Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  One of the most freewheeling and influential teachers during Fraser Robinson’s years at DuSable was the main art teacher, Margaret Burroughs, who laced her lessons with African American history and current events. A young girl when she moved to Chicago from Louisiana with her family in the early 1920s, she joined the NAACP Youth Council as a teenager and studied at the Art Institute on her way to helping create a South Side art center and the DuSable Museum of African American History. Beseeching her students to take pride in their history, she instructed them to press onward when “faced with abhorrence of everything that is black.” Burroughs’s attitudes and activism were evident, not just to her students, but to higher-ups at the Chicago Board of Education who summoned her downtown in 1952 to explain herself. At first, she thought she might be getting a promotion. Instead, they questioned her views of communists and their sympathizers, including Earl Browder and one of her heroes, Paul Robeson. Burroughs said she was never given a reason, but she suspected it was her advocacy of black history, which, she said, “was considered subversive at the time.”

  The central message at DuSable was perseverance in the face of inequality, the idea that it was important to know the past but not be bound by it. Painted above the stage in DuSable High’s ornate auditorium were the words “Peace if possible, but justice at any rate.” The phrase came from Wendell Phillips, a white abolitionist in the nineteenth century and president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. “An agitator by profession,” a prominent historian called him. Nearly sixty years after graduation, Charlie Brown could recite the DuSable epigram from memory. To him, the eight words registered as a demand for fairness, for it was undeniable that African Americans faced long odds. “When you lived in Chicago back then,” he said, “you understood how white society described a black person, or a Negro. One drop of blood, you were a Negro.” Brown was the star of the DuSable basketball team, a six-foot-two forward on the 1953 and 1954 squads that won the city title and became the first all-black teams to compete downstate in the Illinois state tournament. When DuSable played a white team, the coach warned his players to be at least 20 points ahead entering the fourth quarter, especially if it was an away game. “We didn’t look for any favorable calls from the refs,” Brown said. “In those days, racism was not hidden at all.”

  LONG BEFORE the civil rights movement became national news, African American adults on the South Side of Chicago often conveyed a message that acknowledged the obstacles without surrendering to them. Young people learned that they needed to work hard to prove themselves; they needed to be twice as good as whites to get just as far. They had less room for error than their white peers. Unfair? Yes, but that was the deal. No cavalry would ride to their rescue. “If one word came out of my father’s mouth more than any other word, it was discipline, self-control,” said Bernard Shaw, who grew up on the South Side and became an on-air reporter for CNN. “My mother used to say, ‘It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.’ My father used to say, ‘It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.’ ” Yet these were not the standard admonitions that parents of any ethnicity might deliver about character and good manners. Rather, the Shaws were instructing their son on how to succeed in a society dominated by white people. “Racism pervaded city life,” he said. “It certainly trickled down to the high school level.” To succeed, as Fraser’s classmate Reuben Crawford had said, you had to be about the business of being the business.

  Children of the Great Migration learned that their job was to reach a higher rung than the one their parents occupied. “You had to do better. So much was expected of you,” said Crawford, whose father supported his family by working two jobs, one of them as a window washer for the Chicago Board of Education. “You knew to respect your elders and do what you had to do. No nonsense, that was the key.” Crawford played the clarinet, made the honor roll, and held an after-school job, working as a busboy at Gus’ Good Food on North Dearborn. He learned a trade, dye-setting. The values ran deep. Going to church every Sunday was not required, but the moral imperative was strong: “Just do what you’re supposed to do when you’re interacting with people. Treat all people alike. Don’t misuse them. That’s God’s will.”

  The message was very much the same at Fraser and LaVaughn Robinson’s dinner table, said to Capers Funnye, a nephew, who recalled “an absolute conviction for what’s right. You don’t embarrass your family. You don’t embarrass yourself.” He ascribed a “tenacity” to the elder Fraser, recalling his message to the younger generation, especially to black boys: “You don’t have time to be a slacker. If that’s what you want to be, you’re wasting your life. You’re in competition. And as a person who’s a Negro, you have to work twice as hard. You have to always be willing to step forward to prove your worth. You have to adjust to the situation. Move forward.” In a world of equal opportunity, Fraser might have become a college professor, believed Funnye, who attended Howard University, converted to Judaism, and became a South Side rabbi. Indeed, some people who knew Fraser in South Carolina in the early years called him “professor.” He “encouraged striving, he encouraged pushing,” Funnye said. If someone in the family were wasting talents and opportunities, he would demand, “What are you doing? We don’t have time for this.” Although the system might be rigged, the message was to carry on, steadfast and undaunted.

  FRASER III TURNED TWENTY in 1955, the summer of Emmett Till. On August 28, two white men in a Mississippi Delta town kidnapped the visiting fourteen-year-old from his great-uncle’s house, lynched him, and dropped his body, weighted with a hundred-pound cotton gin fan, into the Tallahatchie River. His alleged crime was whistling at a white woman who tended a shop in rural Money, Mississippi. After Till’s mutilated body reached Chicago on an Illinois Central train, his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, decreed that the casket should remain open so that “all the world” would bear witness. For anyone living in the city—and certainly on the South Side, where mourners paid their respects at the A. A. Rayner & Sons Funeral Home—there was no avoiding the shocking news. The papers were filled with it. A photographer from Jet magazine took photographs, one with Bradley looking on. “Few photographs … can lay claim to equally universal impact upon black observers,” wrote historian Adam Green, who traced the ripples. Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote poems about the case. James Baldwin made it the foundation of his play Blues for Mister Charlie. Eldridge Cleaver and Anne Moody said the killing influenced their political paths. Muhammad Ali told an interviewer, “I couldn’t get Emmett Till out of my mind.”

  In Chicago, thousands upon thousands of people filed past the casket during five days of shock and mourning that ended with a large funeral service at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. Before the month was out, a rally at the city’s Metropolitan Church had attracted another ten thousand. Three months later, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. One thought running through her head as she sat there, she said many years later, was Till’s death.

  BY THE TIME of Till’s murder, Fraser Robinson Jr. was earning his living in a post office job offered to war veterans, a valuable pathway to the middle class in an era when prejudice often limited private-sector opportunity. It was not electrical engineering, his long ago dream, but it was steady and it allowed him to salt away some savings. He was a frugal man who believed that when you put money in the bank, you never take it out. Settling back in together as a family, he and LaVaughn took a step rare for African Americans at the time and bought an apartment. It was located in the Parkway Gardens Homes, rising on fifteen acres at the old White City Amusement Park grounds in Woodlawn, just east of the rail yards. Parkway Gardens, described as “the largest mutually-owned apartment project to be owned and operated by Negroes in America,” got its start in 1945. It was an initiative of the Dining Car Workers Union, whose leaders aimed to ease living conditions for the black laborers who crowded into scarce and substandard dwellings during the World War II manufacturing boom. I
n the immediate postwar years, 20 percent of the nation’s steel was made in Chicago, and jobs were more plentiful than housing. Beyond delivering 694 apartments in 35 buildings, the shared ownership model of Parkway Gardens was designed to make decent housing more affordable and keep slumlords at bay. After an initial payment—$2,500 for families who had signed up by 1949—co-op owners paid a monthly amount at something less than market rates. The project, built with several million dollars in Federal Housing Administration support, made it easier to own property at a time when African Americans rarely had access to credit on the same terms as white people. The complex opened in the early 1950s and was completed in 1955. In 2011, Parkway Gardens was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

  The ceremony to lay the Parkway Gardens cornerstone in September 1950 attracted political notables from across the city including, as keynote speaker, civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune who considered the ownership model “the opening of a new frontier to progress.” Michelle Obama would live in Parkway Gardens, across the hall from her grandparents, for the first eighteen months of her life. In future years, she would visit often from her childhood home in nearby South Shore.

  FRASER AND LAVAUGHN ROBINSON’S move into an apartment of their own in the 1950s signified advancement, a solid step on a road that would carry each of their five children through high school, in some cases through college and graduate school, and into the middle class. They reached Parkway Gardens in a decade that would advance the slow-growing consensus that racial discrimination was wrong, symbolized most publicly by the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Yet court victories masked as much as they promised. It was two steps forward, a step or two back. At times, success itself was thwarted. Carl Hansberry was a banker, real estate investor, and unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress. In 1937, he secretly bought a house in a white part of Woodlawn, not far from the University of Chicago. He wanted not only to provide for his family, but to challenge housing restrictions, called restrictive covenants, a form of legalized segregation designed to prohibit black residents from living in certain places. “Literally howling mobs surrounded our house,” his daughter Lorraine wrote, calling the block “hellishly hostile.” Although a neighbor sued and Illinois courts ordered the Hansberry family to leave, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled otherwise in November 1940, invoking a procedural issue, not the constitutional question. By then, the Hansberrys had given up on the new house at 6140 Rhodes Avenue and returned to a home in the heart of the Black Belt, where they hosted many figures in the black cultural elite, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and Joe Louis.

  Eighteen years after the ruling, a group of actors gathered in New York to rehearse a play written by Lorraine Hansberry, who said the drama was largely autobiographical. “Mama,” she wrote to her mother, “it is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes and life, and I think it will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are … people who are the very essence of human dignity.” The play was A Raisin in the Sun, and it became the first drama by a black author to reach Broadway. Hansberry set the story in a black neighborhood on the South Side, the very one where she grew up and the Robinsons now lived. The central character is Lena Younger, a black domestic worker who receives an insurance windfall of $10,000, a princely sum. To help her family escape their shabby apartment, she uses some of the money to buy a house in a white neighborhood. Appalled, the white community sends an emissary to buy her out. Lena struggles with what to do and announces that her family will reject the payoff. They will not surrender to self-doubt, or to the connivings of their foes. “We ain’t never been that poor,” she explains. “We ain’t never been that … dead inside.” Even as she moves up and out, however, she is aware that not everyone in their old neighborhood, or even their own family, will make it. For many black families like them, the dilemma of obligation—to oneself, to family, to others—would become a feature of life, a perpetually renewing riddle. After seeing a revival of A Raisin in the Sun in 2014, Michelle would declare the play “one of America’s greatest stories,” and call it one of her favorites.

  FRASER III SPENT his final stretch of high school living at Parkway Gardens and making his way to DuSable for class. After graduation in 1953, he enrolled at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier, a temporary campus built to accommodate the post–World War II college boom. He ran out of money, dropped out, and soon was helping to support his brother Nomenee, who would graduate from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a degree in architecture. Fraser joined the army in May 1958 at age twenty-two, prompting younger brother Andrew, not yet eight years old, to cry in worry that Fraser was going off to war. But these were the quiet years between the end of the Korean War and the start of hostilities in Vietnam. His first stop was Fort Leonard Wood, 130 miles southwest of St. Louis. Eight days later, he was on his way to Fort Riley, Kansas. Six months after that, he headed to southern Germany.

  At Fort Riley, soldiers converged from all over the country for eight weeks of basic training and eight weeks of advanced combat preparation. Once they reached their barracks near Munich, they joined the 24th Infantry Division, soon to be commanded by Major General Edwin Walker. A complicated figure, Walker had directed the federal troops that defended the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957, but he was bounced from the army in 1961 for distributing right-wing political messages to soldiers under his command in Germany. In 1962, he was arrested for demonstrating against James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi. Walker demanded a spirit of discipline and dedication built on the presumption that a cold war in the era of superpower competition could quickly become hot. Drill time and physical training seemed endless, the rules unbending. “You fell out for formation every day. Every Saturday morning you had barracks inspection and God help you if everything wasn’t perfect,” recalled Joe Hegedus, who served in a mortar battery in Fraser’s regiment. Before he left active duty, Fraser would win an expert marksmanship qualification with a rifle and a sharpshooter’s qualification with a machine gun. He was awarded a good conduct medal and left active duty on May 23, 1960, as a private first class. He would complete his service with four years on the roster of the Illinois National Guard.

  FRASER TURNED TWENTY-FIVE the summer after he returned home to the South Side. He looked for work and spent time with a young woman named Marian Shields. Chicago was teeming, and in flux. As African Americans continued to migrate northward, the city was home to 500,000 more black residents in 1960 than it was in 1940. It was now nearly thirty years since his father’s generation had arrived from the old Confederacy and for all of Fraser Jr.’s frustrations, the family seemed to be gaining traction. In the next decade, it would be the turn of Fraser III and Marian to see what they could make for their children of Chicago’s gruff promise.

  TWO

  South Side

  Fraser Robinson and Marian Shields met through mutual friends when he was nineteen and she was seventeen, a senior at Englewood High. They broke up before he went into the army and got back together when he returned. They were vibrant, energetic, and athletic. Their interests were eclectic, their feet were on the ground, and they laughed a lot. Less than six months after Fraser returned from Germany, they were married in Woodlawn on October 27, 1960. The presiding African Methodist Episcopal minister was the Reverend Carl A. Fuqua, who doubled as executive secretary of the Chicago NAACP. On January 17, 1964, Marian gave birth to Michelle, who joined their oldest son, Craig, not quite two. The Robinsons’ ambitions ran more to family happiness and their children’s advancement than to professional success, particularly after Fraser was hit with multiple sclerosis. In the family’s shorthand, Marian was the disciplinarian, while Fraser was the motivator and “philosopher in chief.” Emerging from complicated families in a city that recognized them first and foremost as black, they saw it as their mission to provide strengt
h, wisdom, and a measure of insulation to Michelle and Craig. Attitudes were changing, if slowly, and opportunities were growing. But the lessons echoed the ones their own parents had taught: Play the hand you were dealt and do it without complaint. “If it can be done, you can do it,” Marian once said, describing the family motto. “It’s a matter of choice.”

  Neither Fraser nor Marian finished college, a disappointment that fueled the push they gave to their children. Fraser served on reserve status with the Illinois National Guard and, like his father, worked at the post office. Three days before Michelle’s birth, he started the city water plant job that he would keep until his death. Marian spent an unsatisfying two years studying to be a teacher, a profession favored by her parents but unattractive to her. She worked at Spiegel, the retail company, and then stayed home with the children until Michelle was in high school. “I come from a very articulate, well-read, highly productive, strong moral background. We weren’t rich but we had the same aspirations as middle- and upper-middle-class African American families … ,” Michelle explained in 2005. “People tend to either demonize or mythologize black communities that aren’t wealthy. But my experience is that my community was very strong, the parents had strong values—the same as other people have throughout this country.”

  MARIAN SHIELDS ROBINSON WAS BORN in Chicago on July 30, 1937. Her parents arrived in the city as grade-school children, each already knowing much about sadness and loss. Rebecca Jumper and Purnell Shields came from the South, one from North Carolina, one from Alabama. Born early enough in the new century that people were alive who had lived in slavery, they joined the growing tide that became the Great Migration, attracted to what writer Isabel Wilkerson, borrowing from Richard Wright, called “the warmth of other suns.” They traveled to the big city with adults who were determined to escape the race-based constraints of the South and grasp the economic opportunities that Chicago appeared to offer. Marian’s parents arrived roughly a decade before Fraser C. Robinson Jr. and lived through the 1920s there. Married by age twenty, they would raise seven children on the South Side. But their path was hardly smooth, professionally or personally. By the end of their lives, they would be living apart.