CHICAGO - Twenty miles from the glittering center of Chicago, at the farthest edge of the South Side, dozens of two-story brick buildings stretch for block after weary block. It was here where America provided public housing for African-American veterans of World War II and it was here, in the 1980s, that Barack Obama became a community organizer. Working with a band of outspoken mothers, Obama first auditioned his oratory and gained public notice.
The despair evidenced by the many dilapidated buildings, and the seeming mockery of the project's flowery name, Altgeld Gardens, prompted Obama to recount years later how an elementary school principal believed the children here no longer laughed like children. "Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their eyes, you can see they've shut off something inside," Obama quoted the principal as saying.
Today, Obama's experience at Altgeld Gardens has become an unlikely focus of the Democratic presidential campaign. His chief rival, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, has suggested that Obama is a good talker without much accomplishment. In fact, Obama's backers here say that his three years as a community organizer demonstrates how he was inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and followed the civil rights leader's model of organizing with churches.
But a visit to Altgeld Gardens, and interviews with some of those who worked with Obama, present a complex picture of how Obama was shaped by his effort to help improve one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods against difficult odds. Parts of his legacy can be hard to distinguish from his legend.
Obama's best-selling memoir, "Dreams From My Father," devotes more than 100 pages to his experiences at Altgeld and nearby neighborhoods, but he filled the book with pseudonyms and vividly re-created scenes. Even his backers say Obama's achievements were modest, while stressing how the experience shaped his aspirations.
Still, key players who worked with Obama at Altgeld Gardens said he deserves credit for pulling together a team of hundreds of residents who rallied for improvements at their housing projects. Obama helped secure grants for a jobs program and pushed for asbestos removal. His biggest accomplishment may have been to leave in place a group of activist mothers, some of whom continue to work or live at Altgeld Gardens.
"What he brought to the effort was he helped [residents] to step into themselves to do things they weren't going to do and that the establishment here was not going to get done," said Linda Randle, an Atlgeld Gardens resident who worked closely with Obama and now has an Obama for President sign in her window.
But some residents remain upset at Obama's characterization of the people in the projects and his role in helping them. He writes unsparingly of his frustration, for example, with a "plump woman with a pincushion face who was president of the official tenant council and spent most of her time protecting the small prerogatives that came with her office: a stipend and a seat at the yearly banquet; the ability to see that her daughter got a choice apartment." The woman is given a pseudonym.
Hazel Johnson, who has lived at Altgeld Gardens since 1962, said Obama appears to be referring to a woman who is no longer living. But Johnson, who said she worked on the asbestos issue at the same time as Obama, said she doesn't know of any other work that Obama did at Altgeld Gardens aside from helping on asbestos.
"I like him, he is a nice, young intelligent man, but some of the things he said are not true," said Johnson. "I was organizing, doing that work before Obama even came to the Gardens."
Obama portrays his time as an organizer as the genesis of his political aspirations. "My work took me to some of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods [where] I received the best education I ever had," Obama said in launching his campaign last year.
Jerry Kellman, who hired Obama for the job in 1985, said Obama arrived full of idealism that needed to be tempered by the reality of what it took to bring about change. The experience turned Obama into a more practical person, Kellman said.
In his memoir, Obama walks a fine line between putting himself at the center of the action at Altgeld Gardens and maintaining that he kept himself in the background as a good organizer is supposed to do.
"I began receiving invitations to sit on panels and conduct workshops; local politicians knew my name, even if they still couldn't pronounce it. As far as our leadership was concerned, I could do little wrong," Obama wrote.
Later in the book, he insists he stayed in the background of the asbestos fight. "Without a word from me, the parents found out that no tests had been done" to determine whether asbestos was in the apartments, he wrote. The city agreed to perform the tests after the meeting with angry parents. He expressed pride that one of the parents, Randle, "was all over the television."
Obama wrote that challenging the city on asbestos removal changed him "in a fundamental way. It was the sort of change that's important not because it alters your concrete circumstances in some way (wealth, security, fame) but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on."
After three years as an organizer, Obama could say that he helped some people get jobs and that many apartments were cleared of asbestos. But the large-scale change that was needed at the 1,998-unit project was beyond his reach.
Obama's successor in the job, Johnnie Owens, recalls Obama explaining why he was leaving for Harvard Law School with his eye on a political career.
"The problems on the local level were so huge that you could spend the rest of your life working on those sort of things and have some marginal success," Owens said. "So he understood that change would take a much more global approach. I do remember him saying at that time that the country was politically in a more conservative mode but that things operated in cycles and that a much more liberal mindset would begin to develop in the country and he wanted to be prepared to be an effective leader."
Loretta Augustine-Herron, who worked closely with Obama at Altgeld Gardens, said she could see his future being shaped by his work at Altgeld. "I always knew he was going to be president," she said. It was here, she said, that Obama learned firsthand how "you must be one of the power brokers if you want to effect change."
For all its impact on Obama, Altgeld Gardens today seems far from the kind of success story politicians like to tout.
Dozens of buildings are boarded up, with fences surrounding much of the property. The roads are a potholed mess. Blinking lights illuminate a series of towers where police have mounted cameras.
Last fall, Obama returned here for a television interview, walking past the boarded-up buildings, waving at children, and promising not to forget the residents as he runs for president. "It was, it is, a tough, tough place," he said.
