Obama tour covers president's South Side past (& those who knew the young community organizer)

Next stop was Altgeld Gardens, where Cheryl Johnson told of how a young Obama had trouble being accepted.

"Altgeld didn't really accept outsiders, and he was considered an outsider," said Johnson, whose late mother, Hazel Johnson, worked with Obama on infrastructure issues at Altgeld. It was Johnson's mother who helped bring Obama into the community, she said.

"He used to come to our house, he used to sit at our kitchen table," Johnson said. "He had such charisma with the community and he always was a laid-back person."

The bus then crawled through the Pullman Historic District and Roseland neighborhood, communities where Obama was also active as an organizer.

No mention of WHAT or WHO the Kenyan organized. Bill Ayers was also left off the itinerary.

Mr. Obama worked 20 years ago as a community organizer in the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on Chicago’s South Side. There, Bamani Obadele, who runs a youth program in Roseland, and Cheryl Johnson, who runs an environmental justice organization at the sprawling development, recently discussed Mr. Obama and the We Count event.

Mr. Obadele said Mr. Obama attended several antiviolence rallies that Mr. Obadele organized in the Robert Taylor Homes public housing development in the 1990s.

“He helped me carry a casket through the streets,” Mr. Obadele said, referring to an antiviolence mock funeral. “He absolutely understands the struggle of black folks. But he’s not the same Barack I knew. The Barack I knew wouldn’t bail out the banks and let the people go hungry. I think his advisers are giving him bad advice.”

Ms. Johnson said: “It’s complicated. He’s inherited a mess we haven’t experienced since the Great Depression. Let’s give him some time.”

Cheryl Johnson and her mother, Hazel, lived in the economically deprived Altgeld Gardens housing project when young Obama was a community organizer there. Her late mother also was an organizer at the housing complex and often welcomed Obama into her kitchen.

“He’s everybody’s president,” Cheryl Johnson told the Examiner, saying she is proud she knows him. But has he made a difference? “We, as poor people, don’t feel it and don’t see it,” she said. Read believes Obama’s problem is that he does not understand the unique needs of Chicago blacks.

“Obama came through Chicago through Saul Alinsky organizing,” he said. “The Alinsky piece seemed to have had an agenda about what it thought was in the best interest of black folks, from the white liberal perspective.”

Obama instead allied himself with Chicago’s MacArthur Foundation, local housing nonprofits and real estate developers. Valerie Jarrett and Allison Davis, Martin Nesbitt and Tony Rezko — all Obama friends — were at the epicenter of that powerful coalition.

Obama’s low-income-housing campaign still resonates among Chicago’s poor today. Deborah Taylor, a public housing tenant in the Kenwood section of Chicago, also told the Examiner things are as bad as ever for poor tenants.

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