Honoring Obama’s Political Heritage
Rebecca Janowitz, AM’08, sips coffee at a Hyde Park bakery just blocks from her childhood home, the same home the 56-year-old still lives in today. A pocket of wealth and racial integration on Chicago’s predominately poor South Side, this neighborhood raised her. It shaped her worldview. She knows its petty ticks and progressive passion. And she’s cared for it in return. In 1986, she founded the 57th Street Children’s Book Fair and kept it running for 23 years, handing over the reigns only last fall. She’s worked for the local alderman and Chicago Public Schools, saved buildings from demolition, and chased drug dealers out of the neighborhood.
Since the late 1800s, this community, her community, has been anchored by the University of Chicago and known for the Museum of Science and Industry and 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. These days, it’s more widely famed as the birthplace of Obama’s political career. Here he struggled as a community organizer, taught law, started a family, and forged the political relationships that would eventually catapult him into the Oval Office.
But there’s a larger narrative that Janowitz grew up watching, a context that highlights the neighborhood’s diversity, reform politics, and academic prestige. In this story, Hyde Park helped Obama make history. “Hyde Parkers were waiting for him before he undertook his political quest,” she writes in her new book Culture of Opportunity: Obama’s Chicago – the People, Politics and Ideas of Hyde Park (Ivan R. Dee, 2010). “The neighborhood offered him an opportunity to lead, and he seized it.”
The book chronicles the development of Hyde Park from this perspective. An anomaly within one of the most segregated cities in the United States, Hyde Park began fighting for racial integration more than 60 years ago through grassroots efforts and publicly funded urban renewal programs. This created what Janowitz calls a “political incubator” for Obama’s public life, with constituents from diverse ethnic, economic, and education backgrounds. “When [Obama] entered a local elementary school to vote on November 5, 2008, he was not a black man living in a black neighborhood, or a black man living in a white neighborhood,” she writes. “Both scenarios would have been awkward reminders of racial division in the United States.”
Instead, Obama followed in the wake of major politicians like Harold Washington, the first African American mayor of Chicago who received unwavering Hyde Park support during his 1983 campaign; and Hyde Parkers Paul Douglas, one of the U.S. Senate’s first champions of civil rights, and Carol Moseley Braun, the first and only black women to be elected to the U.S. Senate. “I was trying to rescue some of those people,” Janowitz says. “Hyde Park was a great place for a black politician to start out because plenty of other people had already done it. He didn’t have to invent it.”
Her list of influential Hyde Parkers goes on—ask Janowitz about her book and one of the first things she’ll mention is the number of people she regrets not including. Her parents, for example, embody the community’s unique blend of academics and civic engagement. While her father was a distinguished sociologist at the University, her mother used to stand on her front porch monitoring the black smoke pouring from a nearby apartment building and submit those records to compliance court. The color of the smoke proved that the owner was illegally burning low-grade coal, causing air pollution. “The landlord didn’t have a chance,” Janowitz remembers proudly.
Whether Hyde Park will someday reflect on Obama’s legacy with the same warmth remains to be seen. Now, however, anyone who ventures down into the labyrinth of Hyde Park’s Seminary Co-Op bookstore will find Culture of Opportunity sitting on its “Front Table” next to Nobel laureate authors and best-sellers. “This local honor means a great deal to Hyde Parkers: the books on the front table are the best of the best, scholarly books expected to become classics and to influence thinking in more than one field,” Janowitz coincidentally writes in the first pages of her book while introducing the neighborhood as an intellectual hotbed.
Culture of Opportunity clearly targets a wider national readership less familiar with the neighborhood and curious about a president’s predecessors. But that hasn’t curbed glowing reviews from the community, Janowitz says. At a May 19 book signing on the University campus, the Seminary Co-Op completely sold out of her book. Hyde Parkers, it seems, will always enjoying remembering their roots, especially if it’s written by one of their own.
--Steven Yaccino
