Even in the face of creeping gentrification, Chicago's far South Side is a gritty, dismal place. Low-rise buildings stretch for kilometres across crumbling sidewalks that front shuttered stores long mummified by rusted metal grates. Some churches keep their doors locked all day; visitors must ring the bell. Call a cab and it rarely shows up.
In the 40 or so blocks that make up the city's most hardscrabble neighbourhood, public transportation is scarce. But few people walk, not wanting to chance being hassled in a place where even U.S. postal workers leer at women passing by.
The streets were rougher still in 1985, when a caramel-skinned 23-year-old some called “Babyface” arrived from New York to help tackle social issues hobbling the community. Although he could not have realized it at the time, his arrival marked the beginning of an ambitious journey for someone who had been raised mostly in Hawaii.
He looked like an African American, but with a mother from Kansas and father from Kenya, Barack Obama did not really know what it meant to be black in urban America until he reached Chicago. He decided to get to know his new surroundings – on foot.
Rev. Alvin Love, head pastor at Lilydale First Baptist Church, was sitting in his office when “Barack rang the doorbell. I looked out the window. I didn't see a car. I go down, I see this skinny guy with big ears.”
The clergyman was surprised, but impressed. “The very fact that he was walking through the community said to me he was someone who, if he didn't know the community, at least was trying to get a feel for it – and wasn't afraid.”
Mr. Obama soon captivated Mr. Love with his novel ideas about how to mobilize people, how to knit together ethnic and religious groups that had never before co-operated. “He said to me, ‘Your issues of unemployment and crime in the community are the same issues the Baptists are having and the African Americans are having. Let's put all the other things aside. If we're going to tackle issues … let's see if there's a common ground for all of us.'
“That really was unheard of. To actually just sit down over issues … and do that with ethnics and Catholic priests, that was something.”
Over the years that followed, Mr. Love watched as Mr. Obama used the South Side almost like a laboratory as he honed what has, two decades later, become his trademark: an ability to solve problems by bridging what seem like insurmountable gaps between opposing factions.
At the same time, he became steeped in African-American culture and found something he had searched for since childhood – a clear sense of his own identity.
Now, at 47, Mr. Obama is threatening to eclipse the favoured Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, a prize that could very well make him the first black person ever to reside in the White House.
As one long-time adviser says, he's “made to be president … This is an individual who transcends politics.”
PART 1: WHERE THE ROAD BEGINS AND ALMOST ENDS
Barack Hussein Obama's earliest memories of the country he wants to lead are set against a backdrop of the next best thing to paradise: tall, swaying palms and the pounding surf of Hawaii.
To those who knew his mother, Mr. Obama's birth was a surprise. Ann Dunham was raised largely in Kansas by working-class parents who eventually wound up moving to the 50th state. She was 18 and just starting out at the University of Hawaii in 1960 when she met a provocative Kenyan exchange student named Barack Obama.
He already had a wife and child back home, but said he was divorced. The two fell in love and defied convention by running off to marry in secret. Six months later, on Aug. 4, 1961, Barack Obama Jr. was born in Honolulu. But by the time he had turned 2, his parents' marriage had begun to fray. His father won a scholarship to Harvard University, but there wasn't enough money to bring his family along. So Ann stayed in Hawaii with young “Barry.” A year later, the Obamas divorced.
