On a humid evening, I went with him as he did a favor for an old friend.
One of his former community-organizer co-workers had asked if he could lead a
training at a black parish in Roseland, on the Far South Side, an area that had
been crippled by the steel mill closings of the mid-1980s. For Barack, it was a
welcome one-night return to his old job and the part of Chicago where he’d
once worked. It occurred to me as we walked into the church, both of us still
dressed in our office clothes, that I’d never thought much about what a
community organizer actually did. We followed a stairwell down to a low-
ceilinged, fluorescent-lit basement area, where fifteen or so parishioners—mostly
women, as I remember—were sitting in folding chairs in what looked to be a
room that doubled as a day-care center, fanning themselves in the heat. I took a
seat in the back as Barack walked to the front of the room and said hello.
To them, he must have seemed young and lawyerly. I could see that they
were sizing him up, trying to figure out whether he was some sort of opinionated
outsider or in fact had something of value to offer. The atmosphere was plenty
familiar to me. I’d grown up attending my great-aunt Robbie’s weekly Operetta
Workshop in an African Methodist Episcopal church not unlike this one. The
women in the room were no different from the ladies who sang in Robbie’s
choir or who’d turned up with casseroles after Southside died. They were well-
intentioned, community-minded women, often single mothers or grandmothers,
the type who inevitably stepped in to help when no one else would volunteer.
Barack hung his suit jacket on the back of his chair and took off his
wristwatch, laying it on the table in front of him to keep an eye on the time.
After introducing himself, he facilitated a conversation that would last about an
hour, asking people to share their stories and describe their concerns about life in
the neighborhood. Barack, in turn, shared his own story, tying it to the principles
of community organizing. He was there to convince them that our stories
connected us to one another, and through those connections, it was possible to
harness discontent and convert it to something useful. Even they, he said—a tiny
group inside a small church, in what felt like a forgotten neighborhood—could
build real political power. It took effort, he cautioned. It required mapping
strategy and listening to your neighbors and building trust in communities where
trust was often lacking. It meant asking people you’d never met to give you a bit
of their time or a tiny piece of their paycheck. It involved being told no in a
dozen or a hundred different ways before hearing the “yes” that would make all
the difference. (This, it seemed, was a large part of what an organizer did.) But he
assured them they could have influence. They could make change. He’d seen the