The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  Given the difficult personal times and the Depression era, Chicago-born Fraser III grew up poor, and the family spent some time on welfare during his childhood. As a result he began working on a milk truck at the age of eleven. As an adult, Fraser worked at the Chicago Water Department tending boilers as a pump operator despite being physically challenged by multiple sclerosis, which he had developed when he was young. He walked with crutches but still managed to be an outstanding employee who rarely missed a day of work.

  At one point, Marian Lois Shields and Fraser Robinson III met, fell in love, and married. They would occupy a one-bedroom apartment in a brick bungalow in an essentially all-black neighborhood. Marian worked as a secretary but left the job to start a family. She and Fraser had two children, Craig (April 21, 1962) and Michelle (January 17, 1964). Fraser would play a key role in the achievements of his children, but he died in 1991 before he could witness the heights of their success. Marian and Fraser had always emphasized the importance of education, and both children were extremely bright. They excelled academically, both learning to read at age four. According to Craig, in 1979, when he was indecisive about whether he should go to Princeton University or the less prestigious but more affordable University of Washington or Purdue University, he turned to his father for counsel. His father stated, “If you pick your school based on how much you have to pay, I’ll be very disappointed.”11

  Craig went to Princeton. He later became a successful businessman and then a winning basketball coach at Brown University and Oregon State University.12 His younger sister, Michelle, followed him to Princeton two years later. Thus began the path that would eventually lead to her meeting a young black lawyer named Barack Obama.

  Michelle became very conscious about issues of discrimination and prejudice while studying at Princeton, a time she describes as difficult for her and the other few black students on campus. Her senior thesis was titled, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” where she wrote that her experiences at the school made her more aware of her “blackness” than ever before and that, “I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus, as if I really don’t belong.”13 Despite these feelings, she dug in and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology. Three years later she earned a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School, graduating only months before Obama started working toward his law degree at the same school. Michelle went to work for the Sidley Austin law firm in Chicago in 1988, and the following year she met Obama, who was a summer intern assigned to the firm. On October 18, 1992, the couple married at Trinity United Church; Michelle’s childhood friend Santita Jackson, Jesse Jackson’s daughter, sang at the ceremony.

  Michelle’s life was changing dramatically during this time. Her father died the year before her marriage, and she decided to leave the corporate world for more public service–oriented work. She took a job as an assistant to Mayor Richard Daley Jr., became Chicago’s Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development, and then developed community outreach programs for the University of Chicago, University of Chicago Hospitals, and University of Chicago Medical Center. This work would place her in a position to meet and work with people, organizations, and institutions all across the city. She clearly had the capacity, skill, talent, and connections to be a successful politician, if she so desired. That role, however, would be played by her husband. It is likely that Michelle’s father Fraser, the former precinct captain, would have relished his son-in-law’s interest, involvement, and success in Chicago politics.

  This was the historical environment and context—a trajectory through the slave plantations of South Carolina, tenant farms of Georgia, and black working-class neighborhoods of Chicago—that produced Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, a gifted, sophisticated, intelligent, committed, forthright, and physically stunning woman who has brought a superb dignity to the White House. She has been steadfast in the face of racist attacks on her, her husband, and even her family, as well as sexist attacks on herself, always responding, when response was called for, in an appropriate and measured manner.

  During Obama’s run for the White House, most critics viewed her articulate, poised, and dignified presence as a valuable asset to the campaign. There was an effort by some conservatives—including Cindy McCain, John McCain’s wife—to portray her as anti-American after she stated at a February 18, 2008, rally in Madison, Wisconsin, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.” The charge did not stick. Most people of color rejected the accusation that Michelle was “anti-American.” For many African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and others, the country’s long violent history of racist exclusion has never been a source of pride. For communities of color, who have been marginalized for generations, endured segregation, and survived the era of lynching, it has been the nation’s progressive steps—such as ending legal discrimination or long-standing racial, gender, or class barriers—that have inspired a sense of pride, patriotism, and national community.

  President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, in the Green Room of the White House, September 1, 2009.

  On January 20, 2009, the Obama family—Michelle, Barack, their daughters Malia Ann and Natasha (Sasha), and Michelle’s mother Marian—officially moved into the White House. The long saga of African Americans and the White House that began with enslavement, followed by a century of legal segregation and racist terrorism, and continuing with present-day racial disparities, had finally culminated in changing the color of the residents of the most famous address in the nation, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. For the first time in U.S. history, the First Family in the White House was African American.

  Becoming the First Black President of the United States of America

  I’ve seen levels of compliance with the civil rights bill and changes that have been most surprising. So, on the basis of this, I think we may be able to get a Negro president in less than 40 years. I would think that this could come in 25 years or less.14—Martin Luther King Jr. in an interview with the BBC, on his way to Oslo, Norway, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

  When Martin Luther King Jr. made his prediction about when a black presidency might be possible, he was responding to a question from a BBC interviewer. King began his response by stating, “Well let me say first that I think it is necessary to make it clear there are Negroes who are presently qualified to be president of the United States. There are many who are qualified in terms of integrity, in terms of vision, in terms of leadership ability.”15 King’s assertion about black leaders’ integrity, vision, and leadership capabilities was one that most whites—even the most liberal—would have rejected at the time. King was also, of course, astute enough to identify the barriers to such an event. He went on to add, “But we do know there are certain problems and prejudices and mores in our society that make it difficult now.”16 Clearly King was being diplomatic and calculated in his words: at that point he had been the target of assassination attempts, and the body count of murdered civil rights organizers was growing. In many ways, a second Civil War was under way, as White Citizens Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, law enforcement, elected officials, and others with a vested interest in the system of segregation were armed and ready for a fight to the death.

  All that said, King still painted a hopeful picture of the years ahead, stating, “I’m very optimistic about the future. Frankly, I have seen certain changes in the United States over the last two years that have surprised me.”17 King is speaking in late 1964, a few months after the Civil Rights Act had been signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, before the battle over the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the horrific attacks by police officers, state troopers, and local thugs on civil rights activists, notably on that last great march of the era, over the Pettus Bridge near Selma, Alabama.18

  The journalist’s question had bee
n inspired by an earlier quote from then attorney general Robert Kennedy, who stated in May 1961, “There’s no question that in the next thirty or forty years, a Negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as President of the United States, certainly within that period of time.”19 Given the toxic racial divisions at the time, including legal segregation, Kennedy was speaking very optimistically, perhaps assuming a much greater capacity and willingness on the part of his newly elected brother John to move a civil rights agenda, tone down the vitriolic rage spewing out of the South, and deal with a Congress dominated by Southern Dixiecrats. Both King and Kennedy would come up slightly short in their prediction of when the first black president of the United States would be elected.

  Race, Racism, and Obama’s White House

  I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together—unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction—towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.—Barack Obama

  How long does it take to become president of the United States? By one measure, it took Barack Obama 1,638 days, from July 27, 2004, when he gave the celebrated speech at the Democratic National Convention that introduced him and his message of unity to the nation, to January 20, 2009, when he took the oath of office. His meteoric political ascent to command the highest office in the land was driven, of course, by all that came before him, a long preparatory period for the nation’s racial politics and much more. Paradoxically, Obama won because of race and in spite of it.

  The images of the Obama family entering the White House transfixed the world. Aware of the long history of white enslavement and racial segregation of blacks, millions across the globe sensed that they were witnessing a barrier of immense importance being broken, and the image of the White House and of the United States itself would be forever transformed. The worldwide celebration of Obama’s electoral triumph and subsequent inauguration bespoke an identification on the part of billions and their hope that social marginalization, discrimination, and oppression could be overcome.

  Scholars will be analyzing and reinterpreting the Obamas for a long time to come. That it took the nation and world by surprise and by storm is an understatement. Despite King’s optimism, seen in the epigraph above, perhaps only the most imaginative science fiction writer could have predicted in 2001 that in less than ten years the United States would have its first black commander in chief and that that individual would be an unknown junior senator from Illinois with the unusual Middle Eastern–sounding name: Barack Hussein Obama.

  One question will vex traditional Democratic and Republican strategists for the rest of their lives: How was Obama able to defeat both the powerful Clinton political machine and the entire Republican Party operation? Obama won for three reasons: he had a compelling message, he had a compelling strategy, and he had a compelling personal narrative. None of these variables by themselves would have sufficed, but their confluence proved victorious in the atmospherics of 2008.

  A Compelling Message: Change People Wanted to Believe In

  Throughout his fight for the White House, Obama’s strategic brilliance was to turn his principal negative into his most expressed positive. There was simply no way he could compare his experience and political history with that of his main Democratic or Republican rivals (not counting the ill-chosen, ignorant, shallow, and untested Sarah Palin). He had been in the U.S. Senate less than three years before jumping into the race. However, his timing was fortunate as the country became increasingly irritated with both Republican and Democratic leaders. Thus, he used their experience against them. His call for change was in sync with the mood of the nation. His straightforward message became a pledge for “a change you can believe in.”

  In one sense, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the excesses of their administration prepared the way for Obama’s victory. In the days following September 11, 2001, Bush achieved the highest rating for a president since such data has been recorded. By the time he left office, he had fallen to one of the lowest levels of popularity in U.S. history. On nearly every possible issue, the American public gave the Bush White House failing grades. Bush had started two wars, both of which spiraled out of U.S. control, killed untold thousands, and became vastly unpopular. While the nation and the international community had supported the response of the United States to attack al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that supported it, the war was deprioritized and lost focus after the December 2001 Battle of Tora Bora failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his top leadership.

  Bush and Cheney then focused on Iraq and built a case to invade based upon alleged intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq War quickly evolved into a deadly affair with mounting Iraqi and U.S. deaths despite global opposition and the revelation that the premises for going to war were false. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Long a foe of the United States, Saddam Hussein had been contained by a wide range of international and U.S.-led political, economic and military punishments. While he periodically rattled his saber, his rash and murderous behavior was reduced to the harm he brought to the people of his own country. Nevertheless, despite public protest, the Bush administration invaded Iraq in February 2003.

  Obama had been part of a handful of Democratic leaders who spoke out against the war. On September 15, 2001, in the ultra-paranoid days immediately following the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Representative Barbara Lee, an African American legislator from the Bay Area in northern California, was the only member of Congress to vote no on Bush’s war powers measure. The motion she voted against gave the president virtually unlimited license to exercise “all necessary and appropriate force” on anyone associated with the terrorist attacks, authority the administration would exploit to the fullest. The resolution passed 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House of Representatives.

  By 2002, when Obama began thinking about running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, the Bush administration’s fear-mongering PR machine pushed the notion that links existed between Iraq and al Qaeda in order to drum up public support for launching a second war. Obama, however, embraced the opposition and gave a speech at an antiwar rally in Chicago on October 2, declaring, “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”20

  Although his position was deemed risky politically at the time, it would be the votes cast in support of the invasion by Senator Hilary Clinton and Obama’s other Democratic presidential opponents (excluding Rep. Dennis Kucinich) that would become liabilities. By the beginning of 2008, despite the military escalation known as the “surge” that desperately tried to halt and reverse its losing trend, popular opinion had turned against the war and, to a degree, against Democrats and Republicans who had supported it.

  Obama’s clarion call for change resonated on many other fronts as well. Bush and Cheney’s record of unresponsiveness to the economic and social calamities faced by millions of Americans also undermined support for their administration. The ineffective, insensitive, and inadequate response to the devastation wrought in New Orleans and elsewhere in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was symptomatic of his administration’s real and perceived callousness. The image released by the White House of Bush flying over the devastated areas was meant to show his concern, but the photo op only cemented the perception that he cared little about low-income and working-class people across racial lines.

  A third decisive issue was the economic collapse that Bush
policies facilitated and then ineptly addressed in a belated and controversial manner. He pushed through tax cuts while not only fighting two wars but also creating the largest government agency in U.S. history—The Department of Homeland Security. When Bush won the White House in 2000, Clinton was overseeing a budget surplus of $236 billion. Bush inherited a surplus of $128 billion. In his first year, Bush doled out $630 billion in tax cuts to the richest 1 percent of Americans and the transition to a spiraling deficit began. By July 2008, he was projecting a budget deficit of $482 billion.21

  While Obama’s Republican rival, John McCain, engaged in unproductive stunts such as dramatically suspending his campaign to fly back to D.C. in superhero mode to rescue the economy, or stating one day that the economy was fine and the next that it was not, or being unaware of how many houses he owned, Obama appeared steady, rational, deliberate, and presidential. It was impossible not to blame the Republicans for the state of the economy, given Bush’s eight years in office and his party’s control of Congress for six of those years. In the final months of the campaign, McCain desperately and unsuccessfully attempted to distance himself from Bush.

  Hillary Clinton finally realized in the primary campaigns, and McCain in the general election, that a message of change carried a lot more credibility than declaring one’s long experience within a political system widely viewed as corrupted, mismanaged, and illegitimate, but their tardy embrace of a rhetoric of change was too little, too late.22 The eight years of Bush and Cheney’s political perfidy, economic mutilations, cowboy foreign policy, and social divisiveness opened the door for an outsider.