Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  Four years after Wright arrived, Fraser C. Robinson Jr. alighted on the South Side. He had traveled north and west from a small town in coastal South Carolina called Georgetown—in honor of King George II, not George Washington. It was known locally for rice farming, timber mills, and the plantation economy. Robinson was born in 1912 to a one-armed father as imperious as he was successful, a lumber company worker and businessman who owned his own home on an integrated block. Just one generation earlier, and for generations before that, the family had lived in slavery, when countless Robinsons and their kin were owned by white people. After the Civil War came and went and Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, they stayed put. They continued to speak Gullah, a distinctive English-based creole language descended from languages brought from West Africa.

  African American voters held a majority in Georgetown as late as 1900, when the town’s white leaders decided enough was enough. The tipping point came in September, when hundreds of black residents massed outside the county jail to protect a black barber named John Brownfield from a lynching. A white sheriff’s deputy had tried to arrest Brownfield for failing to pay a poll tax. There was a scuffle. The deputy caught a bullet from his own gun and died a few hours later. Brownfield went to jail on suspicion of murder. As word spread that white men were organizing a lynching party, as many as a thousand black residents gathered outside the jail and chanted “Save John!” The demonstrations grew, and Georgetown’s white mayor persuaded the state’s governor to send soldiers to restore order.

  In court, Brownfield was convicted and sentenced to death for capital murder, while he and eight others were found guilty of crimes connected to the protests. White community leaders formed a White Supremacy Club and used literacy tests and poll taxes to cull black citizens from voter rolls. By 1902, only 110 of the city’s 523 voters were black. The same was true in other southern states. In Louisiana, about 130,000 black people were registered to vote in 1896; in 1904, the total was 1,342. In Alabama, 2 percent of eligible black men were registered “and they risked serious reprisals if they attempted to exercise their right to vote.” With the white minority firmly in control, the portents looked uniformly bad. “The whites in power,” wrote Rachel Swarns in American Tapestry, a study of Michelle Obama’s ancestry, “made it clear that there was no future for ambitious black men in Georgetown.”

  Finishing Howard High School at the end of the 1920s, Fraser Robinson Jr. considered himself “a young man destined for better things.” Others saw him the same way. A skilled debater and strong student, he envisioned college and perhaps a career in the emerging field of electronics. But he felt certain that such a future did not await him in Georgetown, where he found himself working in a timber mill as the Depression took hold. “He wanted a different kind of life. He had high hopes,” recalled his daughter, Francesca. When a friend left for Chicago, Fraser followed.

  FROM THE START, things went poorly for the man who would one day be Michelle’s exacting paternal grandfather. Jobs in Chicago were scarce and Fraser always seemed to be a temporary hire. He set up pins in a bowling alley. He washed dishes. He worked in a laundry and undertook the workaday chores of a handyman. It soon became clear that college was out of the question, as was a career in electronics. To get steady work as an electrician required membership in a union that barred African Americans. He eventually found a regular income with the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, but the money did not stretch far. As he made his way, he gave up the African Methodist Episcopal church of his youth in favor of a South Side Pentecostal church called Full Gospel Mission. There, he began courting a focused and prayerful teenager in the choir, LaVaughn Johnson. She was the daughter of James Johnson, a sometime Baptist preacher who had done duty as a Pullman porter and owner of a shoe repair shop. After a quiet stretch in Evanston, Illinois, in the 1920s, the Johnsons moved around as he sought stable work. Financial pressure brought trouble, and the marriage between James and his wife, Phoebe, came undone. James moved out, leaving Phoebe on the South Side with their seven children, the oldest twenty-seven, the youngest five. LaVaughn stayed in school, but soon began spending her off hours working alongside her mother in the homes of white families. She did laundry and took care of children in Hyde Park, where her granddaughter Michelle would live seventy years later in relative splendor.

  Fraser and LaVaughn married in October 1934. He was twenty-two years old, three years removed from South Carolina. She was nineteen, barely eight months out of high school. In August 1935, they had a son and named him Fraser C. Robinson III. The city, in the teeth of the Great Depression, was overflowing with unskilled black laborers who had streamed into town in search of something like a future. The pace of migration was startling. In 1910, one in fifty Chicago residents was black; in 1940, it was one in twelve. During those thirty years, the city’s African American population grew 530 percent, to 277,731 residents. The population would continue to climb during the boom years of World War II and beyond as passenger trains delivered thousands of new residents each month to the imposing Illinois Central terminal, within sight of the downtown skyscrapers. Chicago was called the city of big shoulders, not the city of open arms, and the vast majority of African Americans found themselves squeezed into a slice of the South Side called the Black Belt. Some called it North Mississippi. To others, it was Darkie Town.

  Segregation in housing was the rule. For years, white community leaders used restrictive covenants and race-minded civic organizations—known without irony as “improvement associations”—to keep blacks out. Mob violence and intimidation played a part. The Federal Housing Administration, founded in 1934, refused to insure mortgages in neighborhoods that were home to more than a small number of black people. The policy, known as redlining, meant that banks would not loan money to most African Americans, which kept property largely out of reach. In 1940, when Michelle’s father was five years old, three-fourths of Chicago’s black population lived in neighborhoods that were more than 90 percent black. Fully 350 of the city’s 935 census tracts had not a single black resident. Housing in the Black Belt tended to be inhospitable and, as more African Americans arrived from the South, increasingly cramped. To accommodate the newcomers and line their own pockets, landlords carved buildings into smaller and smaller units, often without plumbing, even as they charged rents far higher than white people paid elsewhere in the city.

  Overcrowding and poor sanitation contributed to rates of illness and death that were higher among black Chicagoans than among white ones. Tuberculosis in 1940 was five times more prevalent among black residents. Three black infants died before their first birthday for every two white infants who did. By 1945, more than half of the Black Belt was considered “blighted” by city planners and real estate assessors. Equality was at best a mirage, at worst a hoax. Which is not to say that Chicago did not hold out hope for a better future. But the equation was a complicated one. The deck was stacked, and it would remain that way well into Michelle’s lifetime. As Barack Obama would say of his in-laws and their lives in the 1960s, “They faced what other African American families faced at the time—both hidden and overt forms of racism that limited their effort to get ahead.”

  IN THE MID-1930S, when Michelle’s father was born, money was tight in the Robinson household. LaVaughn again took up housecleaning. She gave birth to Nomenee in July 1937 and later to a third son, John, who died as a baby. Under the strains that grew as the decade passed, the relationship between husband and wife that had started strongly ended abruptly. By the end of the 1930s, the elder Fraser was through with the marriage. Soon after, he was through with Chicago, at least for the time being. He enlisted in the army in March 1941, giving his height as five feet, eight inches, and his weight as 153 pounds. A form noted his marital status as “separated, without dependants [sic].”

  LaVaughn’s day-to-day challenges grew harder. Living on East 57th Street near State Street, she turned to public assistance before finding her wa
y into a federal job, working in the publications office at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Her sons visited her there. With Fraser leading the way, the boys climbed aboard a northbound streetcar and stepped off downtown. They rode upstairs in an elevator cage and visited their mother in the room where she operated a mimeograph machine. To help with the boys during the early years, LaVaughn looked to friends and relatives. She relied especially on two older women from Georgetown, who sometimes spoke Gullah as the children listened. She also remained close to her church, taking young Fraser and Nomenee with her to Full Gospel Mission on Sundays. The storefront church had rigid rules and lively music. “If a church doesn’t jump, so to speak, I don’t feel that there’s any holy spirit there,” said Nomenee, who called it a wonderful experience. He remembered the boost he got from a pastor who called him “my little preacher” and told him he had a gift for words. As for his mother, in his telling she was “religiously sheltered” while growing up and, as an adult, always proper and “very, very prayerful.” Finding a way to blend faith with a measure of professional ambition, LaVaughn would go on to manage a Moody Bible Institute store in Chicago, the first African American woman to do so. In 1958, her twenty-two-year-old son Fraser gave her a Bible for Mother’s Day. Fifty-five years later, with Michelle holding that Bible in the Blue Room, Barack Obama would take the oath of office for his second term in the White House.

  Although money was always scarce, LaVaughn strongly encouraged Fraser and Nomenee in musical and artistic pursuits. “Everything educational, they got it,” her sister Mary Lang said. They learned to swim and ice-skate and to always do their schoolwork. Money mattered, but Nomenee recalled a time when his mother’s caution about his safety trumped her concern about the family’s finances. For Christmas one year, he received a set of molds in the shapes of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, and other Disney characters. “I just loved that little toy because you had some plaster and you’d take that off and let it sit and harden. You’d shellac them and paint them. So, one day, I just decided to keep making them. I had forty sitting on the table or something. I came up with this idea that I’m going to sell them.” He put them in an old shoebox and asked his mother to buy him a receipt book. “I never told her what I was doing. I said I’m going to try to go into business. She was just laughing.”

  While his mother was at work, Nomenee began walking through the neighborhood, knocking on apartment doors. “I said, ‘Miss, would you like to buy one of these? Thirty-five cents, three for a dollar.’ You know, she’ll say, ‘Honey, come here, look at this! Look at this little boy!’ So, one week, I collected thirteen-something dollars, a lot of money. I put it on the table in front of Mom.” Shocked, she asked where the money had come from. Nomenee said he had gone into business selling Disney figures and reminded her that she was the one who had bought the receipt book. LaVaughn was not amused. “Don’t you dare go out there again knocking on people’s doors,” she told her son. “Somebody’s going to snatch you.” That ended the sales enterprise.

  World War II took Fraser Jr. to Europe and, by his children’s accounts, made him stronger. He worked with radios and climbed in rank in a segregated unit, years before President Harry Truman ordered the military’s integration in 1948. “I think he finally had the opportunity to use his skills and gifts in the army. He had a sense of autonomy in some respects,” said Francesca, his only daughter, born in Chicago long after the war. Fraser would return to the South Side, but for years he kept a certain distance from the family. “He’ll come by once a year or so and take us to the circus. That was our encounter with him,” said Nomenee, who recalled visits to a railroad fair in downtown Chicago and occasional trips to the movies. His father lived just a few blocks away, but it might as well have been across the state. His mother knew the location; the children did not.

  After Fraser’s army stint and several years back on the South Side, he returned to the family, which in time would grow to include three more children. They were Andrew, Carlton, and Francesca, named for a friendly Italian woman who delivered milk and eggs to Fraser and other black American soldiers bivouacked near her farm. It had been more than a decade since his departure, but he rejoined the household as a prideful man, confident and often stern, a disciplinarian possessed of firm ideas about right and wrong. It was no accident that he became a master sergeant during his army years. He could be hard on the boys, recalled Nomenee, who said he challenged his father’s authority more than his brother did. Once, in Nomenee’s early teens, his father started to whip him for a misdeed, now forgotten. Young Fraser stepped in. “He happened to hear me screaming. He came in and said, ‘That’s enough, Dad. That’s enough.’ He held his hands and Dad couldn’t move, couldn’t pull away. We never had any whippings after that.” When he was raising his own children years later, Fraser III would not spank them. He left that chore to his wife.

  When Fraser III and Nomenee grew older, they were expected to work in addition to fulfilling their school responsibilities. “We had to contribute. It’s not like we were making that much money, but it’s just that that was Dad’s system,” said Nomenee, who recalled that one boy might be responsible for the phone bill, another for the light bill or groceries. One of Fraser’s first jobs was as a dairy helper, hefting glass bottles of Wanzer Dairy milk—motto: “Wanzer on milk is like sterling on silver”;—to customers’ doorsteps and returning with the empties. He worked on the horse-drawn cart of a vegetable deliveryman, also for a hat-maker and a cleaning company. Being a swimmer on his high school team, the Sea Horses, Fraser sometimes found work as a lifeguard. When he could, Fraser passed along his old jobs to Nomenee, two years younger. “We had to be hustlers, in the positive sense of hustling,” Nomenee said. “We had to figure out ways.”

  LAVAUGHN WAS DETERMINED to open a door to a wider world for her children. In the mid-1940s, when he was about eleven years old, Fraser caught a bus on Saturday mornings to the Art Institute of Chicago, a grand beaux-arts edifice on Michigan Avenue. There, he discovered painting and sculpture. With classmates at what was then called the Junior School, he worked in an array of disciplines. One of his teachers was Nelli Bar Wieghardt, a German-Jewish sculptor and refugee from wartime Europe. “Her style was very open, looking to discover what strengths the student had and encouraging them,” said Richard Hunt, another black student of hers, born the same year as Fraser. “More embracing than strict,” Hunt said, and less wedded to academic conventions than to approaches more abstract and flowing. Hunt remembered lunch discussions about race relations in the United States. Wieghardt was startled by what she found after “escaping and coming to the land of the free and then discovering what it was in terms of black-white relations.” For Hunt, who traveled to the Junior School on Saturdays from the bustling working-class streets of Englewood, one discipline led to another as he studied drawing and painting, watercolors and oils, still life and figures. Looking back after becoming a professional sculptor, he remembered an eclectic and engaging array of Art Institute instructors. Classrooms and studios were tucked into basement spaces, but, just upstairs, students had the run of a flourishing museum. “The teachers might suggest, ‘Why don’t you go up and look at Rodin?’ ”

  Fraser’s passion for art was understated, but enduring. It set him apart at DuSable High School, where his interests ran from painting and sculpture to swimming and boxing. A full-page photograph in the 1953 Red and Black, the school yearbook, shows him dressed in a sport coat, sculpting a bust. “You’d hardly know he was around,” said classmate Reuben Crawford. “He was going about the business of being the business, as we used to say. He was very quiet and into his art.” If he could have afforded it, Michelle said later, her father would have made art his profession. “He was quite an artist,” Nomenee agreed, acknowledging a certain envy that started at an early age. He saw Fraser, who led parades and took trips as a young drum major, as smoothly talented and sociable, a steady soul who made friends easily. He had fashion sense and style. �
��He was very self-confident,” his brother said. “He was secure with himself.”

  FRASER CELEBRATED his seventeenth birthday in 1952, shortly before starting his final year at DuSable. The previous year, Nelson Algren had published his essay Chicago: City on the Make, mocking the bilious self-promotion of city leaders and their notion of Chicago as a place where color did not matter. He argued that race relations were grounded in a “protean awareness of white superiority everywhere, in everything.” Algren, a white novelist later known for his novel about heroin addiction, The Man with the Golden Arm, told of rents pegged higher for black residents, and restaurants and bars that were unofficially, but certainly, off-limits. “Make your own little list,” he wrote. “Of the streets you mustn’t live on, the hotels where you can’t register, the offices you can’t work in and the unions you can never join.”

  Among DuSable students, many of them children of the Great Migration, blackness was widely discussed and understood. It was not only a fact of life, it was the X factor in their futures. Encounters with racism, studied in school and experienced outside, would shape their thinking and their decisions, not least about what lessons to teach the next generation. The high school itself was named for Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, a black fur trader regarded as the first permanent settler of Chicago. Born in 1745 in what is now Haiti, his story was important to the high school’s identity from the time it was christened in 1936. “We were taught the history of Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable,” said Charlie Brown, a 1954 DuSable graduate who reported that African American history lessons stretched throughout the school year. Students regularly discussed “all the hardships the black people went through.”