Altgeld Gardens: Where Obama Learned to Organize

Altgeld Gardens was built between nineteen forty-four and nineteen forty-five to house Black World War Two veterans returning to Chicago. Its fourteen hundred ninety-eight low-rise units, spread over one hundred ninety acres on the city's far South Side, were designed as a park-like alternative to tower-block housing. The project was named for former Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld.

In nineteen eighty-five, a young community organizer named Barack Obama came here to help residents fight asbestos contamination in the buildings. Working through the Developing Communities Project, he helped build job training and other programs for residents. Hazel Johnson, an Altgeld resident, had spent years sounding alarms about environmental hazards in the complex and became a national figure in the environmental justice movement.