Michelle Obama

by David Colbert

  Over the next decade, three more Nesmith girls would arrive, and all of them would attend school. Fraser noticed that Frank and his wife took school seriously. "They pushed their kids hard into education," Fraser's niece Carrie Nelson told Washington Post reporter Shailagh Murray. "One day Uncle Fraser would, too, because that's what he learned from them." Just as important: He taught himself to read and write. Mrs. Nesmith, probably helped him, but according to family history he mostly learned on his own. That's not easy to do, as four-year-old Michelle would discover many years later.

  Fraser also took on new work—a lot of it. He had three jobs. One was at a lumber mill where Frank Nesmith had gone to work after leaving the railroad. The fast-growing Atlantic Coast Lumber Company had become the town's biggest employer, because few people were willing to work in the rice fields anymore. Fraser worked with the mill's kiln, the large oven where freshly cut boards were dried. He was also a shoemaker, and he sold newspapers on a street corner in Georgetown. One longtime resident of the city, Dorothy Taylor, told the Washington Post she remembered seeing him there when she was a student. For some reason, she knew that he always took his spare copies home and made sure his children read them—just like Michelle's mother brought home extra workbooks to keep Michelle and Craig ahead of their classes fifty years later.

  Fraser's children included a son named Fraser Jr. This is Michelle's grandfather—the one she has come to South Carolina to visit. Fraser Jr. was the oldest of nine children. Government records from 1930 show that the five oldest, ranging from seventeen-year-old Fraser to a seven-year-old brother, had all absorbed Fraser Sr.'s lessons about education and could read and write. Only the infants in the family couldn't.

  By the time Fraser Jr. was in his teens, his father had created a comfortable life for the large family. Fraser Jr. had done his part by excelling in school. He didn't go to college, however. By 1930, when he was eighteen, he was working in the lumber yard. The company now claimed to be the largest of its kind in the world, and it might have been. Its enormous factory produced hundreds of thousands of feet of boards a day, and its warehouse held millions of feet of lumber ready for shipment from the huge docks the company had built at Georgetown's port. It was one reason Fraser Sr. had been able to build a large home. Other family members, like Fraser Sr.'s brother, Gabriel, had also become comfortable thanks to work related to the lumber yard. Gabriel had bought a farm with his earnings. Fraser Jr. imagined the same success for himself. So he went to work.

  Then the Great Depression began. By 1932, the Atlantic Coast Lumber Company was out of business.

  THE GREAT MIGRATION

  Losing a job is bad enough, but for African Americans the Depression became dangerous in other ways. Racial violence had already increased during the previous few decades. It was now extreme.

  The problem had begun about a dozen years after the Civil War ended. At the time, the former Confederate states were still under the legal control of the national government in Washington, D.C., which put the U.S. Army in charge. In a way, the southern states were being treated as if they had been foreign countries during the war. That was, after all, exactly how they had asked to be treated before they lost the war. The goal of Reconstruction, as the federal government's plan was called, was to set rules that the states could follow in order to govern themselves again and have a voice in Congress. These rules included protections for the rights of African Americans, such as the right to vote.

  Reconstruction was strongly opposed in the South. The country's most notorious hate group, the Ku Klux Klan, was formed at this time. It was one of many white supremacy groups that sought to terrorize African Americans. An informal rebellion was taking place. This was a period of great violence against African Americans and whites who supported Reconstruction. Then Reconstruction suddenly ended, thanks to a political deal.

  After the votes were counted in the 1876 presidential election, both the Democrats and the Republicans claimed victory. For several months, legal fights and political arguments dragged on. At the last minute, a deal was struck to give the presidency to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, whose support came from the North. In return, the former Confederate states, who had backed the Democratic candidate, got what they wanted in the first place: An agreement to end Reconstruction.

  Soon old faces were back in power in the South. They immediately passed laws to take from African Americans the rights that were granted during Reconstruction. Voting rights were the first to go. They created elaborate rules designed specifically to exclude African Americans. Then they passed laws requiring segregation. In South Carolina, for example, it was illegal for a restaurant to serve whites and African Americans in the same room, even if the owner wanted to do so. These segregation laws were called "Jim Crow" laws, after an African American character in a music hall song.

  The lowest moment in the history of Jim Crow may have come in 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson and members of his cabinet introduced segregation in the federal government. This ranged from building crude office partitions to the firing of African American employees. Just a little later in Michelle's story, another connection between her life and the turning points of American history will appear when becomes part of Woodrow Wilson's most cherished legacy, a university built on the same beliefs he brought to the presidency.

  Voting rules and Jim Crow laws would be the target of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but that was still a long way off for young men like Michelle's grandfather. In the decade or so before the lumber yard closed, attacks on African Americans had become extreme. African Americans who had served in World War I came home in 1919 imagining that new opportunities waited for them. They found a fresh wave of Ku Klux Klan members who feared successful African Americans and were ready to do violence. The KKK and other groups and mobs even killed African American soldiers in uniform. The summer of 1919 is called "Red Summer" because so many riots against African Americans broke out. The first one happened in Charleston, South Carolina, not far from Georgetown.

  The lack of work, Jim Crow, violence: Michelle's grandfather decided he'd had enough. He did what more than a million southerners had done in the decade and a half or so since the beginning of World War I. He moved north.

  This was the tail end of what's now called the Great Migration. African Americans from the southern states moved to the cities of the North, often switching from jobs in farming to work in factories. The African American population of major northern cities boomed.

  Michelle's grandfather chose Chicago, where the family would stay until Michelle and Barack moved into the White House. By the time he arrived, the African American community had already ballooned to more than five times the size it had been in 1910. It was growing at ten times the rate of the city's overall growth. About one of every five new residents was African American. A quarter of a million African Americans lived in Chicago by the time Fraser Jr. arrived.

  A lot of them were looking for work. Michelle's grandfather eventually got a job at the post office. He met and married a Chicago native, LaVaughn Johnson, whose parents had moved to the city from Mississippi many years before. Michelle's middle name comes from this grandmother.

  Fraser Jr.'s dreams of success in Chicago didn't work out as he'd hoped, probably because of the timing of his move. The Depression hit hard. Then, after World War II, another wave of African Americans moved north—what historians call the Second Great Migration. Competiton for jobs was tough. More than that, he discovered segregation and racism in Chicago too. Regulations made it unusually difficult for African American families to freely choose where to live. Fraser Jr. and his wife ended up in one of the public housing projects that were within an accepted area. This bothered Fraser. "He was a very proud man. He was proud of lineage," Michelle told the Washington Post. "There was a discontent about him." Her grandfather remembered his childhood in South Carolina fondly and talked about it often. After leaving his job at the post office, Fraser Jr. didn't
waste time before moving south. He and Michelle's grandmother joined the same church, Bethel AME, where his family had been worshiping since before he was born. They became active in the Georgetown community.

  That's when Michelle's childhood trips to South Carolina began. Of course, she was a city girl. The loud and unfamiliar chirping of crickets kept her awake. She didn't like some of the food. But she met and came to know relatives she'd only heard about, and some she didn't know existed. She still has a lot of family in Georgetown.

  OTHER BRANCHES

  Some of Michelle's southern connections haven't been discovered yet. The story of her mother's side of the family is also not as clear as the story of her father's side. That's part of the African American experience too. Slave owners broke family ties. Slaves didn't leave the trail of official documents—land purchase contracts, for example, or wills—that historians usually follow. Because in many places slaves weren't allowed to read and write, they didn't leave personal letters behind.

  For instance, not much is known yet about Michelle's great-great-grandmother, Rosa Ellen Cohen, who was Fraser Jr.'s wife. She seems to be a descendant of one of the European families who moved to Georgetown in the late 1700s. There were a few branches of a family named Cohen, a Jewish family that may have come from Portugal. A modern descendant of the Cohens, Sadie Pasha, who has researched the family for many years, says at least one Cohen in Georgetown passed along his name to mixed-race children in the early 1800s.

  Without more evidence, we can't know the exact relationship that led to this branch of Michelle's family tree. There are at least a few possibilities.

  There's a small chance that Michelle is descended from a free African American woman who worked for one of the Cohen families and came to be known by the family name. Government records from early 1800s show 930 African Americans living in Georgetown, of whom eighty were free citizens. It's also known that some of the Jewish people in South Carolina had children with Native Americans. One of these children may have then formed a family with an African American woman and given her his name. But these aren't the most likely possibilities.

  Some of the Cohens owned slaves. Rosa Ellen was likely descended from a relationship between slave and owner. Michelle and the rest of her family believe there is at least one slave owner in her family tree.

  This subject isn't spoken about openly in every family. It leads to uncomfortable questions that are difficult to answer: Would the slave have chosen this relationship? Was the slave too frightened to refuse? Even if the relationship had been a loving one, those partnerships were never equal: If trouble arose, one partner had legal rights and the other had none. But a belief about a slave owner in the family isn't passed down lightly, even if it's passed down by whispers.

  Michelle, as usual, is open and direct about this. As she explained to the Washington Post, "A lot of times these stories get buried, because sometimes the pain of them makes it hard to want to remember," she said. "You've got to be able to acknowledge and understand the past and move on from it. You have to understand it, and I think a lot of us just don't have an opportunity to understand it. But it's there." Barack stated the family belief directly in his speech about race in America, "A More Perfect Union," given during the 2008 primary campaign: "I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners."

  If we do eventually confirm that Michelle has such an ancestor, as we probably will, we may still be surprised by the full story. Some of these relationships were more complicated than they first appear. Because the slavery laws in South Carolina made it almost impossible for some owners to free their slaves, some free citizens were married in every way but legally to spouses who were, by law, still slaves. But stories like these are exceptions.

  Michelle is focused on the positive. "An important message in this journey is that we're all linked," Michelle told the Post. "Somewhere there was a slave owner—or a white family in my great-grandfather's time that gave him a place, a home, that helped him build a life—that again led to me. So who were those people? I would argue they're just as much a part of my history as my great-grandfather."

  Her family story, she said, is like many others. "There are probably thousands of one-armed Frasers, all over this country, who, out of slavery and emancipation, because they were smart and worked hard, those American values, were able to lift themselves up." Yet when she finally learned the story as an adult, it also explained to her a lot about her own life. "It makes more sense to me," she said, "if the patriarch in our lineage was one-armed Fraser, a shoemaker with one arm, an entrepreneur, someone who was able to own property, and with sheer effort and determination was able to build a life in this town. That must have been the messages that my grandfather got."

  She could have added: And what he passed down.

  3. CLASS ACT

  September, 1977: Michelle's first day of high school. This isn't just around the corner, like Bryn Mawr elementary. Michelle's not going to the local high school. To get here, she has traveled an hour and a half on two city buses. Now the thirteen-year-old is in a part of the Chicago that seems to have more warehouses than homes.

  She chose this for herself. Her brother isn't going to the local high school, so why should she?

  MAGNET AND STEEL

  Craig attended Mount Carmel, a private boys' school. It was smaller than the local school, and tougher academically. It also had a great sports program. NFL star Donovan McNabb attended Mount Carmel in the 1990s, helping the team win a state championship. Antoine Walker of the NBA is another graduate. It was the perfect school for Michelle's brother. When he wasn't being challenged in the classroom, he was starring on the basketball court.

  But when it came to taking on challenges, Michelle had him beat. Her school, Whitney M. Young, was a true adventure.

  The distance from home was one reason. But Michelle could handle the daily trips, even though they sometimes added up to three hours. The classes at Kennedy-King College that were part of the gifted program at Bryn Mawr elementary had given her confidence.

  Whitney M. Young was also meant to be an experiment for Chicago. It opened just two years before Michelle started ninth grade. It was a magnet school, drawing kids from all over the city. Chicago had long been a collection of ethnic neighborhoods, with boundaries that were invisible but difficult to cross. Whitney M. Young was meant to erase those boundaries, at least for its students. It would be the first time that many of them, Michelle included, were in a class that reflected Chicago's diversity. It was a big step for the city, and for all the students who chose to attend.

  However, what really drew Michelle and most of her classmates were the school's superior academics. In addition to taking advanced placement classes, Whitney M. Young students could take college courses at the University of Illinois. In a way, it was like the gifted program at Bryn Mawr. It had no ceiling on the opportunities it offered. That made it perfect for a student who constantly pressured herself to take on new challenges.

  Dagny Bloland, a teacher at Whitney M. Young, echoed this in an interview with Washington Post reporter and Michelle author Liza Mundy: "When [Michelle] applied and came here, the tradition of leaving one's neighborhood to go to high school was very new, and a person had to be very gutsy to do it. For most of the kids who came here in those times, the idea that you would take two or three buses and a train to come here was a very new idea.... It was a real experiment to come here. I think you had to be the sort of person and the sort of family that would put education above everything else."

  "Gutsy" might be the perfect word to describe Michelle in high school. It was hard work for her. She was one of those students who do not do well in tests, something she still mentions in speeches. So she made up for it in other ways. Her brother remembered her doing her homework for hours without stopping, while he would rush through his, play basketball, and watch television. But she made the honor roll all four years, and was inducted into the National H
onor Society.

  By this time, her mother had already stopped pushing her. There was no need. Harriette Cole of Ebony magazine asked Marian Robinson, "What would happen if [Michelle] came home with grades that weren't the best grades?" Michelle's mom thought that was pretty funny. "That didn't happen," she said, laughing.

  But it almost did. A typing teacher gave Michelle a B, even though Michelle had scored enough for an A on the scoring scale the teacher had posted for the class. The teacher's reason? She just didn't give As. That was her philosophy. Michelle was furious. That just wasn't right—and Michelle had long before developed a way of dealing with things that just weren't right. "She badgered and badgered that teacher," Michelle's mother remembered with admiration and amusement. "I finally called her and told her, 'Michelle is not going to let this go.' " Michelle got the grade she'd earned.

  Another word comes up again and again in interviews with classmates: "focused." Classmate Michelle Ealey Toliver told biographer Liza Mundy, "She didn't goof off like some other students.... She was on a very advanced, focused track." (That made her the exact opposite of her future husband. "I was sort of a goof-off," Barack once told his Chicago Tribune reporter and biographer David Mendell.)

  Both the public that knows Michelle through the media and the family that knows her best would be surprised to learn a few classmates remember Michelle as quiet. This wasn't shyness. It was a no-nonsense attitude about work. But as Barack would one day realize, even before her family did, there was also a more serious element to it. There was some fear. She was still a kid who could see from her father's example that trouble could appear at any moment.