A big part of Obama's job as a community activist--that part the book encompasses the middle third of the memoir---involved visiting the Altgeld Gardens housing project on Chicago's South Side.
Some of the participants in the asbestos campaign remember things differently than what Obama wrote in his book.
From the Los Angeles Times, free registration may be required:
The drama began with a tiny ad in a local newspaper — a notice that asbestos was about to be removed from the management office at Altgeld Gardens, the all-black public housing complex where young Barack Obama worked as a community organizer.
"You think it's in our apartments?" a worried mother asked. "I don't know," Obama replied. "But we can find out."
What followed, Obama says in a memoir, was a life-altering experience, an early taste of his ability to motivate the powerless and work the levers of government. As the 24-year-old mentor to public housing residents, Obama says he initiated and led efforts that thrust Altgeld's asbestos problem into the headlines, pushing city officials to call hearings and a reluctant housing authority to start a cleanup.
But others tell the story much differently.
They say Obama did not play the singular role in the asbestos episode that he portrays in the best-selling memoir "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." Credit for pushing officials to deal with the cancer-causing substance, according to interviews and news accounts from that period, also goes to a well-known preexisting group at Altgeld Gardens and to a local newspaper called the Chicago Reporter. Obama does not mention either one in his book.
There is more in the LA Times article.
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