Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Barack Obama’s very first followers were a trio of middle-aged women who sat on the DCP’s board. Their backgrounds could not have been more different from Obama’s—or more similar to the great majority of blacks who had grown up in the segregated America of the 1940s and ’50s. Loretta Augustine was a native south sider; Yvonne Lloyd a southerner, from Nashville; Margaret Bagby a country girl from a small Michigan town that was a remnant of the Underground Railroad. All three lived in Golden Gate, the neighborhood of aluminum-clad ranch houses alongside Altgeld, and all were married to men with blue-collar jobs: Augustine’s husband was a postal clerk, Lloyd’s was a cop, Bagby’s a UPS driver. Augustine, the youngest, was a cherubic woman who had lived several years in Altgeld during the early years of her marriage. But by the time Obama arrived to head DCP, that marriage was breaking apart, and she was spending more and more time on community activism. That was one reason she became the group’s president. Lloyd, thin and sardonic, was the mother of 11 children, several of them born before Obama. Bagby, a quiet, heavyset woman who had joined DCP after seeing several steelworker neighbors lose their jobs, also had sons older than her kid organizer.
At one point, all the women asked themselves the same question: why am I following this child? When Gerry Kellman had been their organizer, they’d dutifully followed his orders, figuring it was for the good of the neighborhood. With Obama, it was different. They wanted to do what Barack told them to do because Barack told them to do it. The DCP was responsible for its own funding, through church dues and grants, which meant going to foundation boards and asking for money.
And damn if they didn’t get the money every time.
Augustine figured Obama was carrying 140 pounds on his six-foot-one body. She was so worried about his eating that she invited him to her house for Thanksgiving.
