Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  Rebecca Jumper, Michelle’s maternal grandmother, was born in 1909 in North Carolina, the seventh child in the family and the first to be born away from the Virginia farm where her father, James Jumper, had been an illiterate sharecropper. The family had followed relatives across the state line to Leaksville, where businesses sprouted to mill the cotton, process the tobacco, and hew the trees grown nearby. James worked as a laborer and his wife, Eliza Tinsley Jumper, the daughter of former slaves, took in laundry, scrubbing other people’s clothes on a washboard. As adults, they both learned to read and Eliza could write “a little.” Before Rebecca was ten years old, however, her parents died, perhaps in an influenza outbreak that killed thousands of people in North Carolina, the majority of them black. The family split apart. Rebecca joined her mother’s younger sister, Carrie Tinsley Coleman, and her husband, John, who had moved north in 1907. After starting in Baltimore, they were on their way to Chicago to try their luck. They settled on the bustling South Side as a cobbled-together family of three. As an adult, Rebecca found work as a seamstress. “The women in my family were dressmakers,” said Marian, who would also learn to sew. John went to work in a meatpacking plant, not five years after Upton Sinclair wrote his dark history of the industry, The Jungle. He then found work as a plasterer.

  Purnell Shields, too, knew loss at a young age. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1910, the newest member of a family that had climbed several rungs since slavery. The city was deeply segregated and would remain so for decades, yet his grandfather had succeeded as a businessman and acquired property. His father, Robert Lee Shields, worked as a Pullman porter—desirable work that delivered a solid income, a measure of prestige, and a window onto a wider world. Purnell was not yet ten when his father died suddenly, leaving his mother, Annie Shields, to pay the bills while caring for her two children. Her work life until then had consisted of working at home as a seamstress, and she struggled with the new responsibilities. She soon remarried. Her new husband was a tailor. With Purnell and his sister, the family moved from Alabama to Chicago in the early 1920s.

  Purnell, working in a syrup factory by the time he was nineteen, would spend much of his adult life as a carpenter and handyman whose passions ran to music, especially jazz. When he was a young man, Chicago was a music mecca. “When I finally came to Chicago on May 9, 1930,” said Floyd Campbell, a renowned drummer of the era, “there was plenty of work for musicians. I used to say that there were at least 110 full-time musicians working on salaries of up to $75 a week within a one-block radius of 47th Street and South Parkway. There were two bands at the Regal Theater and three large orchestras working at the Savoy Ballroom.… Chicago was a musician’s town.” The greats, the sidemen, and the dreamers flowed through town in the years to come. Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines. Bessie Smith and King Oliver. Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. Count Basie and Benny Goodman. Ella Fitzgerald and Gene Krupa. They all played at the Lincoln Gardens Cafe or the enormous Savoy Ballroom, capacity four thousand, or in the galaxy of other South Side clubs.

  It was clear to everyone who spent time with Purnell Shields that jazz animated him. “He played it 24 hours a day on the highest volume he could put it on,” recalled Michelle, who credited him with presenting her with her first album, Talking Book, released by Stevie Wonder in 1972. She reported that he had speakers in every room, including the bathroom, and quoted her mother as saying of her upbringing, “You learn to sleep through jazz.” Craig said the grandfather they called Southside was “by calling a chef, drummer and jazz aficionado, an impresario and all around magnet who made everyone in the family gravitate to his side.” He experienced frustration, as well, particularly about the racism he encountered throughout his life. He was denied better jobs and pay because, as an African American, he could not join a labor union. “I had a father who could be very angry about race,” Marian once said. “My father was a very angry man.”

  IN NO DECADE since the Civil War and Reconstruction had race been more consistently central to the national conversation than it was in the 1960s, when Fraser and Marian were beginning to raise their children. The Kerner Commission, delivering its 1968 report on racial unrest in America’s cities, made its elemental conclusion plain on the very first page: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the angry summer of 1967 and chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner Jr., was hardly stacked with iconoclasts or seers. Rather, months of testimony and analysis yielded the inescapable conclusion that America’s cities were bitterly broken and black people were getting the short end of the stick. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans,” wrote the eleven members of what was officially named the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” In establishing the commission, President Johnson declared that the nation should attack, as a matter of “conscience,” the urban conditions that bred despair and violence: “All of us know what those conditions are: Ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs.”

  What the commission found in cities across the country was commonplace in Chicago, where progress toward equal opportunity had been grudging in the aftermath of the 1948 Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, which ended racially restrictive housing covenants, and the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Protests had been launched and civic battles fought, notably over segregated schools, but avenues to advancement through education, work, and politics remained stubbornly narrow. When the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. decided to carry his nonviolent southern protest movement to the urban north in 1966, he chose Chicago. To draw attention to slum housing and discrimination, he made a show of moving his family into a dilapidated West Side apartment with a broken boiler and stairwells that stank of urine.

  That same year, a team of university researchers concluded that poverty and lack of opportunity in Chicago’s African American neighborhoods owed much to discriminatory policies in housing and employment. Redlining and usurious contract-buying practices were common. Although the income of an average black family in 1966 was just two-thirds of the income of an average white family, average rents were identical. Noting that rents and home prices in African American neighborhoods were artificially high. Academics called it a “color tax” and demonstrated the ways that housing discrimination rippled through other aspects of the lives of black citizens: “This difference has its source in the prejudice that deprives the Negro of the free choice of his residence. Regardless of his living standards or of his preferences, the Negro is confined to certain areas of the city. Residential segregation by extension tends toward segregation of residentially oriented facilities such as schools, parks, libraries, beaches and public transportation lines.” Schools became increasingly overcrowded with black children, but the Chicago public school leadership refused to redraw boundaries to allow black students to fill unused classroom space in largely white schools.

  As for employment, the gap was stark. Black people were generally unwelcome in jobs in the Loop, the city’s downtown business center. A 1966 report on major Chicago businesses by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that white workers were ten times more likely than black workers to have professional or managerial jobs and five times more likely to have sales jobs. Black employees were three times more likely than whites to be laborers or service workers. In raw numbers, the survey found that African Americans held 4.5 percent of the 33,769 white-collar jobs in the insurance industry and 12 percent of the 78,385 retail jobs. In the health care field, black people were found to have 7.9 percent of the 23,783 white-collar jobs.

  All ten of Chicago’s poorest communi
ties were in the so-called “Negro Belt” on the city’s South and West Sides. Seven of the ten communities were found to be at least 90 percent nonwhite. Meanwhile, only one in sixty-five African Americans lived in neighborhoods that were at least 90 percent white. The most downtrodden neighborhood in the city was Altgeld, on the city’s far southern edge, where Barack Obama would work as a community organizer in the 1980s.

  WOODLAWN, WHERE MICHELLE LIVED for the first eighteen months of her life across the hall from Fraser and LaVaughn Robinson in Parkway Gardens, was also going downhill. The community’s population was expanding and becoming increasingly African American, with Woodlawn moving from 40 percent nonwhite in 1950 to 98 percent nonwhite in 1966. It was also becoming poorer by every measure, its housing stock deteriorating, juvenile delinquency rising, and jobs moving away. “Statistically, Woodlawn had become just another slum,” wrote one author. In 1965, when Craig was three years old and Michelle was one and a half, the Robinsons moved about three miles away to a house on a quiet street in South Shore, a middle-class neighborhood in transition from all white to all black. At the time, some called the move going “way out south.” They packed up their things, from Fraser’s artwork to the children’s toys, and settled into the upstairs apartment of a red-brick bungalow purchased that year by Marian’s aunt, Robbie Shields Terry, a strong-willed schoolteacher active in the Woodlawn AME church choir, and her husband, William Terry, a Pullman porter. With no children of their own, they liked the idea of having the young Robinson family close by. The apartment was small, but the house had a yard in front and back with plenty of room to turn cartwheels.

  At about the time Marian and Fraser were moving to 7436 South Euclid Avenue, Gloria and Leonard Jewell bought a home two blocks south. “Because it was an integrated neighborhood,” Gloria Jewell told a Chicago Tribune reporter in 1967. “We wanted to bring up our two children, ages 5 and 4, in a world that would be far more pleasant than it had been to us.” She said, “People here are dedicated and have high standards.” Gloria worked as a Head Start coordinator after earning a teaching certificate. Leonard was a commercial artist who had studied and taught at the Art Institute of Chicago but was routinely denied jobs because he was African American. One of the first black families in the 7600 block of South Euclid, the Jewells stayed and built a life even as a steady stream of white people moved out. “I had the best childhood ever. It was awesome,” said Leonard Jewell Jr., known as Biff to his friends, including Craig Robinson. “I had so much fun. There were tons of kids, we played tons of games. It was all outside, simple stuff. Riding your bike, playing softball, playing football. There was always something going on. Climbing my garage, swinging from the trees into my backyard. It was a blast.”

  Two blocks away it would not be long before Craig and Michelle could ride their bikes on the sidewalk and around the block to the back alley. Across East 75th Street was a large city park with a grass field and playground equipment. Its name, Rosenblum Park, signified an earlier wave of South Shore residents, now moving out. When they were old enough, Craig and Michelle could walk safely to class at Bryn Mawr Elementary, where Marian, one of the very few stay-at-home mothers in the neighborhood, volunteered her time. “There were good schools, that’s why people moved, and it was the reason we moved,” Marian said. “It was fine with me that it was changing. Some people felt the schools were too geared to whites. People were very conscious and wanted black artists in the schools. My point was just to go to school and learn what you have to learn.” To the children, it seemed pretty great. Craig called it “the Shangri-La of upbringings.”

  IN 1966, when Martin Luther King arrived in North Lawndale, a grittier precinct on Chicago’s West Side, he found a latticework of racial politics so intricate that it made him long for the television-ready segregationists in Selma and Birmingham. Not that the hatred in Chicago was any milder, he would soon conclude, for the structural inequality that hindered and harmed black people had deep roots. King began leading interracial vigils and protest marches in support of open housing. He met with gang members, civic activists, and city officials. Pickets stood outside real estate offices and banks, instructing passersby about discrimination that kept more people from doing what the Robinsons did. In the city’s central business district demonstrators carried signs that read “We are here because the Savings and Loan Associations refuse to loan money to Negroes who wish to buy beyond the ghetto.”

  On July 10, six months into what became known as the Chicago Freedom Movement, King headlined a rally on a ninety-eight-degree day at Soldier Field, where tens of thousands of people listened to performances by B.B. King, Mahalia Jackson, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and sixteen-year-old Stevie Wonder. Several thousand then marched three miles to City Hall, where King emulated Martin Luther and taped a parchment with fourteen demands to an outside door. Five days later, a neighborhood argument over opening fire hydrants for black children in the brutal summer heat had ricocheted into riots that left two dead, hundreds under arrest, six police officers wounded by gunfire, $2 million in property damage, and four thousand National Guardsmen patrolling the streets.

  The troubles continued. Three weeks later, King led a march of 550 white and black Freedom Movement supporters through Marquette Park, a white southwest Chicago neighborhood. Despite the deployment of two hundred police officers in riot helmets to protect the demonstrators, the protest turned ugly. The marchers, including Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson, were met with rocks, bricks, and cherry bombs; forty-two people were hospitalized. White youths slashed tires and set fire to marchers’ cars, which were identified by their “End Slums” stickers. King addressed 1,700 supporters a few days later by saying the protests and the picket lines would continue: “I still have faith in the future. My brothers and sisters, I still can sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ” The next afternoon, when King returned to Marquette Park, an angry crowd of more than four thousand white people was waiting. One sign read “King Would Look Good with a Knife in His Back.” A King supporter who had helped plan the march route heard a singsong chant to the tune of the Oscar Mayer Weiner jingle:

  I wish I were an Alabama trooper.

  This is what I would truly love to be.

  Because if I were an Alabama trooper,

  Then I could kill the niggers legally.

  A rock hurled by someone in the crowd hit King behind his right ear and knocked him to the ground. Someone else threw a knife; it missed him and stuck in the shoulder of a white heckler. The three-mile march continued, as did the attack, with windows shattering, bones breaking, and men setting protesters’ cars afire. Six Chicago policemen, seen by the crowd as collaborators, were cornered and beaten until reinforcements fired gunshots into the air and rescued them. “I have never in my life seen such hate,” King told reporters later. “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago. I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”

  The protests, the bad publicity, and the potential for more conflict pushed Mayor Richard J. Daley and the business community to promise modest action. But when King left town, the status quo remained undisturbed. “We should have known better,” King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference ally Ralph Abernathy said later, “than to believe that we could come to Chicago and right its wrongs with the same tactics we had used in Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma.” What the Chicago project did, however, was demonstrate to a national audience that racism in the mid-1960s was not confined to the byways of the old Confederacy. The violence and vitriol in the heartland, wrote author Taylor Branch, “cracked a beguiling, cultivated conceit that bigotry was the province of backward Southerners, treatable by enlightened but firm instruction.” In the aftermath of the bloody Chicago campaign, the editors of the Saturday Evening Post wrote, “We are all, let us face it, Mississippians.”

  THE TUMUL
T EXPOSED a mean side of Chicago, a city dominated by Daley, a quintessential political boss who was elected to six terms between April 1955 and December 1976. More than any mayor in twentieth-century America, Daley perfected the power of patronage to bend the city to his vision and his will. He earned the loyalty of many, co-opted others, and bulldozed the rest. This was particularly true in the growing black community, which experienced Daley’s tactical largesse as a limited blessing. “Daley had a special weak spot. He never accepted African American Chicagoans on an equal basis,” said Leon Despres, an independent white South Side alderman who often found himself on the lonely end of 49–1 city council votes. “He used their committeemen and officeholders to get votes. He allotted them their mathematical share of patronage. He reserved the highest offices for whites. He resisted a genuine opening of the police and fire departments. He arranged the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway to serve, he hoped, as a barrier to expansion of black residence. He resisted genuine fair housing legislation as long as he could.”

  By the early 1960s, there were six African American aldermen on the city council. They were known derisively as the Silent Six for their supple responses to Daley’s demands. The mayor granted his loyalists considerable license to dispense jobs to constituents, so long as election day turnout was high and aldermen voted the right way when called upon. At its height, the Chicago machine controlled as many as forty thousand patronage jobs, by one estimate, ranging from gardeners, garbagemen, and drivers to city inspectors and department heads. For some, patronage meant respectable work at a decent salary, a path to the middle class. For others, it was a gateway to greased palms; cash flowed from numbers rackets, business schemes, and kickback operations that were limited only by the boundaries of human imagination. For still others, it was a ladder to public office. Very few people stepped into one of the fifty city council seats during the Daley years without a nod from the man who ruled City Hall.