Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. David Garrow J.
Leo at St. Victor and asked him to lead a clergy effort to respond to Wisconsin’s closing. “It was quite obvious that the man to see was Leo,” Tom later explained. “Right away, within five minutes, he says, ‘Yes, we’ve got to do something about it.’ ” Dick Poethig remembered it similarly: “He had the right feeling, right off the bat.” The three clergymen agreed they would invite some ecumenical colleagues on both sides of the nearby Illinois–Indiana state line to an initial meeting at St. Victor on Friday, June 6.
Come that day, sixteen clergymen and four laypeople joined the initial trio at St. Victor, and, as Joyce wrote in a memo the next day, reached “unanimous agreement that the Church or the parishes and congregations should organize in an effort to get some community say into the steel mill closings.” On June 23, nine of them again assembled at St. Victor, with Tom Joyce stating that their “only model” was the clergy response in Youngstown. He went on to say that the community deserved to have “a modernized, efficient, competitive steel industry” based upon “modernization of the present plants.” At a third meeting on July 7, they chose August 23 as the date to host “a workshop for key leadership people in the community, labor and church.” For that session, Leo emphasized that their effort must not be seen as simply pro-union but instead be “distinctly a religious response.”6
Later on July 7, Frank Lumpkin and twenty-four other former Wisconsin workers assembled at the union hall of United Steel Workers Local 65—which represented employees at U.S. Steel’s huge but shrinking South Works—and signed a declaration that “we are tired of waiting” and that action was needed “Now.” When contractors for Chase Manhattan Bank tried on July 22 to remove the existing steel inventory, which Chase had arranged to sell for $16 million, from the Wisconsin site, angry former workers blocked the plant gates; on August 5, when contractors sought to remove a crane, the ex-workers prevented that too.7
On Monday night, July 28, Frank Lumpkin’s group of workers, now calling themselves the Save Our Jobs Committee (SOJC), were joined by Mary Gonzales, a Chicago native in her late thirties who, with her new husband, Greg Galluzzo, had begun working in the Southeast Side communities just before Wisconsin’s demise. Gonzales and Galluzzo had first met eight years earlier, when Greg was a Jesuit seminarian working for Chicago’s Pilsen Neighbors Community Council and Mary was married with several young children. By 1979, Mary was a single mother of three daughters and Greg was leaving the priesthood, and late that year Mary was hired by the Latino Institute as director of advocacy while Greg was working for the Illinois Public Action Council (IPA), which traced its organizational roots back to Saul Alinsky, who had died in 1972. Together they began to work in the Southeast Side’s increasingly Hispanic—primarily Mexican—neighborhoods, but as of February 1980, when they married, their only office in South Chicago was their car.
Mary and Greg went person by person through South Chicago, focusing on its Catholic parishes. Their long-range goal was to have “a citywide coalition” of permanent, neighborhood-based advocacy groups. By early March, they had conducted scores of one-on-one interviews, established contact with five parishes, and had five small nascent groups of residents meeting and talking.
Mary’s father had worked at Wisconsin Steel for thirty-five years, never missing a single day, before dying of brain cancer at age sixty-two. Mary had not heard any advance rumors about Wisconsin closing, but when it did, “it just reverberated through that whole neighborhood,” with thousands of families losing all of their health care coverage. Doing one-on-one interviews all across South Chicago, she recalled years later, the most common refrain was “I don’t have a doctor.”
By June, their new organization had a name—the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) of Southeast Chicago—and Mary had drafted a proposal to circulate to potential funders. Wisconsin’s demise had created not only “tremendous unemployment,” but also “psychological pressure on families.” Life “has changed in a shattering fashion,” and more than two dozen people out of the several hundred they had approached were now actively participating in the nascent UNO. “The staff’s main function will be to train leadership,” Mary’s proposal said, and they hoped to publicly launch UNO as a southeast-wide organization within eighteen months. “Never since the Depression has this community been hit so hard.”8
Leo Mahon’s August 23 conference at Calumet College in Whiting, Indiana—just across the state line from southeastern Chicago’s largely white East Side—was a four-hour event that attracted a good crowd and good press coverage. Leo presented a vision that was grand, or grandiose, given how little he knew about Chuck Rawlings’s unsuccessful effort to save Youngstown’s steel economy. A statement issued on behalf of the conveners asked how management “can morally justify divestiture” in light of “its unwillingness to invest its profits” to modernize antiquated plants. They went on to say that local parishioners must force “the industry to see its responsibility to the community rather than simply to shareholders,” yet Leo confessed to a reporter, “I had one of my parishioners tell me we’re two years too late.”
The conveners believed the conference gave them “a mandate to organize a permanent structure,” and Dick Poethig imagined they might attract $60,000 in support from the Presbyterian Church and a combined $35,000 from Cardinal Cody and the Catholic bishop of nearby Gary, Indiana. Leo suggested they name themselves the Calumet Religious Community Conference—soon changed to Calumet Community Religious Conference, or CCRC—and that they hire Roberta Lynch, who had contacted him when she heard about his efforts to mobilize the community in response to Wisconsin’s closing; Roberta had two uncles who were priests in Panama, so she had long heard of Leo Mahon. Roberta brought experience from working for progressive Southeast Side Illinois state representative Miriam Balanoff. By the end of August, CCRC hired Roberta as its first staff member, at a salary of $500 a month.9
Two days after CCRC’s conference, the PSW’s attorney informed the federal bankruptcy court that PSW, Chase Manhattan, and International Harvester had reached agreement that Chase would cover 100 percent of the March 28 checks that had bounced—$1.3 million, including vacation pay—and 30 percent of an additional one week’s wages—some $1.1 million—that Wisconsin workers were owed contractually. An earlier offer of just the $1.3 million had been rejected seventeen hundred to sixty-two, but the new deal elicited an angry protest by several hundred workers because this agreement also cleared the way for Chase to sell the accumulated inventory that the workers had previously blocked. The Tribune reported that these workers “also marched on their union headquarters,” but Tony Roque “refused to meet with them.”
During September, reports spread that Thomas Fleming, a businessman who had helped Envirodyne acquire Wisconsin Steel, had encouraged an African American friend, Walt Palmer, to pursue reopening the mill. Savvy journalists were highly dubious, but on October 6 Palmer, Tony Roque, and Chicago mayor Jane Byrne appeared before what the Tribune called “1,500 cheering steelworkers” at the downtown Auditorium Theatre to announce that Wisconsin Steel would reopen on November 1. Byrne stated that President Carter—just four weeks away from a tight reelection face-off against Ronald Reagan—had said federal support was available, and “as soon as there’s agreement on the financial plan presented by Mr. Palmer, you can count on the steel mill opening.” According to the Tribune’s Richard Longworth, Palmer was “a mesmerizing speaker,” who received “a standing ovation” from the workers, many of whom “had tears of joy in their eyes as they left.” But it was only a political chimera, and nothing more. By the end of October Byrne was claiming that the government would loan $10 million to rehabilitate Wisconsin’s coke oven, but she admitted that Walt Palmer was “no longer in the picture.”10
CCRC’s efforts to become an active organization met with mixed success, as Roberta Lynch was having trouble organizing groups of parishioners. At the CCRC Steering Committee’s monthly meeting, she said that “getting people involved at the congregation level is taking much more time than we had originally anticipated.” Neither the bishop of Gary nor Cardinal Cody had offered any firm financial support, and as 1980 was ending, CCRC’s clergymen worried that “a fully-staffed and functional organization” would not be in place prior to 1982, and they reduced Roberta’s work to just half-time.11
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