Barack Obama - In His Own Words: A Promise of Redemption

K Gardner

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Sat Jun-14-08 09:52 AM
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Barack Obama - In His Own Words: A Promise of Redemption

In 1983, I decided to become a community organizer. There wasn't much detail to the idea. I didn't know anyone making a living that way. When classmates asked me what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for Change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country - manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

I couldn't really blame them for being skeptical. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can construct a certain logic to my decision, show how becoming an organizer was a part of that larger narrative starting with my father and his father before him, my mother and her parents, my memories of Indonesia with its beggars and farmers, my father's death. I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone - and that that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.

Lying in bed at night, I would let the slogans drift away to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images, of a past I had never known.

They were of the civil rights movement, mostly the grainy black-and-white footage that appears every February during Black History Month - the same images that my mother had offered me as a child. A pair of college students, hair short, backs straight, placing their orders at a lunch counter teetering on the edge of riot. SNCC workers standing on a porch in some Mississippi backwater trying to convince a family of sharecroppers to register to vote. A county jail bursting with children, their hands clasped together, singing freedom songs.

Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my emotions in a way that words never could. They told me that I wasn't alone in my particular struggles and that communities had never been a given in this country, at least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men. I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you'd been born or the house where you'd been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because membership was earned - because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community - black, white and brown - could somehow redefine itself - I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.

That was my idea of organizing. It was a promise of redemption.

In six months, I was broke, unemployed, eating soup from a can. I had all but given up on organizing when I received a call from Marty Kaufman. He explained that he'd started an organizing drive in chicago and was looking to hire a trainee. He'd be in New York the following week and suggested we meet at a coffee shop on Lexington. He offered to start me off at ten thousand dollars for the first year; the salary would go up if things worked out.

After he was gone, I took the long way home, along the East River promenade. The old fluted park lamps flickered to life; a long brown barge rolled through the gray waters toward the sea. I sat down on a bench, considering my options and noticed a black woman and her young son approach. The boy yanked the woman up to the railing and they stood side by side, a single silhouette against the twilight. The boy took a few steps toward me.

"Excuse me, mister, " he shouted. "You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?" I said it probably had to do with the tides. The answer seemed to satisfy the boy and he went back to his mother. As I watched the two of them disappear into dusk, I realized I had never noticed which way the river ran.

A week later, I loaded up my car and drove to Chicago.

(excerpts from Chapter Seven of "Dreams From My Father" by Barack Obama, pp. 133-143)

Note: Chapter Seven has been heavily snipped and edited for posting. This book was written in the early 1990s and published in 1995, yet note how many of Barack Obama's ideas have come to fruition; how he has taken his dream of grassroots organizing on a community level and applied that to the nation. His dream has become a reality. His dream has become Our Dream.