to pursue a law degree, he applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School. Even as he prepared to leave Chicago for Harvard, he made clear he intended to return to the city with the skills he still lacked to effect change. Previously he had felt lost and alone. Now he had a home and a purpose. “I would learn about interest rates, corporate mergers, the legislative process,” he later reflected, “knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago, but that I could now bring back [to the city] like Promethean fire.” Meanwhile, he would bring to Harvard a restless and probing mind along with a deep internal equanimity that would act as ballast against the type of radical thinking of Malcolm X, Saul Alinsky, and Jerry Kellman.⁷⁷

Before entering Harvard, Obama toured Europe and visited Kenya, the home of his father. He wanted to see and explore the ancestral roots of Obama Sr., and his own. He also wanted to visit with his grandmother, half siblings, and numerous aunts and cousins he had never seen. By visiting Kenya and returning to the place where his father grew up, he hoped to better understand his own identity as well as his father’s. By learning more about his father’s motivation in coming to the United States, he hoped also to learn more about what motivated his own actions. In these ways, his trip to Kenya would be as much one of self-exploration as of exploration.⁷⁸

Touring Europe, Obama felt uncomfortable and ill at ease. Europe, he said, was beautiful, the churches and historic places he saw imposing. But after a week, he felt that as a Black person conscious of his racial identity and searching for his roots, his decision to come to Europe had been a mistake and that he was “living out someone else’s romance.” The “incompleteness of my own history,” he added, “stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.” His European stop was also “just one more means of delay, one more attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Old Man.”⁷⁹

In Kenya, Barack was embraced by family. The emptiness he felt in Europe was washed away by familial ties and the welcoming spirit he received wherever he visited. Members of his large, extended family opened their homes to him. Aunts, uncles, half brothers and half sisters, a step-grandmother Sarah (known as “Mama” Obama) and his cousins peppered him with questions about his life and experiences. They also wanted to know more about the US and Harvard. Most knew little about one of the world’s most prestigious universities other than that Barack’s brilliant father had gone there. They also understood the value of education in bettering one’s position in life. By going to Harvard, Barack would be honoring his father’s memory.⁸⁰

His visit to Kenya was redemptive. “How tempting,” he reflected, “to fly away with this moment intact. To have this feeling of ease wrapped up … and take it back with me to America to slip on whenever my spirits flagged.” At the same time, he resented the fact that in public facilities, like bars and restaurants, locals were treated in a condescending manner while wealthier tourists from Europe received first-class treatment. Once Auma, who was studying German at the University of Heidelberg and would later receive her PhD degree from the University of Bayreuth, walked out of a restaurant in a fit of anger after servers ignored her and Barack. Outside, he kept his poise and tried to make light of the incident. But like his half sister, he deplored the treatment that they had received in contrast to the first-class treatment extended to tourists from what he referred to as “imperial cultures.”⁸¹

From his visit to Kenya, Obama gained a number of insights about his father and himself that he would take back to the United States. Throughout his visit, for example, he tried to understand why his father had abandoned him and his mother in order to return to Kenya. He found his answer in the concept of “family”; in effect, his father had left his family in the United States to join his larger and needier family in Kenya. But he concluded that family for his father meant more than the immediate or extended family. As in concentric circles, it meant an ever-extending community of Kenyans. This reinforced his own view of the interconnectedness between family and social obligation and between community organization and his belief in community as a lever of political power.⁸²

Auma provided this insight when she explained why she returned from Germany to Kenya. In Germany, she found stability and security, a modicum of which she was still able to retain in Kenya because her training assured that she would always be able to find employment. Still, she faced familial strife over issues such as whether Obama Sr. had left an inheritance and, if so, who was entitled to it. Even more of a strain was the obligation she felt to support her relatives, even those who had a job, on a salary barely sufficient to meet her own needs. “I feel like they are all just grabbing at me and that I’m going to sink,” she told her half brother. Yet she stayed.⁸³

Auma’s account of her Kenyan life affected her half brother emotionally and led him to pose new questions about his own familial and social obligations. “Now I was family … now I had responsibilities,” he wrote in his memoir. “But what did that mean exactly?” “For the first time in my life,” he continued, “I found myself thinking deeply about money: my lack of it, the pursuit of it, the crude but undeniable peace it could buy.” But he also realized that a career in pursuit of wealth was not for him. He would, he said, experience a “perverse survivor’s guilt … if I ever did try to make money and had to pass the throngs of young Black men on the corner as I made my way to a downtown office.” The only way to prevent others from being left behind, he concluded, was to transfer power from an economic elite to “a group larger even than an extended family.”⁸⁴

Although Obama’s visit to Kenya was redemptive, it was also dispiriting. If he expected to experience an epiphany in visiting his father’s homeland, he was disappointed. What he found in Kenya “were the same maddening patterns” he experienced wherever he had lived or visited—wealth and poverty, social inequality, political and economic elites determined to hold on to power, an overriding loss of heart about the possibility of peaceful change.⁸⁵

As Obama looked at the shanty towns of Nairobi, observed the despair of Auma and the other relatives he visited, witnessed the tribal divisions that still existed in Kenya, and saw firsthand the lack of electricity or any infrastructure in the small villages that dotted the country, he developed doubts about what he could accomplish. “I’d come to Kenya thinking that I could somehow force my many worlds into a single harmonious whole,” he later wrote. “Instead the divisions seemed only to have become more multiplied.”⁸⁶

Toward the end of his stay in Kenya, he visited his father’s grave in the small village of Kogelo, about 435 miles from Nairobi near the coast of Lake Victoria. It was a highly emotional experience for him. When he saw the site, he realized that his father’s effort to escape from his roots in an isolated village in rural Kenya and become an influential figure in his homeland had failed. He wound up buried in the same remote area where he was born and raised. “To discover that he remained trapped on his own father’s island with its fissures of anger and doubt and defeat, the emotions still visible beneath the surface, hot and molten and alive,” horrified him. “For a long time,” he recounted, “I sat … and wept.”⁸⁷ He saw that his “life in America—the Black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment [he had] felt as a boy, the frustration and hope [he had] witnessed in Chicago—all of this was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away.”⁸⁸

Returning to the US to attend Harvard Law School, Obama came back more uncertain about his future and more conflicted about issues of race, class, culture, and identity than when he began his trip to Kenya two months earlier. But his roots were now firmly established in two continents with ties of family and home both in the United States and Kenya and with a mother and half sister living in Indonesia, another ocean away. ⁸⁹

Notwithstanding the doubts the future president may also have had about bringing meaningful change to a community like the Altgeld Gardens or to nations like Indonesia, Kenya, or the United States, he continued to lean toward pursuing a political career based on his conviction that change was possible. Key to success was an inspiring leader like Harold Washington and the rallying of voters on a community or grassroots level. Obama had developed these views under the forceful guidance of his mother and the protective guidance of his grandparents. They had been refined through a broad menu of reading and his experience as a student at Punahou, Occidental, and Columbia, and as a community organizer in Chicago’s South Side. Now he was about to take them with him to Harvard.