Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

By the end of October, Mary Gonzales and Greg Galluzzo had a small UNO office in the heart of South Chicago’s commercial district. On Thanksgiving, in full alliance with Frank Lumpkin’s Save Our Jobs Committee (SOJC), UNO staged its first protest action as thirty former Wisconsin workers, and their families, descended upon the “Gold Coast” block where Jane Byrne lived in a forty-third-floor condominium apartment, chanting, “The mayor is a turkey.” Much of Mary’s work focused on organizing parents at an overcrowded elementary school to push for construction of a new building. By the outset of 1981, she and Greg had won financial support for UNO from Tom Joyce’s Claretian Social Development Fund and also from two small, progressive Chicago funders, the Wieboldt Foundation and the Woods Charitable Fund, the latter of which had just hired its first staffer, a young woman named Jean Rudd.

At CCRC’s first monthly meeting in early 1981, Roberta Lynch echoed something Dick Poethig had said two months earlier: “there is still not a widespread sense of crisis about the steel industry in our area.” What’s more, she admitted, “the vagueness of CCRC’s program makes it difficult for people to see what they might accomplish by getting involved.” Dick Poethig suggested that CCRC mount “a mortgage-protection campaign to prevent the unemployed in the region from losing their homes” and pursue “state legislation calling for advance notice of a plant closing” plus state funding “for retraining the unemployed.”

A CCRC training session in mid-February allowed Roberta to describe why she, like Leo, rejected Saul Alinsky’s confrontational approach to community organizing. She said they would not use a model where “you find a target, you look for ways to bring people quickly into confrontation with it” yet only “on a very narrow … basis … looking to win a very quick victory.” The CCRC, she said, should not be “deluding people” with any easy victory “to get this or that” because that “isn’t going to have meaning in terms of what the real problems are.” Instead, since the church is “a tremendously vital and important force,” reaching out to “clergy people in every congregation in the region” would allow CCRC to become “an organization that can go to U.S. Steel and say we represent 200 churches, 50,000 people in the Calumet region.” But so far congregations’ responses had been “very mixed,” since “one of the big problems we have is just … convincing people that a problem exists.” In a subsequent memo, Roberta again emphasized how CCRC needed “to identify an initial program,” for “a concrete focus is essential if we are to convince people to work with us.” Investing time made sense to parishioners only if they believed it was “building toward something that will have an actual impact,” and she confessed, “I have certain hesitations about whether we will really be capable of carrying out sustained activity.”

Early in 1981 the federal bankruptcy court awarded title to the Wisconsin Steel site to the federal EDA. The EDA imagined selling the plant, perhaps for use as a “mini-mill” that would employ less than half of Wisconsin’s onetime work force, but everyone realized that with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, the chances of federal action to prop up antiquated steel plants had vanished. Nonetheless, Frank Lumpkin announced that 150 former Wisconsin workers would travel to Washington, D.C., to lobby for federal action. Frank estimated that only 10 percent of the ex-employees had found new jobs, and he stressed that all benefits had now run out. When the workers visited the House gallery, six members of Congress rose to speak on their behalf, including Chicago’s Harold Washington.

In April, Roberta Lynch resigned to pursue a full-time job. CCRC continued to meet for the rest of 1981, but without even a part-time paid staffer, little meaningful outreach activity was taking place. In stark contrast, Mary and Greg’s UNO of Southeast Chicago was receiving funding commitments from multiple sources ranging from the United Way of Metro Chicago and the Chicago Community Trust to the Wieboldt Foundation and the Roman Catholic Church’s national Campaign for Human Development (CHD), a then relatively low-profile program with a social-action support mission very similar to Tom Joyce’s much smaller Claretian program. Mary also contacted Jean Rudd at the Woods Fund, and by the end of 1981 UNO had scheduled a large ceremony for May 8 to publicly launch the organization. Similarly, Frank Lumpkin and his Save Our Jobs Committee, with UNO acting as their fiscal agent, successfully approached small foundations such as the Crossroads Fund for modest support to ensure SOJC’s future. More significantly, thanks to progressive attorney and legendary former Chicago alderman Leon Despres, Frank secured the pro bono services of a savvy young attorney, Tom Geoghegan, so that from mid-1981 onward, SOJC would be an increasingly active participant in the legal arm-wrestling about liability for Wisconsin Steel’s demise.

Most important, by early 1982 Greg Galluzzo had added to UNO’s staff a thirty-one-year-old organizer who quickly found his way to Calumet City to introduce himself to Leo Mahon. Jerry Kellman had grown up in the New York City suburb of New Rochelle, drifted through two years of college, first in Madison, Wisconsin, and then Portland, Oregon, and by 1971 was undergoing Alinsky-style training by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) staff, the truest—and most aggressive—disciples of the late community organizing guru. That training led to organizing assignments in Chicago, suburban DuPage County, Philadelphia, and Lincoln, Nebraska, where he put together a citizens coalition made up primarily of one congregation’s parishioners. By 1979, Kellman was back in Chicago and in graduate school, first at Northwestern and then at the University of Chicago. Galluzzo knew immediately that he wanted to add Kellman’s faith-based organizing expertise to UNO’s expanding work on the Southeast Side.

In February 1982, Leo told Tom Joyce, Dick Poethig, and his other colleagues about Kellman, and they agreed to invite him to CCRC’s next meeting. The organization’s bank account balance totaled $473, but UNO and the Latino Institute had Kellman’s salary covered and within four weeks Jerry, Mary, and Greg sent Leo a detailed three-page memo titled “Our Suggestions for a Church-Based Organization in the Calumet Region.” “We agree with you that the Calumet Region needs organizing if it is to avoid becoming an economic wasteland,” they wrote, but there were two essential challenges: first, “how to organize enough strength to change the situation, rather than set people up for still another defeat,” and second, “how to sustain the organizing over an extended period of time by developing the parish as a community through the organizing process.”

The trio wanted to expand UNO’s Catholic-parish-based organizing from Chicago’s Hispanic neighborhoods southward into parishes in majority-white suburban towns like Calumet City, with Kellman doing that outreach. Once a core group of at least ten parishes was organized, the effort could expand to Protestant churches. Funding for the expansion could be sought from CHD and foundations like Woods and Wieboldt, so that by 1984–85 Kellman could add staff to do “leadership development within each parish and congregation.” Then those parishes could “come together for common programs which affect the entire region. The issues start small, but grow progressively larger as the organization grows stronger and as the leaders become increasingly sophisticated.” Leadership training would be ongoing, and “the professional staff is there to share what they know, not to make the leadership dependent on them.”

Leo took their proposal to his CCRC colleagues, telling them, “I feel that this is the kind of direction our organization must take.” He half-humorously told his own parishioners that “the talk around Calumet City … is that the parish of St. Victor’s is openly going ‘Communist.’ ” Frank Lumpkin, the actual Communist, was continuing his work for SOJC, and the Tribune’s Richard Longworth published a moving profile of Frank and his colleagues, in which Frank estimated that five hundred former Wisconsin workers had left town, fifteen hundred were still unemployed, and twelve hundred or so, including his friend Daniel “Muscles” Vitas, had found some type of new job, Vitas as a school crossing guard.

UNO’s May 8 founding convention was “a sight of such inspiration that few will forget it,” observed Father Tom Cima, UNO’s new board chairman and pastor of Our Lady Gate of Heaven Parish in Jeffery Manor—a primarily black middle-class neighborhood located between South Chicago and South Deering. UNO and SOJC collaborated in a downtown protest at which marchers chanted “We want jobs,” and progressive Catholic clergy throughout Chicagoland—as most residents called the metropolitan area—were overjoyed when on July 10 Joseph Bernardin, the liberal archbishop of Cincinnati, was named archbishop of Chicago, succeeding the widely reviled John Patrick Cody, who had died on April 25.

Of seemingly lesser consequence, in the summer of 1982 Mary and Greg’s corps of southeastern Chicago organizers received a new recruit. The twenty-two-year-old Bob Moriarty had grown up in an Irish working-class Chicago suburb, and during his junior year at Northwestern University in Evanston, the town just north of Chicago, he had taken a community organizing seminar taught by a professor named John McKnight. A fifty-year-old Ohio native and navy veteran, McKnight had worked for the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, directed the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and headed up the Midwest office of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In the latter role, McKnight had been in the room when Martin Luther King Jr. negotiated a much-criticized end to his 1966 civil rights protests that had roiled Chicago, and from that post, McKnight had moved to Northwestern.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, McKnight wrote a series of influential articles on how service economies reduce citizens to consumers and clients. Writing first in the Christian Century in 1975, McKnight explained that each time a social problem, or need, is identified, “citizens have an increased sense of deficiency and dependence.” Two years later, McKnight expanded on that analysis and argued that service economies “are peopled with service producers and service consumers—professionals and clients.” The former controlled the relationship, and “the client is less a person in need than a person who is needed” in order to justify the salary or income of the provider. As “the interpretation of the need necessarily becomes individualized,” it disables “the capacities of citizens to perceive and deal with issues in political terms.”

By 1979, McKnight had honed his analysis further. “A service economy needs ‘deficiency,’ ‘human problems,’ and ‘needs’ if it is to grow…. This economic need for need creates a demand for redefining conditions as deficiencies” and “the power to label people deficient and declare them in need is the basic tool of control and oppression.” As government social welfare bureaucracies expand, “the professional servicers now receive more money for their help than the recipients receive in cash grants.” Quite possibly, McKnight contended, “there are more people in Chicago who derive an income from serving the poor than there are poor people…. The welfare recipient is the raw material for the case workers, administrators, doctors, lawyers, mental health workers, drug counselors, youth workers, and police officers. Do the servicers need the recipient more than she needs them? … Who really needs whom?” McKnight believed that professionals willing to cast aside their own self-interest must commit themselves “to reallocation of power to the people we serve so that we no longer will need to serve.”

John McKnight was unquestionably the most influential social analyst in 1980s Chicago, and he brought Bob Moriarty to organizing. But Greg Galluzzo thought the twenty-two-year-old Moriarty was too young for the congregation-based organizing that UNO was moving toward under Jerry Kellman’s tutelage, so by September 1982 Moriarty was going door to door in South Deering, just like Mary Gonzales had in South Chicago two years earlier. Moriarty’s job was to warn residents that Waste Management Incorporated (WMI), a huge garbage conglomerate that already operated a four-hundred-acre landfill farther south, below 130th Street, had just applied for a city permit to open a new landfill on the 289-acre “Big Marsh,” located just south of 110th Street and west of Torrence, only a few blocks from residents’ homes and the Bright Elementary School on South Calhoun Avenue.

One day Bob knocked on the door of a home on 108th Street, hardly four blocks from the now-shuttered gates of the Wisconsin Steel plant. Moriarty introduced himself to a woman named Petra Rodriguez, who was interested in his information, but Rodriguez also had a hugely consequential recommendation for him: “You should meet my daughter.” And so Bob walked around the corner to her home at 10814 South Hoxie Avenue and brought to Chicago organizing the most important recruit of the decade. The next eight years of Chicago politics would be different because he did so.

Mary Ellen Rodriguez Montes was a twenty-four-year-old stay-at-home mother of three young children. In Spanish, her name was Maria Elena, but to her family, and to the young organizers she would work with, she was simply Lena. “She was very smart, very beautiful, very tough,” Bob remembered, and a “quite extraordinary person,” another organizer explained. A priest who knew Lena well recalled her as “a real dynamo. She was also very attractive: great charisma and personality and very engaging.”

Lena easily recalled Bob’s first visit: “I remember him coming to the door.” She knew about the Love Canal environmental disaster near Niagara Falls, New York, and Chicago newspapers were reporting that a company called SCA Chemical Services had asked the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) for permission to move toxic chemical waste from downstate Illinois to an incinerator located at 11700 South Stony Island Avenue, just southwest of where WMI wanted to locate its landfill. Lena and her husband Ray agreed to host the first meeting of Bob’s recruits in their second-floor living room. Another young stay-at-home mom who attended was Alma Avalos. One year younger than Lena, she had grown up on Petra Rodriguez’s block and now had two young children. Bob, Lena, and Alma then spent the next several weeks recruiting other South Deering residents to protest against the two facilities.

Before the end of October they were ready to act. They wanted a public meeting, in South Deering, with IEPA director Richard Carlson, but they got no response. Then Moriarty, along with another organizer, Phil Mullins, who had come to UNO from Pilsen, suggested taking a busload of residents, along with their children, to Governor James R. Thompson’s office in downtown Chicago. Arming the children with sticky caramel apples, the group made its way to the governor’s suite via an unsecured back stairway. With Lena and Alma in the lead, the group said they weren’t leaving until they spoke to Carlson. Unhappy staffers got Carlson on the phone, and he promised a meeting, but by the upcoming Election Day, November 2, one still had not been scheduled. Jerry Kellman happened to know where the governor voted, so another bus trip was scheduled for what turned out to be a chilly, rainy day. After a wait of several hours, Thompson’s limousine finally appeared, and the group dashed toward him brandishing picket signs. With plenty of journalists looking on, a public meeting was quickly promised.

Four weeks later, on the evening of December 6, Carlson traveled to the Trumbull Park Fieldhouse, on South Deering’s northwestern flank, to speak to a crowd of more than two hundred residents. Moriarty and his recruits had prepared carefully for the session. They were concerned, however, by the presence of Foster Milhouse, a well-known precinct captain in Alderman Vrdolyak’s 10th Ward political organization and a leader of the old-line South Deering Improvement Association (SDIA), a group that traced its roots back to an infamous August 1953 race riot. When the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) accidentally assigned one black family to the housing project that adjoined Trumbull Park, SDIA’s membership responded with violence. After more African American families moved in during the next four years, even greater violence erupted in July 1957. When Milhouse began heckling at the outset of the December 6 meeting, Moriarty’s recruits responded quickly. “We call him Judas,” Moriarty remembered, and “they just jeer him out of the hall … ‘Judas, Judas, Judas.’ ” Once Milhouse was dispensed with, Carlson quickly agreed to the residents’ requests, but it was Lena who emerged as the star of the evening. “I somehow kind of like blossomed in this room,” she remembered. “I actually enjoyed it,” and indeed “felt called to it.” Also present was her husband Ray, who “really had an interest in being a lead person” and who “seemed a little bit upset about it,” Lena explained, when his wife emerged as the residents’ lead spokesperson. Ray “was a decent guy, but really insecure,” Bob recalled, and Alma described it similarly: “jealousy.”

Carlson’s appearance put their group on the map, and by the end of the year, they had chosen a name to distinguish themselves from the larger UNO: Irondalers Against the Chemical Threat, or IACT. In February 1983, a wary Alderman Vrdolyak met with them about WMI’s proposed landfill. Lena recalled that he “met with us on the site of Waste Management’s proposed dump and from where we stood, we could see our homes. He said, ‘Gee, I didn’t realize that it was this close to the houses.’ I said, ‘Does this mean you’re going to oppose it?’ And he said, ‘Oh no, I’ll reconsider and get back to you.’ Well, he never did get back to us.”

In the meantime, when incumbent mayor Jane Byrne, whom Vrdolyak energetically backed, finished second in the Democratic mayoral primary on February 22, Vrdolyak’s political fortunes took a turn for the worse. Byrne got 33 percent, and Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley—a son of the late Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s powerful mayor from 1955 until his death in late 1976—placed third with 30 percent. The upset winner was African American congressman Harold Washington, who rode a tidal wave of enthusiasm among black voters to a 36 percent plurality. Washington still had to win the general election against Republican former state legislator Bernard Epton, and the racial symbolism of Chicago electing its first black mayor—or white voters uniting to stop it—cast the contest in starkly racial terms.

Washington visited the IACT activists at Bright School on March 29, and on April 12, he narrowly edged Epton, winning 51.7 percent against the Republican’s 48 percent. Analysts concluded that only 12.3 percent of the city’s white voters, primarily from the generally liberal lakefront wards, voted for Washington. Seventeen days later, on April 29, 1983, Chicago’s first black mayor took office.

Throughout the latter part of 1982 and the first five months of 1983, the outlook for Southeast Side steelworkers grew worse and worse. There was even more concern when word got out that PSW president Tony Roque had signed an agreement with Chase Manhattan in August 1980 that allowed the workers to recoup their bounced checks, but that also potentially released International Harvester from most if not all of its pension obligations to Wisconsin’s former workers. Roque had not understood the legal implications of what he had signed. Some families were becoming so desperate that SOJC had initiated free food distribution twice each month and received additional funding support via UNO.

For decades, U.S. Steel’s South Works, located well north of 95th Street, had been the unchallenged behemoth of the Calumet region’s steel mills. Its 1973 workforce of ninety-nine hundred had shrunk to seventy-four hundred in 1979, fifty-two hundred in early 1981, and then forty-eight hundred in the spring of 1982, but in September 1982, U.S. Steel chairman David M. Roderick announced that the company would build a new rail mill at South Works thanks to concessions from both USW Local 65 and the state of Illinois. The new facility would add up to one thousand jobs, and completion was targeted for late 1983. “If we were going to be shutting down South Works, we wouldn’t be building the rail mill here,” Roderick assured Chicago journalists and state officials. Six months later the USW accepted an openly concessionary contract, hoping that laid-off workers would be brought back. Then, in May 1983, Roderick reversed himself and told U.S. Steel’s annual meeting that South Works might indeed be closed due to the impact of environmental regulations on such an aged plant. The same week that Roderick spoke, a comprehensive survey of Southeast Side neighborhoods showed “a job loss rate of 56 percent since 1980” and “an unemployment rate of 35 percent.”

In late May, more than 150 IACTers and other antidumping protesters descended upon WMI’s annual meeting in tony suburban Oak Brook. The protest drew significant press attention, and next the IACTers—who had revised their name to Irondalers to Abolish the Chemical Threat, rather than just “Against”—blockaded the entrance to WMI’s large Calumet Industrial District (CID) landfill south of 130th Street, creating a backlog of scores of garbage trucks. Chicago police, unsure whether the remote location was in Chicago or instead in Calumet City, made no arrests. In the meantime, Mary Ellen Montes, who was seeking an appointment with the city’s new mayor, met with his sewer commissioner on June 10, and six days later the IACTers again blocked the CID entrance. This time Chicago police had a map, and seventeen of the sixty protesters were arrested, including Lena. Her mother Petra spoke to reporters, and Moriarty and others went door to door in South Deering to raise bail money.

Everyone was released in time for a 10:00 A.M. meeting the next day with new mayor Harold Washington. At least one woman showed Washington the visible bruises she had from her arrest, and the mayor agreed to speak at an IACT meeting in South Deering. By midsummer, IACT had access to a crucial meeting place which previously had been denied it: St. Kevin Roman Catholic Church, on the east side of South Torrence, just north of the rusting Wisconsin Steel plant and by far the neighborhood’s largest church. Up until early 1983, St. Kevin’s pastor had been Father Bernard “Benny” Scheid, a notoriously hateful and sometimes drunken political ally of Alderman Vrdolyak. Two years earlier, when the Chicago Sun-Times had publicly exposed the extent of then-Cardinal Cody’s financial misdeeds, Scheid wrote a letter to the paper’s editor warning him to “get your affairs in order. We pray for your sudden and unprovided death every day.”

Fortunately for IACT and South Deering, Scheid’s successor was Father George Schopp, who for several years had worked with Greg Galluzzo and UNO as pastor of St. Francis de Sales Parish on the East Side. Schopp was inheriting a parish that included not only Lena and Alma, but, far more menacingly, Scheid’s buddies and Vrdolyak precinct captains like Foster Milhouse (“we used to call him Fester Outhouse,” Schopp recounted) who were “kind of a goon squad.” But Schopp was already familiar with Vrdolyak’s iron grip control of Southeast Side politics, and his arrival at St. Kevin dramatically altered the parish’s political role, as all of Chicago would soon see.

In late August, Harold Washington announced that he was blocking WMI’s attempt to open a landfill in Big Marsh as well as a proposed expansion of the nearby existing Paxton Landfill on East 120th Street. Then, on Wednesday evening, August 24, Washington came to South Deering to speak to an IACT-organized crowd of some six hundred people packed into St. Kevin’s large basement hall. As the Tribune’s headline the next morning put it, “Washington Invades Ald. Vrdolyak’s 10th Ward Turf.”

Both George Schopp and Dennis Geaney, Leo’s associate pastor from St. Victor, were worried about what Benny Scheid and Vrdolyak’s lackeys might try to do, so Schopp asked a number of supportive priests to stay close to Scheid. As reporters scanned the crowd and a television crew set up their camera, Scheid “assured me that he would work over the crowd by telling them that Washington was an ex-convict and still a big crook,” Geaney recalled a few weeks later. Once Washington arrived and the meeting got under way, Geaney happened to sit beside Petra Rodriguez, “who told me that the chairperson was her daughter, Mary Ellen Montes. This tiny woman steered the tight ship of 600 people like a seasoned sea captain. Benny and the 10th Ward Regulars never got an opening.” Scheid “got up and started blustering, trying to berate Mary Ellen,” Schopp recalled, but Lena was unbowed and the hecklers were silenced.

Washington was a powerful and emphatic speaker, and he took control of the crowd. “There is an over-concentration of waste facilities in this community” and the multiple dumps posed a significant danger. “I am appalled things have gone this far.” Washington singled out WMI by name: “I believe this company has a horrible record of violating the public trust and endangering the public health,” he said. “We’ll do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this. We’re investigating this now. Apparently Waste Management has quite a bit of influence over certain key people,” an obvious allusion to Vrdolyak, who had received at least $18,500 in political contributions from WMI.

As Washington concluded, the crowd rose to give him a standing ovation, but Lena, standing beside him, immediately intervened: “The meeting’s not over yet, Mr. Mayor. We’re not finished.” She then sternly insisted that Washington give a yes or no answer to each of five specific IACT demands for city action, and as she recited them, Washington smilingly said “yes” each time. After her fifth one—“Are you committed to stopping Waste Management?” to which Washington responded, “Yes, I am”—Lena reached up, “threw her arms around him and kissed him” on the cheek, as 10:00 P.M. news viewers all across Chicagoland soon witnessed. Washington looked smitten. “Now I know why she is your leader. She’s quite a politician,” he told the crowd. To Lena herself, the mayor was even more complimentary: “Boy, you’re a tough woman. I don’t want to mess with you. I’ll do anything you want me to do,” and Washington gave her his private home phone number.

Observers were blown away by Lena’s aplomb. “It was an impressive performance by Mary Ellen,” environmental expert Bob Ginsburg remembered. “She held him there until he agreed” and “it made UNO a citywide player” operating from the veritable backyard of a powerful city council figure who had already become Washington’s greatest political nemesis. “It was a big deal.” Dennis Geaney felt likewise: Lena “was too astute to let him use his charisma as a substitute for hard answers.” Phil Mullins, who had just succeeded Bob Moriarty as UNO’s IACT organizer, was astonished. “It was an awesome meeting…. It was amazing. It just changed everything.”

George Schopp felt the backlash, “big time…. It sent Vrdolyak off the wall.” Former alderman and Vrdolyak ally John Buchanan told the priest, “You’re part of a Communist conspiracy.” Different repercussions came from beyond the neighborhood. The CID landfill below 130th Street received almost two-thirds of Chicago’s garbage. It and the older Paxton Landfill at 122nd Street were essential sites; after all, the city’s waste had to go somewhere. The chairman of the Zoning Board of Appeals saw the Southeast Side locations as simple common sense: “from a land use point of view, that is an area that has become dedicated to this type of business.” The other most relevant city official viewed WMI in economic development terms: “Their proposal is no different from a steel mill starting to expand. I’m looking at it as an industry expanding, and we need jobs.” The Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry agreed, which led to a Tribune headline saying “Dumping Ban Called Threat to Business.” Unlike with landfills, the city had no regulatory authority over the SCA incinerator at 117th Street, and in early October the Reagan administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave what the Tribune called “the largest commercial toxic waste incinerator in the United States” a permit to burn PCBs inside Chicago’s city limits. The chemical waste company confidently declared: “This is a state-of-the-art incinerator. It will not pose a health threat to residents.”

But the most pressing threat to the Southeast Side’s well-being was the ongoing uncertainty of what U.S. Steel would do with South Works, where the active workforce was down to twelve hundred. Although the ongoing shrinkage of South Works’ employee roster was not as sudden or dramatic as the Wisconsin catastrophe, the cumulative job loss over time was almost three times greater, and it was the result of industry-wide trends, not a series of missteps. Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, the domestic U.S. steel market shrank dramatically, especially because of greatly reduced demand from the U.S. auto industry and a more than 50 percent growth in the import of steel from abroad.

Throughout the fall of 1983 and into early 1984, U.S. Steel’s leadership continued to threaten a possible shutdown of South Works unless environmental protections were seriously loosened and the United Steelworkers union surrendered even more far-reaching contract concessions. Two days after Christmas, U.S. Steel announced that it would shrink the plant to just its beam mill and one electric furnace, reducing the workforce to just eight hundred. Members of Congess were joined by Archbishop—and now Cardinal—Joseph Bernardin in denouncing U.S. Steel’s behavior, and Tribune business editor Richard Longworth wrote an angry column, declaring that U.S. Steel’s behavior “violated every standard of decency and broke every obligation to the workers and the community that made it rich.” The company had betrayed “every principle of economic fair play established over the last fifty years” and new federal legislation might be necessary “to protect the country from companies like U.S. Steel.” Indeed, “U.S. Steel is operating so far outside the rules of normal free enterprise that it is challenging the entire American industrial system.” Among those responding to the essay was St. Victor’s Father Dennis Geaney, who commended Longworth and rued the damage done to “people who are being treated like obsolete machinery.”

While IACT and the Southeast Side steel crisis were making news throughout the summer and fall of 1983, Jerry Kellman reactivated CCRC in tandem with the Catholic parishes that stretched across Cook County’s suburban townships, the area that comprised the archdiocese’s Vicariate XII. Mary Gonzales and Greg Galluzzo also were expanding UNO’s organizational reach into three more predominantly Hispanic Chicago neighborhoods: Back of the Yards, Little Village, and Pilsen, where Danny Solis was transforming the Pilsen Neighbors Community Council into a UNO affiliate. Before the end of the year Mary and Greg also added to UNO’s staff Peter Martinez, a veteran IAF organizer. Martinez had known and clashed with Kellman a decade earlier, and his arrival not only increased tensions between Jerry and Greg, but it spurred Kellman’s gradual shift from UNO to Leo Mahon’s CCRC. Jerry sought support for CCRC from the archdiocese’s CHD, the Woods Fund, and Tom Joyce’s Claretian Social Development Fund, emphasizing that his congregational organizing would lead parishioners toward “understanding social action as part of a faith commitment.”

By midsummer, Kellman had visited pastors across the vicariate and had won the support of urban vicar Father Ray Nugent. Combining the vicariate’s numerical designation with the Book of Ecclesiastes’ (3:1–2) well-known invocation of “time,” Kellman and the pastors came up with “Time for XII” as the name for a program which would work hand in glove with CCRC to train lay leaders in each parish to listen to fellow parishioners’ thoughts about the region’s economic crisis.

Cardinal Bernardin gave Time for XII his enthusiastic support, and on August 29 he endorsed it at a meeting of three hundred parish leaders from across the vicariate. Kellman and Leo Mahon believed it would take until October 1984 to raise the necessary funds—in part through contributions from each church—to hire staff and begin work at the more than twenty parishes that said they would sign on. In the interim Kellman would kick off “pilot projects” at St. Victor and at Father Paul Burke’s Holy Ghost Parish in neighboring South Holland.

At St. Victor Parish, Leo’s—and soon Jerry’s—right-hand layman was the energetic Fred Simari. Under the tutelage of Leo’s first young associate pastor at St. Victor, Bill Stenzel, Fred had proceeded through the archdiocese’s three-year deaconate school. At almost forty years old, Fred was six years older than Kellman, who quickly impressed him as an “incredibly hard worker” who “was great at what he did.” Also involved at St. Victor were two other key parishioners, Gloria Boyda and Jan Poledziewski. Within St. Victor, “lots of laypeople got involved,” Jan recalled, another of whom was Christine Gervais. “We just went into different homes and spoke to the people and then kind of brought back all of our information,” Gervais remembered. We “just sat and talked,” especially about what families needed. People just “refused to believe that the steel industry was going down,” because for many families, the plants were the only jobs that three successive generations of breadwinners had known.

By the beginning of 1984, Kellman was expanding beyond St. Victor and Holy Ghost, and at Annunciata Parish on the East Side Kellman used a small retreat as an opportunity to explain Time for XII. Soon thereafter Jerry spoke with one young man from the parish, Ken Jania, about joining him to do further outreach. Jania, newly married and running a small, failing East Side restaurant, jumped at the chance, and by May 1984, Ken was CCRC’s second paid staff member.

“My job was to connect with the parishioners,” Jania recalled, “to make a presentation in front of church” and “organize and start the interview process with parishioners.” On the East Side, in predominantly Polish Hegewisch, Chicago’s southeasternmost neighborhood, in Calumet City and other southern suburbs, there were “hundreds of interviews that we documented.” The job was harder than it sounded, for “it was very difficult for me to come from that neighborhood and to go and do those interviews, because in many cases I knew the people” going back to high school. “It was very difficult with these families” since “they’d lost everything” when a father’s steel plant job disappeared. “He’s got nothing,” since “their skills didn’t translate to anything,” and that meant “absolute desperation,” with prolonged unemployment signaling how “the traditional blue collar nuclear family’s exploded.”

As IACT’s Alma Avalos explained, “I don’t think the reality really sunk in until after a couple of years passed.” As Christine Walley, the most poignant chronicler of the Southeast Side’s disintegration, later wrote, “it sometimes felt as if our entire world was collapsing.” Permanent closure of the mills, whether Wisconsin or especially South Works, “was simply unfathomable,” and for many men “the stigma of being out of work was deeply traumatic.” In her household, following the Wisconsin shutdown, “my dad became increasingly depressed, eventually refusing to leave the house…. He would never hold a permanent job again.” The Southeast Side’s economic demise also “caused untold social devastation” among neighbors as another former Wisconsin worker attempted suicide and a third drank himself to death. Her father lived on, wallowing in “the deep-seated bitterness of a man who felt that life had passed him by.” All across the Calumet region, it slowly dawned on people that a “world we thought would never change” had suddenly proven “far more ephemeral” than anyone had imagined possible.

Jerry Kellman’s reenlivened CCRC had an expanded geographic reach thanks to Vicariate XII’s archdiocesan links with neighboring Vicariate X, which encompassed all of the Chicago neighborhoods that comprised Greater Roseland. Far more crucial, however, in early 1983 Leo Mahon’s protégé and former associate pastor, Bill Stenzel, was assigned to the small, struggling Holy Rosary Church at the southwest corner of 113th Street and King Drive. Stenzel had spent some previous months with Father Tom “Rock” Kaminski at neighboring St. Helena of the Cross Parish on S. Parnell Avenue at 101st Street. One of Stenzel’s tasks was to merge an even weaker nearby parish, St. Salomea, a historically Polish church, into Holy Rosary, which had been traditionally Irish. Holy Rosary had some deeply committed parishioners, like Ralph Viall, a white man in his fifties, and Betty Garrett, an African American woman who had moved to Roseland in 1971, but the merger faced no opposition because there was hardly anyone either Irish or Polish or—excepting Ralph Viall and his friend Ken—indeed white left in Roseland.

If any one neighborhood in America epitomized the experience of “white flight” in its most traumatic form, Roseland was it. The name went back to the earliest white settlers, Dutch immigrants who first arrived in 1849 to build homes and farms in the area around what would become 103rd to 111th Streets at South Michigan Avenue—the same street that fifteen miles northward becomes Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” shopping district. In 1852 the Illinois Central and Michigan Central Railroads interconnected just a little to the southeast, and the settlement that grew up there would be called Kensington. Over the next quarter century Chicago’s role as major rail hub grew dramatically, and in 1880 the already-famous sleeping car magnate George Pullman chose an area just to the northeast—between what later would be 103rd and 115th Streets—to build a new manufacturing plant as well as a company town he would name after himself. By the turn of the century, Pullman’s burgeoning plant employed many workers who lived in Roseland and Kensington, and in the coming decades and the World War II era, thousands of men—white men—who found well-paying jobs in the steel plants east of there, across the large geographic divide of Lake Calumet and its attendant marshes, made their homes in Roseland or the adjoining neighborhoods of West Pullman and Washington Heights, both of which, like Kensington, were often lumped into Greater Roseland.

Black people were almost nonexistent in those neighborhoods. To the north, between 91st and 97th Streets astride State Street, a small black community called Lilydale grew up in the years after 1912, and by 1937, its residents successfully protested for the construction of a neighborhood public school. At the time of the 1930 census, Kensington had 170 black residents. In 1933, when an African American woman purchased a duplex some fifteen blocks southwestward, near 120th Street and Stewart Avenue, white neighbors bombed the property. A decade later, when white real estate developer Donald O’Toole announced the construction of Princeton Park, a new neighborhood of primarily single-family homes for African Americans just west of Lilydale, eleven thousand whites petitioned unsuccessfully to block the development. The end of World War II created a serious housing shortage, and when the CHA moved the families of several black war veterans into a reconstructed barracks project on the east side of Halsted Street at 105th Street, it took more than a thousand law enforcement officers to finally end three nights of violent white protest riots.

Following World War II, Greater Roseland’s racial composition changed gradually, and then incredibly abruptly. Blacks were 18 percent of the population in 1950, but the proportion increased to 23 percent in 1960, to 55 percent in 1970, and then to 97 percent by 1980. But those statistics, while dramatic, nonetheless fail to convey how stark the transformation was. In 1960, West Pullman was 100 percent white; by 1980, it was 90 percent black. Washington Heights, 12 percent black in 1960, was 75 percent so by 1970, and 98 percent by 1980. In central Roseland, the dominant church presence, reaching all the way back to the original settlers, was the four congregations of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) and four more of the Reformed Church of America (RCA). One of the CRC churches considered reaching out to new African American residents in early 1964, but then dropped the idea in July 1968, concluding that the neighborhood was in “rapid decline” by the spring of 1969. As in other neighborhoods all across Chicago’s vast South Side, the onset of the real cataclysm could be dated quite precisely: April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. “From that day on, everything changed,” one resident told Louis Rosen, who wrote a powerful memoir of the transformation before becoming a successful musician. “It was rapid. It was awful,” one white person recalled. “It was an exodus.”

That is what happened in Roseland. In hardly twelve months in 1971–72, all four self-governing CRC churches abandoned the neighborhood and moved to the white suburbs. Of the RCA churches, one decamped in 1971, a second in 1974, and a third in 1977; the last survivor held out well into the 1980s. Of all the statistics measuring white flight, one may capture the price that the neighborhoods—and the new residents—paid more powerfully than any other: in 1960, fifty-eight M.D.s practiced in Roseland. Twenty years later, in 1980, after a population increase of five thousand residents, there were only eleven.

While virtually all whites fled, one Christian Reformed couple in their late thirties walked against the tide. Rev. Tony Van Zanten had finished seminary in the early 1960s, spent some time in Harlem and then over a decade in Paterson, New Jersey, another city experiencing serious decline. In August 1976 Tony and his wife Donna relocated to Chicago and opened Roseland Christian Ministries Center in the heart of South Michigan Avenue’s once-vibrant business district. They fully realized how “the racial change in Roseland was a very radical and very swift one,” maybe more stark than in any other place. “There were no social services at all,” Donna remembered. “There was nothing there for the new people.”

Standing against the tide were the Roman Catholic parishes that for decades had stood within fifteen blocks or so of each other all across Greater Roseland. Several closings and mergers had taken place in the previous decade as the area’s Catholic population shrank due to the racial turnover, but new African American members energized some parishes. Father Paul Burak was newly ordained when he arrived at St. Catherine of Genoa in West Pullman in 1972, when white flight was near its peak and the population, for the moment, was roughly 50 percent black and 50 percent white. St. Catherine’s retired pastor, Father Frank Murphy, had been a forceful proponent of racial equality, but that hadn’t stemmed the flight. “I experienced a lot of struggle and confusion about the parish” through the early and mid-1970s, Burak recounted. “Every weekend I would meet someone saying ‘Father, this is our last weekend here.’ ” Burak left St. Catherine in 1978, only to return in 1981, and by then few white parishioners remained. Tom Kaminski arrived at St. Helena in 1977, and only a few elderly white people were still in the congregation.

At first glance, the massive white depopulation of these neighborhoods promised a wonderful opportunity—thousands of newly available, often well-constructed brick bungalow-style homes—for African American Chicagoans whose families had for decades been trapped within the clear racial boundaries of Chicago’s South and West Side neighborhoods. But the reality of Roseland’s racial transformation again made black families highly vulnerable to exploitative white real estate “professionals,” this time due almost entirely to federal government policy choices. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), by 1968 part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was indisputably the villain, but until the mid-1970s, almost no one fully fathomed—or sought to expose—the consequences of government policy-making gone awry.