Obama advisor Jerry Kellman, who made a short speech supporting Obama at the Demoratic convention, is the neighborhood organizer who hired Obama at a salary of $10,000 annually, to work as a community organizer in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood in South Chicago. 

It was Kellman also who advised his young employee, Obama, to join the Rev. Wright church as a way to gain needed financial and political support. Years later he would marry Michelle Robinson, a fellow lawyer at the law offices, where they both worked. He and Michelle would remain parishioners for two decades.

Obama's work as a community organizer following college was guided by a book called  Rules for Radicals, written by Saul Alinsky, a notorious Chicago activist from the 1930s to the early ‘60’s who has been labeled a "communist" in some of his history but who apparently was never a member of any party, not even the ones he formed. It was Alinsky who hired Kellman, as a neighborhood organizer. Alinsky died in 1972 and never met Obama. 

This was Alinsky's written instructions to young organizers. "The agitator's job is first to bring folks to the ‘realization’ that they are indeed miserable, that their misery is the fault of unresponsive governments or greedy corporations, then help them to bond together to demand what they deserve, and to make such an almighty stink that the dastardly governments and corporations will see imminent ‘self-interest’ in granting whatever it is that will cause the harassment to cease.

Ironically, Alinsky was also an influence on Wellesley senior, Hilliary Rodam (who became Clinton).  She chose Alinsky as the topic of her senior thesis, met with the man three times and earned high marks for the thesis she wrote.

Alinsky was so taken with Rodham’s potential as an organizer and activist that he asked her to take a job in the same neighborhood where Obabma would eventually work.  

She was tempted, she said, but turned the offer down and went on to law school where she met her husband, Bill.

Years later, when the Clintons were in the White House, the White House asked Wellesley to seal the Alinisky thesis.  The request was honored and the thesis remained sealed until the Clintons' left the White House.  It is now available for researchers at the college.

Jerry Kellman remains an advisor to Obama and speaks in glowing terms of Obama's work in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood.

Ray Py