Valerie Jarrett is in front of Obama in this picture.
Part of Jarrett’s identification with the president is her international childhood and experience as an African-American growing up abroad. She was born in Shriaz, Iran, to a renowned physician father and spent the first five years of her life in Iran. There, she said, she was treated as an American, not an African-American. Her family lived in London for one year before settling in Chicago’s elite neighborhood, Hyde Park, where she was teased for both her race and British accent. Chicago-based journalist Lynn Sweet reports, “In the manner of privileged Hyde Park-Kenwood children from smart families, Jarrett went to the exclusive University of Chicago Lab School before transferring to her mother’s alma mater, Northfield Mt. Hermon, in western Massachusetts for the last two years of high school.” After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School, she went to work for Chicago’s first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, whose election many Sixties radicals attributed to themselves. After Washington’s death in 1987, she stayed on under his successor, Richard Daley. In City Hall, she and her colleague Susan Sher recruited Michelle Robinson, then engaged to Barack Obama, and Jarrett quickly melded her way into their lives...
...Her late father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was a pioneering black journalist in “negro” newspapers, After graduating from Knoxville College, Vernon Jarrett started at The Chicago Defender in 1946, where he wrote columns extolling Communist poet Langston Hughes and lifelong Stalinists W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. (Obama would write in Dreams of My Father that “I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm [X], DuBois and Mandela.”) A contemporary writer at Kansas City Star asserts by 1948 Jarrett “had been forced out [of journalism] by the Cold War, the Red scare and racism.” He freelanced at Kansas City’s The Call from 1954-58, then returned to Chicago to become the first nationally syndicated black columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and still later wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times. Valerie married his son, William Robert Jarrett, who preceded his father in death. Together, they had a daughter, who now attends Harvard. The elder Jarrett may have been part of his daughter-in-law’s rise through Chicago’s political ranks. The Washington Post called Jarrett “a key influence in [Harold] Washington's decision to run for the Chicago mayoralty.”
Vernon Jarrett later wrote of another up-and-coming political figure in the Chicago Sun-Times:
Good news! Good news! Project Vote, a collectivity of 10 church-based community organizations dedicated to black voter registration, is off and running. Project Vote is increasing its rolls at a 7,000-per-week clip. Just last Saturday it registered 2,000 during the Chicago Defender's annual Bud Billiken Parade. But now, the not-so-good news: If Project Vote is to reach its goal of registering 150,000 out of an estimated 400,000 unregistered blacks statewide, “it must average 10,000 rather than 7,000 every week,” says Barack Obama, the program's executive director…”There's a lot of talk about `black power' among the young but so little action.”
When Vernon died in 2004, he was saluted in the pages of People’s Weekly Worker, the house organ of the Communist Party USA. A final point of confluence, perhaps more fortuitous than anything: Vernon Jarrett once sat on a union publicity committee with Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist poet who occasionally counseled…the young Barack Obama.
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment