Hyde Park political activist Barbara O’Connor dies at 89; worked to elect Obama, Harold Washington

Hyde Park political activist Barbara O’Connor | photo by Joy Rosner

Political organizer Barbara O’Connor was fond of pointing to the bentwood rocker in her Hyde Park home and saying, “Barack Obama sat in that chair.”

Her friend Alexander von Hoffman recalled how she’d tell the story: “ ‘Barack Obama came to my third-floor apartment at 56th and Kenwood – this was before he was in politics – and wanted to know if it would be a good idea to run for office and what would it take. And I explained the nuts and bolts of campaigning.”

Ms. O’Connor, an early backer of Obama and Mayor Harold Washington and a Hyde Park community activist for 65 years, died Jan. 12 at the Symphony Residences in Lincoln Park. The cause was complications from lung cancer, von Hoffman said. She was 89.

“The progressive political community really lost a giant,” said labor leader Clem Balanoff.

“You cannot count how many political campaigns she worked on,” said von Hoffman, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “She got out the vote, she trained the canvassers and polling workers. She worked for almost any progressive political candidate in Cook County in the last half century.”

She helped U.S. Rep. Abner Mikva and U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun; Mayor Lori Lightfoot; independent Ald. Leon Despres, Luis Gutierrez and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, he said.

When Washington ran in the 1983 Democratic mayoral primary, she was on the lookout for vote rigging. “I remember one ward several years ago,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times, “where they took the whole precinct home and changed the votes.”

“She was tireless,” said Arlene Rubin, executive director of Project LEAP (Legal Elections in All Precincts). When it came to preventing election fraud, “She knew more than the attorneys.”

Barbara O’Connor at the Hyde Park Garden Fair last fall.

Friends say she nurtured political careers in the same indefatigable fashion as the compact garden she tended on her Hyde Park balcony. “She had more plants and flowers on that porch than I have in my backyard,” said political strategist Jacky Grimshaw. “She had herbs, carrots, tomatoes, green beans, peppers.”

“She was such an outgoing, wonderful personality that she made a great precinct worker and later on, organizer and a trainer for politics,” said strategist Don Rose. “I think she helped bring a lot of people in the game.”

Young Barbara grew up in Chatham, the daughter of Mary and Joseph O’Connor, a former player with the old Chicago Cardinals football team whose job was buying cattle for the Chicago stockyards. She attended Mercy High School. Her first arrest at a protest for social justice happened when she was 15, she told friends.

Young Barbara O’Connor

She was shaped by the work of Catholic leaders on social justice and racial equality, including Bishop Bernard J. Sheil, who started the Catholic Youth Organization, and Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

At 18, she volunteered for the Illinois gubernatorial campaign of Adlai Stevenson II. She enrolled in Marycrest College in Davenport before earning a master’s degree in urban studies from Loyola University, von Hoffman said.

In the early 1950s, von Hoffman said, Ms. O’Connor moved to Hyde Park and met Saul Alinsky, who taught her about community organizing. She worked to foster integration and protect residents from being displaced by the development that used to be referred to as “urban renewal.”

Barbara O’Connor

Ms. O’Connor worked on Dan Walker’s successful 1972 campaign for governor. Later, she became director of the Governor’s Action Office. She served as deputy director of Mayor Washington’s Office of Inquiry and Information from 1983 to 1987. There, she frequently dealt with renters’ complaints about inadequate heat from their landlords.

Her longest job, from 1991 to 2003, was at the office of the Cook County Clerk. She became its supervisor of polling places, Balanoff said. “One of the things that she did early on was to make sure that all polling places in Cook County were accessible for those with disabilities,” he said.

Former Clerk David Orr said he’d remember “her passion for justice and fairness. She was passionate about how we needed to change this old Machine model.”

In the late 1960s, she served on the Catholic Interracial Council of Chicago with Sargent Shriver, first director of the Peace Corps. She was a longtime member of the Independent Voters of Illinois Independent Precinct Organization.

Barbara O’Connor wearing a cat necklace. Some of her cats had garden names like Pumpkin and Geranium.

The Hyde Park Herald featured her green thumb in a 1974 article on the “sky farming” she achieved in her third-floor walk-up. She whipped up delicious dishes with the herbs she grew. Ms. O’Connor enjoyed the companionship of a long line of cats, some with garden names like Pumpkin and Geranium.

A memorial service is scheduled at 11 a.m. Saturday at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, 5472 S. Kimbark Ave., according to her friends. A reception with tributes, refreshments and music is to follow at Hyde Park Union Church, 5600 S. Woodlawn.