Michelle Obama (5 page)

Schools were one of the most important issues in the civil rights movement in Chicago. A few months before Michelle was born, two hundred thousand Chicago students—about half of the total number in the city's schools—stayed home from classes as a protest against the city's superintendent of schools. Their parents were furious because the schools in African American neighborhoods were overcrowded. Instead of investing in new schools, Superintendent Benjamin Willis offered portable classrooms, which came to be called "Willis Wagons," in school parking lots and empty lots. Then, trying to double the number of students each school could teach, he started two shifts of classes a day. These were cheap, halfhearted responses to the problem. They only created new trouble. The shift system meant that some kids had very different schedules than those of their working parents. The portables were not made for Chicago's frigid winters.

African American students might have been sent to schools in other neighborhoods, which had room. But Chicago's government worked to keep the city segregated. African Americans parents were also blocked from moving to the neighborhoods with better schools. Most real estate agents would not show them homes. If the families did find a home, banks would not lend them money to buy it. If they didn't need a bank, they might find that a law prevented the house from being sold to anyone who wasn't white. As a result, African Americans tended to be stuck in crowded homes and apartment buildings in just a few neighborhoods. Because African Americans couldn't easily leave, landlords took advantage of them. Buildings weren't repaired. Rents were higher than elsewhere in the city.

Breaking these housing barriers wasn't easy. In 1951, an arsonist burnt down three houses that had been sold to African American families, to prevent the families from moving into the white neighborhood. But thanks to hard work by civil rights lawyers and others, a few neighborhoods opened up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Unfortunately, what happened next was a step backward. As African American families moved in, white families moved out.

Michelle's family saw this happen a few years after they moved into their neighborhood. When Michelle and Craig were young, the neighborhood was mixed. People got along. Then, one by one, the white families left.

Often the reason was just money. Like many families, most of their wealth was in their homes. They feared that as more African Americans moved into the neighborhood, the value of their homes would go down, because no new white families would come. Real estate agents, who wanted to make money from selling the houses, spread this fear. (Selling was often a mistake. Property values went up in some neighborhoods as African Americans moved in.)

Michelle's brother Craig still remembers this: A moving truck in front of a neighbor's house, a car packed with valuables, and the last white family in the neighborhood saying goodbye before leaving Chicago for the suburbs.

In Michelle's neighborhood, the breakdown of old barriers happened peacefully. But Chicago endured serious riots over this problem. People died. Although Michelle was too young to understand these issues at the time, the conflicts shaped her parents' thoughts, and she absorbed their lessons.

The message to African American parents in Chicago was: The school system does not care about educating your child. It does not believe your child can be educated. This was the same message Michelle's great-grandfather Fraser Sr. had heard in South Carolina at the turn of the century. He rejected it then, and Michelle's parents rejected it too. Fraser Sr. had brought newspapers for his children. Without even knowing that fact, Michelle's parents had the same instinct and brought home workbooks for Michelle and Craig.

The lesson Michelle understood was, opportunities are out there, but you won't reach them unless you cross some boundaries that you may not be supposed to cross. She talked about this when she was back in South Carolina during the 2008 campaign. She was meeting with girls at a community center for kids in public housing. Their lives seemed to be a mix of Michelle's South Carolina roots and Chicago politics. "Does everybody here want to go to college?" she asked. "What do you think it's going to take to get from here to college?" The replies were vague, noted Holly Yeager, a reporter who witnessed the scene. Then Michelle became stern. "You've got to take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way. All right? Trust me, I was right where you guys are. I grew up in the same kind of neighborhood. The thing that made me different from a lot of other kids who didn't have opportunities was that I tried new stuff and I wasn't afraid to be uncomfortable. You guys have got to do that, because the things you want in life will not get handed to you. There is a lot of opportunity out there. But you've got to want it."

Michelle's experience at Whitney M. Young High School was a sign of how far the city had come. The way she grabbed that opportunity was a sign of how far she had come. But the school had not magically erased all of Chicago's old problems and prejudices, or all of Michelle's problems. As she came to the end of high school, she got a shock.

November 1980: Sixteen-year-old Michelle is in the office of one of the school's guidance counselors. She's holding a list of colleges. The applications are complicated, and she wants to be certain she can get all the forms she needs from Whitney M. Young by the December deadline.

Looking at Michelle's file, the counselor asks, "What's your first choice?"

Michelle tells her.

"You can't go there," the counselor says. "Your test scores aren't high enough."

Michelle took that criticism personally, but the real problem was that the advice wasn't personal at all. It was the kind of information that appeared in college guides. The right advice for Michelle would have been to aim high. Especially with Ivy League admissions, which include interviews and personal recommendations from teachers and long applications, a single weakness wasn't fatal.

As it happened, Michelle probably understood Ivy League admissions better than the guidance counselor did. Her brother was in his sophomore year at Princeton University. She had seen colleges compete for him when he was still at Mount Carmel High School. The University of Washington had offered him a full scholarship.

Craig probably would have ended up at Washington, just to save the family the burden of paying for school. He knew that his father had skipped college in part to allow the family to pay tuition for a younger brother. But Craig changed his mind after his father dropped the D-bomb on him: "If you pick a college based on how much I have to pay," his father said, "I'll be very disappointed."

His mother went to work as a secretary at the Spiegel catalog company to help pay for Princeton. She was happy to do it. With her kids practically raised, it was like making time for herself.

Michelle had been delighted for Craig. She looked through all the booklets and bulletins the university sent to incoming students. Envelopes with the school's orange-and-black crest and
P
logo arrived throughout the summer before Craig's first year. Naturally, her friendly competition with him led her to think about the Ivy League for herself. She later remembered, "I knew him, and I knew his study habits, and I was, like, 'I can do that too.'" Or, as she put it on another occasion, "I thought, I'm smarter than him!" She was going to become a Princeton Tiger too.

What the guidance counselor told her only made her more determined. She knew Princeton would look at more than her test scores. She was right. She might not have been perfect on paper, but she was impressive. Princeton's admissions committee also knew from the example of Craig, who was doing well at school and was on his way to becoming one of the college's all-time best athletes, that the Robinson family had a way of exceeding the highest expectations.

In September 1981, she kissed her parents goodbye and headed to college. Hard work had taken her to exactly where she wanted to go, one of the most prestigious universities in the country.

But it wouldn't be long before she was questioning if she had wanted the right thing.

Stevie Wonder albums. Friends who laughed at her constant wisecracking, and who made her laugh, too. Dancing for any reason at all. Cheering for Craig's amazing performances on the basketball court. The occasional date with a student who wasn't scared off by a big brother hovering around. This was Princeton.

So were problems like this:

Michelle has just met one of her roommates. Their room is on the top floor of a four-story dormitory, in what was originally an attic. With three beds, three desks, and three dressers, it's packed tightly. Making it feel even more cramped, the angled roof of the building forces the ceiling in this room to slant down toward the floor. The bathroom is downstairs. This is a dormitory with a lot of tradition, which is a polite way of saying it's getting old. But Michelle doesn't care. Everything still seems new to her.

She's sitting on the edge of her bed and talking when her other roommate arrives. The woman seems a little out of breath from carrying two suitcases up the four flights of stairs. Her name's Catherine Rodrigue. She's from New Orleans. While she settles in, Michelle learns about her: She's an athlete, like Craig. Captain of the basketball and volleyball teams at school. Michelle notices from a photo that Catherine was homecoming queen too. As they talk, Michelle starts to sense something familiar about her: Like Michelle, she had to work hard to get here. She was raised by a single mother who took a job at a good school so Catherine, her only child, could attend it. Then her mother, who taught science, tutored Catherine to keep her ahead of her schoolwork.

Catherine's mother, who drove her to Princeton, is waiting at a small hotel near the campus. She and a friend who helped with the driving are going to take Catherine to dinner. Catherine and Michelle say their goodbyes. Not long afterward Michelle finds Craig and they call their parents. Fraser and Marian are only half-listening to the hundred new details of Michelle's life, which are coming out too fast to understand. They just want to hear that Michelle's happy. She is.

But at the hotel where Catherine's mother is staying, the mood is different. Catherine's mother only cares about one detail, and she's furious. Catherine's roommate is
black
? No way. Catherine has to move immediately.

She's so mad she calls her own mother, Catherine's grandmother. Her advice: "Take Catherine out of school right now and bring her home." Catherine's mother spends the evening calling the Princeton alumni back in New Orleans who had helped Catherine apply to the college to get their help.

Catherine already likes Michelle. She thinks Michelle is funny and interesting. But even while they were talking back in the room Catherine expected this problem. Although she's a little embarrassed by her mother's anger, she isn't putting up a fight. She and her mother are close. She doesn't want her mother to be unhappy. She's also used to this behavior.

The next morning her mother enters the housing office like a tank. She doesn't even try to hide her reasons for wanting them to move Catherine. "Catherine is from the South," she told them. "We aren't used to living with black people." Her one effort to be polite is to use the word "black." Normally she uses a word that starts with the letter
n
.

She can't be talked out of her demand. The housing office says it will take some time, but it's possible. Before she leaves, she makes sure the forms are completed. As soon as she gets back to New Orleans, she calls the housing office to push them. She calls again and again over the next months.

To Catherine's credit, Michelle didn't know about the problem at the time. She wouldn't learn until the 2008 campaign, when Catherine and her mother told the story to the press. By then, both Catherine and her mother had moved on from their old ideas. They were embarrassed, and they were brave enough to be honest about what Catherine said was "her secret shame" at Princeton.

But Catherine and Michelle didn't become close, either. Michelle later wondered to Sally Jacobs of the
Boston Globe
if racism, even if it was just from other members of Catherine's family, might have been the reason. "Sometimes that's the thing you sense, that there's something there, but it's often unspoken."

Catherine did eventually move out. Her mother's efforts led to the offer of a new room that happened to be larger. Catherine said later that she didn't have any bad feelings towards Michelle, she just wanted the extra space. However, there was no effort to remain friends. They didn't even speak when they passed each other on campus, Catherine told the
Globe.

At the time the story came out, opponents of Barack were saying that Michelle imagined racism that didn't exist, and that she was too quick to complain about it. The incident with Catherine, and her reaction to it, showed the opposite. Often, racism was behind problems that simply puzzled Michelle.

Unfortunately, racism was not rare at Princeton. Lisa F. Rawlings, a classmate of Michelle's, recalled to the
Boston Globe,
"I cannot tell you the number of times I was called 'Brown Sugar.'"

It's likely that the same thing happened at every campus where African Americans were a minority. Princeton, however, might have been worse than some others. It was a school with a long tradition of race problems. Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton before becoming president of the United States, had once said, "The whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no negro has ever applied for admission, and it seems extremely unlikely that the question will ever assume a practical form." In 1936, an African American high school senior who didn't know the school's policy applied and was accepted, but when he showed up he was refused enrollment. Princeton did not admit its first regular African American student until 1947, more than two hundred years after the school was founded.