Barack and Michelle

by Christopher Andersen

  It remained to be seen whether Barack was different from so many other young college graduates who had come to Kellman seeking to make a difference. “The pattern was that people Barack’s age who had done well in school, who were Phi Beta Kappa and Rhodes Scholars, would volunteer in the inner city and quickly unravel. They’d burn out in a matter of months. I hoped that his motivation was strong enough so that wouldn’t happen to him.”

  The pay Kellman was offering—ten thousand dollars for the first year—amounted to less than a quarter of what Barack had been earning as a junior financial writer. No matter. It was the opportunity he had been waiting for. By working shoulder to shoulder with his fellow African Americans in this most American of cities, he would finally lay claim to that elusive sense of self that he had been so desperately seeking.

  Barack would also find something else in Chicago—something that had proved equally precious, equally elusive. He would find the love of his life.

  I always tease her she had sort of the South Side version of Ozzie and Harriet. Or Leave It to Beaver.

  —Barack

  I was just a typical South Side little black girl.

  —Michelle

  We knew you would do this 15 years ago when we could never make you shut up.

  —Michelle’s parents, in their 1988 Harvard Law School yearbook ad congratulating her

  3

  She’s what?” Alice Brown asked, the tone of her voice hovering somewhere between anxiety and outright panic. On the other end of the line, Catherine Donnelly was not at all surprised at her mother’s reaction. The Princeton University freshman imagined Alice, knuckles white as she gripped the phone, eyes wide with disbelief, her face turning an unsettling shade of crimson.

  “Well, like I said, Mom,” Catherine continued, “she seems very nice, quite tall, smart, of course, pretty—beautiful, actually,” Catherine answered. “Her name is Michelle, she’s from Chicago…and she’s black.”

  Growing up in Louisiana, Catherine had attended school with a few black students. But for Alice Brown, the idea of her daughter sharing the cramped, slope-ceilinged dorm room at Pyne Hall with Michelle Robinson and another student was something else again. Catherine’s mother had grown up in an unabashedly racist southern household, so Catherine braced for the worst.

  Indeed, the possibility that her daughter might room with an African American during her first year at Princeton was something that Alice Brown had not even remotely considered. A financially strapped single mother who had poured her life into raising Catherine, Alice had always had big plans for her daughter. As far as she was concerned, they did not include a black roommate—much less one raised on the gritty South Side of Chicago by a working-class family.

  Like Michelle’s family, Alice had made considerable sacrifices for her daughter. Convinced that a private school education would greatly improve Catherine’s chances of getting into a top college, Alice took a teaching job at one of New Orleans’s most exclusive private institutions so that Catherine could attend tuition-free. When Catherine was admitted to Princeton, it seemed as if every door was finally open to her. Alice wondered how many of those doors would now slam shut if her daughter was forced to share a room with a black girl. She also wondered if such a person might be a “bad influence” on Catherine.

  “Mom just blew a gasket when I described Michelle,” Catherine would later recall. “It was my secret shame.”

  Alice, who had driven Catherine up from New Orleans, didn’t stop there. No sooner did she hang up with her daughter than she marched straight to the student housing office. “I need to get my daughter’s room changed right away,” Alice demanded. “We’re from the South. We aren’t used to living with black people.”

  When she was told that no other rooms were available, Alice, distraught, called her mother. “Take Catherine out of school immediately,” Catherine’s grandmother insisted. “Bring her home!”

  Michelle was blissfully unaware of Alice Brown’s reaction or the frantic attempts Alice had made to arrange for her daughter to room with someone else—anyone else—as long, of course, as that person wasn’t black. Catherine certainly gave no hint of what was going on behind the scenes. She and “Miche,” as Michelle liked to be called, got along well enough.

  “Michelle had these beautiful, long-fingered hands that she used to tell great stories with,” said Catherine, who, like Michelle, was seventeen at the time. “I loved her hands.”

  The following semester, however, Catherine jumped at the chance to move out when a larger room became available. When she finally learned, some twenty-seven years later, of Alice Brown’s attempts to move her daughter out of their dorm room, Michelle would recall that she and Catherine were “never close. But sometimes that’s the thing you sense, that there’s something that’s there, but it’s often unspoken.” Once Catherine moved out, she and Michelle, who would soon be socializing almost exclusively with the few other blacks on campus, turned the other way when they passed each other on campus.

  Catherine would certainly regret what had happened then, as would her mother. “Michelle early on began to hang out with other black students,” Catherine remembered. “Princeton was just a very segregated place. I wish now that I had pushed harder to be friends, but by the same token, she did not invite me to do things, either.”

  Alice Brown’s machinations notwithstanding, it quickly became clear to Michelle, who enrolled at Princeton in the fall of 1981, that she and other minority students were not exactly being welcomed with open arms. Historically Princeton, with its broad emerald playing fields and imposing neo-Gothic architecture, was the very definition of resolute eastern elitism. Not even Woodrow Wilson, who was Princeton’s president prior to his election to the White House in 1912, believed blacks belonged there. “The whole temper and tradition of the place,” he wrote, “are such that no Negro has ever applied for admission, and it seems extremely unlikely that the question will ever assume a practical form.”

  It was not until 1936 that a black man named Bruce Wright was admitted to Princeton, and then only because they initially believed him to be white. As soon as the administration realized its mistake, Wright was asked to leave.

  By the late 1960s, a handful of African Americans had been admitted to the then all-male university. When Princeton went coeducational in 1969, a smattering of black women joined their ranks. Of the 1,141 students in her freshman class, Michelle was one of only 94 blacks.

  As far as most of her white classmates were concerned, Michelle and the other African Americans at Princeton were beneficiaries of affirmative action programs and did not deserve to be there. It would be commonplace for white students to walk up to blacks and ask them their SAT scores point-blank. “The implication,” said Michelle’s classmate Lisa Rawlings, “was that I didn’t have the scores to get in, I didn’t have the grades to get in.”

  Princeton itself only fueled the notion that the bar had been lowered for minority applicants. A few weeks before the school year began, black and Hispanic freshmen were invited to attend special classes designed to help them adjust to campus life. “We weren’t sure whether they thought we needed an extra start,” said fellow student Angela Acree, “or they just said, ‘Let’s bring all the black kids together.’”

  Either way, the effect was to isolate minority kids from the rest of the student body. Michelle quickly gravitated to the other African Americans on campus, and by her sophomore year was sharing a suite with three other black women. “I cannot tell you,” Michelle’s classmate Lisa Rawlings recalled, “the number of times I was called ‘Brown Sugar.’ Definitely you got the feeling you didn’t belong.” Hilary Beard remembered how white students who had never been around blacks before “would want to touch [her] hair.”

  For the most part, however, Michelle and her fellow African Americans on campus were merely ignored. “The same white kids you were in classes with,” Michelle said, “would pretend not to know you once class was over. They wou
ld just look the other way if you passed them on campus, or even cross the street to avoid you. It happened all the time.”

  Angela Acree agreed. “White kids we knew from class would pass us on the green and pretend not to see us,” said Acree, whose closest friends at Princeton were Michelle and another black student, Suzanne Alele. “It was, like, here comes a black kid. It was a very sexist, segregated place.”

  Michelle might have been less taken aback if her older brother, Craig, who had arrived at Princeton two years earlier on a basketball scholarship, had bothered to warn her. Certainly the mere fact that she was the sister of a Princeton basketball star paved the way for Michelle socially. And Craig was more than generous with his advice when it came to housing and classes and professors.

  Craig and Michelle, who bore such a striking physical resemblance that they were often taken for twins, had always been close. So why hadn’t he cautioned his little sister about the racism that was pervasive on the Princeton campus? “We all viewed it as what you needed to do, to do business there,” Craig explained. He hadn’t wanted to discourage Michelle—or to cause his parents undue worry—by describing what he and the other blacks on campus had to endure on a daily basis. “You just,” he said, “had to put up with certain things.”

  Back home in Chicago, Marian and Fraser Robinson were completely unaware of what their children were going through. “We had no idea, no inkling,” Marian later said. “After all, it was Princeton.”

  To be sure, both children had known nothing but love, support, and encouragement growing up in a solid working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s mostly African American South Side—a world away from Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kenya.

  In 1964, the same year Barack Obama’s parents divorced, twenty-nine-year-old Fraser Robinson III landed a job working the swing shift as a “station laborer” with Chicago’s water department. That meant he essentially worked as a janitor at the city’s water treatment plant, mopping, scrubbing, and scraping virtually every surface, cleaning the bathrooms, taking out the refuse, flushing drains, and doing whatever else it took to make his demanding foreman happy—all for six thousand dollars a year.

  He was thrilled to get the job. Once a gifted high school athlete who excelled in boxing and swimming, the affable, energetic, relentlessly upbeat Fraser had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Although the symptoms at this early stage of the disease were all but imperceptible, he knew that he would need the kind of steady employment with health benefits and a pension that the city government could provide.

  For Marian Shields Robinson, news of her husband’s water company job came none too soon. Sweethearts since high school, where she had been a standout in track, Marian and Fraser wed in 1960. When their son, Craig, was born two years later, she quit her job as a secretary at the Sears Roebuck Catalog Company to take care of the baby. Now that she was pregnant again, Marian, twenty-six, worried that she might have to return to work to make ends meet.

  On January 17, 1964—just three days after Fraser started his new job—Marian gave birth to a healthy baby girl. They named her Michelle LaVaughn (after Fraser’s mother), and, as originally planned, Marian continued staying home as a full-time mom.

  The Robinsons breathed a collective sigh of relief knowing that Fraser’s salary could pay for their small apartment on South Parkway (later Martin Luther King Drive) in a solidly black part of the city. But that security came with a price. Having grown up the son of a government worker in Chicago, Fraser Robinson III knew all too well that Mayor Richard Daley’s fabled Democratic machine made sure all city jobs were doled out exclusively through an elaborate system of bribery, nepotism, and patronage.

  It helped that Fraser was a committed Democrat. He volunteered as precinct captain—a powerful position on the grassroots level and an essential cog in the well-oiled Daley machine. There was one Democratic precinct captain in each of Chicago’s fifty wards, and it was their job to keep the party faithful happy. The Daley machine may have been one of the most violent, corrupt, and notoriously racist in modern American history, but no matter. As long as people like Fraser Robinson were there to make sure their streets were cleared of snow and the garbage was collected on time, Democrats, regardless of race or ethnic origin, would continue to vote Democratic.

  African Americans, however, were particularly vulnerable to the pressures brought to bear by these foot soldiers in Richard Daley’s political army. Entire families could easily be intimidated by law enforcement, threatened with eviction from public housing, or told that whatever government payments they might be receiving would grind to a halt. “The Negroes always vote for us,” Daley once said in an infamous Freudian slip, “because they know what’ll happen to them if they don’t.”

  By all accounts, Fraser was particularly effective as a precinct captain—a job he could perform, it seemed, without ever resorting to dirty tricks or intimidation. Well dressed and sporting a neatly trimmed mustache, Fraser was jovial, quick-witted, and sympathetic to his neighbors’ needs. And the more effective he was as a precinct captain, the more swiftly he rose through the ranks at the water department. In just five years, he would be promoted three times, rising to the position of operating engineer at twice his starting salary.

  The Daley machine seemed light-years away from Friendfield, the South Carolina rice plantation where Jim Robinson, Michelle’s great-great-grandfather, was born into slavery around 1850. It was here, in South Carolina’s Low Country region northeast of Charleston, that thousands of slaves like Robinson worked the snake-infested fields that produced fully half the country’s crop of rice.

  All that abruptly changed in the wake of the Civil War. Friendfield’s magnificent antebellum mansion was looted, its rice mill burned to the ground, and a smallpox epidemic swept through the region, killing blacks and whites alike.

  Like many of the other newly emancipated slaves, Jim Robinson stayed to work the land as a sharecropper. In the 1880 census, he was listed as an illiterate farmhand and the married father of a three-year-old son named Gabriel. Four years later a second son, Fraser, was born.

  When Gabriel and Fraser were still small, their mother died and their father quickly remarried. His new wife, however, considered her new stepsons little more than a nuisance. At the age of ten, Fraser had gone in search of firewood when a sapling fell on his left arm, shattering it. His stepmother, convinced that it was just a minor injury, refused to seek medical attention for him, gangrene set in, and by the time his stepmother finally summoned the doctor, all they could do to save his life was amputate.

  Francis Nesmith, the white son of a plantation overseer, soon took Fraser under his wing. Eventually, Fraser moved into the Nesmith house, and, though officially listed in the 1900 census as a sixteen-year-old “house boy,” he was raised alongside Nesmith’s own children. While described as being illiterate at the time, Fraser would eventually teach himself to read.

  Both of Jim Robinson’s sons flourished. Gabriel earned enough money as a laborer to buy his own farm. Fraser married Rosella Cohen, a local woman whose parents took the name Cohen from their Jewish slave owner, and they had several children.

  To support his family, the one-armed man plied his trade as a shoemaker and earned extra money by working in a lumber mill and hawking newspapers. He always managed to take a few copies home each night so his children could improve their reading skills and learn something about the world in the process.

  Born in 1912, Fraser junior was an outstanding student who excelled in public speaking. Yet after graduation from high school, he found himself scraping by working as a laborer at a local sawmill.

  As the economy of the rural South continued its inexorable downhill slide, Fraser junior and his new wife, LaVaughn, joined the millions of other blacks who fled north in search of a better life. Fraser junior would be disappointed. For the next thirty years he toiled as a U.S. postal worker, earning just enough to afford a small apartment in one of Chicago’s ubiquitous public
housing projects. When he retired in 1974, he and LaVaughn packed up and moved back to South Carolina.

  (If Michelle Robinson’s family tree seemed lacking in variety compared with that of her future husband, it was worth noting that one of her first cousins was a rabbi. Capers C. Funnye Jr. converted from Methodism to Judaism and in 1985 founded Chicago’s mostly black Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation. The only African American rabbi in the Chicago area recognized by the greater Jewish community, Funnye also became the first African American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and served on the board of the American Jewish Congress of the Midwest. Funnye, like most of the members of his congregation, believed that the original Israelites were black.)

  Michelle was six when the family relocated to South Shore, a more affluent neighborhood that stretched along the southern border of Lake Michigan. Following the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the neighborhood had undergone a profound transformation as black families moved in and white families fled. The Robinsons watched as, one by one, South Shore’s few remaining white families packed up, waved good-bye, and left.

  While this quiet exodus occurred without rancor—Marian remembered that there were no harsh words or overtly bad feelings between the whites who fled and the African Americans who stayed—the message was clear. “How do you think we felt?” a black neighbor said. “They were nice to our faces, but it was pretty clear we weren’t good enough to live next to.”