"I always had him there to offer guidance — where I should look for work and what I should look for in a life partner," she says. "He helped me to heal in disappointment and with the loss of our mother ... he helped remind me all that she had given us."

——

The two-hour phone interview was promising, so Gerald Kellman decided to follow up by meeting the job applicant — Barack Obama — while visiting New York. The men chatted at a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue.

Kellman was looking to hire someone to help black residents of Chicago's poverty-wracked South Side develop their own political voice. Obama, a recent graduate of Columbia University, was inspired by the civil rights movement and interested in social change.

"He was extremely confident when I first met him," Kellman recalls. "He turned the interview around and ending up asking me as many questions as I asked him. He was very concerned about what we would be able to teach him. He wanted to learn how to change things."

When Obama became a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project, he'd talk strategy with Kellman.

"His way of operating was to think about things, not accept them as face value but to reflect," Kellman says. "His way of proceeding ... was very methodical. He never shied away from challenging people, but the way he did it was important. He avoided unnecessary confrontation."

In Chicago, politics can sometimes be defined by ethnicity and race, and Obama "wasn't very good at that," Kellman says. "Barack did that very poorly. ... People in conflict use whatever they can. They use race, anything they can to discredit you in Chicago, which is a tough place. ... Who he is at rock bottom is someone who brings people together."

———

If a political career was part of a grand plan, it wasn't apparent while Obama was working on the streets of Chicago.

"As organizers, we were trained to be suspicious of politicians," says David Kindler, who was based in Chicago's southern suburbs for the same group that employed Obama. "Folks we worked with tended to be ill-served by political relationships. You wouldn't go into a meeting to see how to get elected to office. They (community people) would have stoned you."

Kindler remembers one day when Obama, who was leading a training session for Midwest community organizers, offered a personal story. Obama told about being an inexperienced organizer and arranging for public housing residents to meet with officials to complain about their living conditions. He rented a van, waited in a church parking lot and as time passed, he became increasingly worried no one would show, Kindler recalls. Finally, a handful of people did and they attended the meeting.