Community Activist, Obama and the Few Bad Apples on the Night Shift – Represent Our Resistance

In later years, I remember one non-profit or community center room after another. We had to work in cramped spaces with limited material and financial resources. If I received a salary, it was just enough to pay for an apartment where the rent couldn’t be higher than $475 a month. I remember the Federal Building rallies and the door-to-door petition drives. I remember writing for small neighborhood publications for no pay or teaching GED or adult continuing education where students were in need of basic assistance that fell to us teachers sent to the community. Later, in the 1990s, with a doctorate degree, I taught part-time at universities and worked on community projects, still barely able to move above an income of $10,000 or $12,000 a year.

Senator Barack Obama seems to have thrived during the Reagan years. As I read of his “community organizing” and “community activism” in Chicago, I am remembering those Reagan years well. The Black communities in Chicago were undergoing change – not good change. Guns and drugs were pouring into the communities and people were paid to burn as many buildings as possible to make room, first for desolation and the flight of the middle-class Blacks, but ultimately for progress – called gentrification. Whites came back into the city. Middle-classed Blacks purchased buildings and become landlords. Some remained in Southside neighborhoods like Bronzeville or Chatham while others moved to suburbs. If, as a Black American, some of us opted to remain focused on the conditions of Black Americans, the poor, and working class, we were treated with utter distain by whites and Black bourgeois alike. The latter capitulated to the materialism of the Reagan era and submitted to the re-education process. They talked about the price of their clothes and the purchase of rehabbed homes in the Black community. At the time, the façade of “upward mobility” for the Black bourgeois in Chicago was pretty much the “in” thing.