Obama-Ayers link involved Annenberg grant

The Chicago education project that has linked the names of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and William Ayers, a former 1960s and 1970s radical turned college professor and education activist, was part of a $500 million initiative by Philadelphia publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg to aid schools around the country.

The half-billion-dollar "gift," as it was described by President Bill Clinton at a 1993 White House ceremony, would go on to provide 2-to-1 matching-fund grants to 18 school districts around the nation. Called the Annenberg Challenge, the fund provided $50 million to the Philadelphia School District and $49.2 million to Chicago.

The money was used to try to improve education in various ways, including the promotion of smaller schools, greater community links and support for teachers.

The Windy City's initiative, which came on the heels of a school-reform movement, was supported by government and civic leaders. According to people active in the project, Obama was an attorney and up-and-coming civic leader who was tapped in 1995 by heads of leading charitable foundations to chair the initiative's board of directors.

Ayers, a former Weather Underground member who was charged but not convicted on federal riot and bombing-conspiracy counts, was by that time a University of Illinois education professor who cowrote the proposal to get the Annenberg money for Chicago.

Anne Hallett, now executive director of Grow Your Own Illinois, which helps residents become teachers, said that she and Ayers had written the grant proposal and that it had high-level government support. Neither she nor Ayers was a member of the board, she said, and neither had any role in Obama's becoming board chairman.

Hallett described Ayers, a member of a prominent Chicago family, as well-regarded and a contributor to the Chicago school-reform movement.

Patricia A. Graham, a professor emerita at Harvard University and then head of the Spencer Foundation, said she and two other foundations were approached by Hallett and Ayers to form an organization to oversee the grant they were seeking. Obama's name was suggested by one of the foundations.

"I found him [Obama] to be eloquent and a man who had been successful thus far in his young life through education," Graham said yesterday. She said she had invited him to become chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge board. He agreed, she said, provided she would be cochair, which she said she did.

Several years ago, Ayers and Obama overlapped as board members of the Woods Fund, a Chicago charity that supports community-based groups.

R. Eden Martin, a lawyer and head of the Commercial Club of Chicago, said he was on the Woods board at the same time as Ayers and Obama. He said the men did not appear particularly close. "I wasn't aware they had any relationship outside the board," Martin said.

Ayers declined to be interviewed for this article. He has not publicly apologized for past associations with the Weather Underground, which has been linked to a number of bombings, including one that killed a law-enforcement officer.

Obama repeatedly has denounced Ayers' radical activities.