Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  Everything was a transaction and everyone understood the rules. “It was impossible to do business in Chicago at that time without dealing with Mayor Daley,” said John Johnson, the African American chairman of the downtown media company that published Jet and Ebony. “You couldn’t cut a deal with underlings; you had to see him personally. Which meant that you were personally obligated to him.” Harold Washington, who became the city’s first black mayor in 1983, got his start with the machine. So did Eugene Sawyer, who took office when Washington died. William Barnett, a precinct captain who later became one of the Silent Six, said matter-of-factly, “We gave out jobs. A man had to carry his precinct to keep his.” A former Black Panther named Bobby Rush would say in 1975 that Barnett’s perspective had been “blunted by the taste of polish from Mayor Daley’s boots,” but defenders argued that the bargain made by the Silent Six was not entirely venal, particularly when work possibilities for African Americans were so limited. “You went along with things in order to make sure that we were able to help people,” Sawyer told the Chicago Tribune after he himself became mayor. “They were people who wanted somehow to break that shackle, but they had so many people that would get hurt, so many people who would lose jobs and positions.” Far down the food chain, precinct workers owed the jobs that sustained their families to the labor they did for the machine. “There are no virgins in Chicago politics,” Sawyer said. “We all started in the Daley machine.”

  Sawyer’s political mentor was Robert Miller, one of the Silent Six. A funeral director by profession, Miller ran the 6th Ward on the South Side, dispensing favors, getting out the Democratic vote, and toeing the party line. Miller not only understood patronage as the way politics was played, but defended the tradeoffs as the price of progress for his black constituents. Just as Sawyer owed his job on the city payroll to Miller, who put him to work at the city water plant in June 1959, so did Nomenee Robinson, Michelle’s uncle, who talked his way through the 6th Ward patronage system into a water plant job one year later. As Robinson recalled the moment, he was attending the Illinois Institute of Technology, helped to a scholarship by Robert Chorley, director of the Woodlawn Boys Club. When Chorley asked what he intended to do for the summer, Robinson replied, “Mr. Chorley, I need a good job.” The year before, Robinson had worked as a city janitor and he was looking to move up. Chorley wrote a letter of introduction and sent him to Miller, who dispatched him to City Hall. There, he met Matthew Danaher, Daley’s patronage chief, who had started as the mayor’s driver and risen to become the 11th Ward alderman before his indictment on federal bribery charges. Danaher, in turn, sent Robinson to see the public works commissioner, James Wilson, who thumbed through a thick employment ledger.

  “Okay, we have this laborer job,” Wilson said. “How’s that fit you?” Robinson took a chance and said that, well, he had held a better job before. Wilson turned back to the ledger and saw a different slot. “Chlorine attendant,” he said. “It’s like an engineer’s job at the old water tower. Are you up to that?” Robinson asked how much it paid. When Wilson said it paid $543.50 a month, Robinson was floored. It was a sum equal to the median family income for a Chicago family of four. He accepted on the spot. Miller, of course, asked something of Robinson in return, assigning him to be an assistant precinct captain. As Robinson recalled, “He put it very nicely: ‘If this conflicts with your studies, you let me know.’ ” Miller tied the request in a bow, but both parties understood that declining was not an option.

  Fraser Robinson followed his younger brother into a low-level job with the machine, serving as a Democratic precinct captain and reporting to the city water department. He was twenty-eight years old when he started work as a water plant “station laborer,” or janitor, for a salary of $479 a month. One of his colleagues in later years was Dan Maxime, a white man from the North Side who had started working for the Democratic machine in 1957. When Maxime got his first patronage job, serving as a Cook County zoning inspector, he said it was “the beginning of the good old days of politics. With the graft, even for the cop on the street. When you got stopped, he asked for your license and you had either a five- or a ten-dollar bill you handed him with your license. We were all part of the system. Every election was war and the Republicans were the enemy. You did everything you needed to win that war. That included stealing votes.” But Fraser Robinson was not one to falsify registrations or steal votes, Maxime said. “He wasn’t the type. He was strait-laced. Just the salt of the earth.”

  For Fraser, the role of precinct captain suited his outgoing personality. It was also “a ladder, a stepping stone to a job,” said his brother Andrew. The water plant job, while tedious, afforded him a steady living with reasonable hours. In five years, he had been promoted to foreman at $659.50 a month, and seven months later, in May 1969, he began tending boilers for $858 a month. He would keep that job until his death. Marian recalled that Fraser “felt local politics was the most important” and saw his precinct work as a way to do good works. “He loved trying to help people. The city was set up so that precinct captains were the go-between with the city,” she said. “If they needed an answer, he was the liaison. He was always going to the precinct. He would head there in the evening. He loved to talk.” She called him “a visiting kind of person.”

  THE HOUSE AT 7436 South Euclid Avenue where the Robinsons lived was neither the nicest nor the poorest on a quiet street stretching three blocks north to a commercial strip on East 71st Street that would later be called Emmett Till Way. It had two entrances on the south side, with one door leading to a staircase that rose to their second-floor apartment. With help from Marian’s father, Purnell, the Robinsons turned two rooms and a kitchen into a home for a family of four. The parents took the bedroom while Purnell installed paneling that divided a narrow living room into a shared bedroom and play space—later, a homework space—for Michelle and Craig. The kitchen, down a hallway from the children’s room, did double duty as the dining room, and the family shared a single bathroom. “If I had to describe it to a real estate agent, it would be 1BR, 1BA,” Craig said. “If you said it was 1,100 square feet, I’d call you a liar.”

  “Everything that I think about and do,” Michelle said later, “is shaped around the life that I lived in that little apartment in the bungalow that my father worked so hard to provide for us.” The family made a point of sitting down to dinner together every evening, apart from the nights when Fraser pulled the late shift at the water plant, a twenty-minute drive up Lake Shore Drive to downtown Chicago. Aunt Robbie gave piano lessons to the children, who played outdoors together in good weather. When Craig rode the bicycle he got for Christmas, Michelle followed on her new tricycle. “It was almost as if we were twins, rather than siblings close in age,” Craig recalled. There are stories of practical jokes played in the dark and scenes that made the children fall out laughing. Also, all sorts of contests, from hunts through dictionaries and encyclopedias to a jumping game staged by Fraser, who sometimes put a quarter atop a door jamb for young Craig to leap and reach. Michelle had an Easy Bake Oven and a passel of Barbie dolls, including the impossibly contoured blonde Malibu Barbie—the first doll she owned—and a black Barbie imitation. “I liked everything Barbie. I was a big Barbie doll kid and every Christmas, I got a new Barbie. One year, I got the Barbie townhouse and the camper.” Only later, after she started to read the work of Maya Angelou, particularly her poem “Phenomenal Woman,” did she reflect on the cultural messages contained in the curves of the tiny-waisted plastic figurines. Barbie seemed to be “the standard for perfection,” she said later. “That was what the world told me to aspire to.”

  AT THE ROBINSON HOUSE, Fraser made time when he returned from work to play sports with the kids—baseball, basketball, soccer, football. He gave Craig a pair of boxing gloves and taught him how to use them. Craig remembers boxing with Michelle, who told the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen that her father “taught me how to throw a ball and a mean right hook bet
ter than any boy in my neighborhood.” She described herself as “kind of a tomboy” and recalled sports as “a gift I shared with my dad.” The children were limited to one hour of television a day. The Brady Bunch was a particular favorite of Michelle’s, and she developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the show. For the parents, nights out of the house on their own were a rarity. The family typically devoted Saturday nights to games: Chinese checkers, Monopoly, a bluffing game called Hands Down, and, later, epic Scrabble battles. From an early age, Michelle hated to lose.

  When the weather was warm, in a house without air conditioning, the children staged camping trips on the back porch, later converted to a bedroom for Craig. During football season, they backed the Bears, with Fraser parking himself in front of the television on Sunday afternoons. They rooted for the White Sox, the nearby South Side baseball team. But they invested more passion in the Cubs, the team that played in the North Side’s iconic Wrigley Field. The star was the effervescent Ernie Banks, ace fielder, slugger, and two-time National League most valuable player who had once earned $7 a day in the Negro Leagues. Fans called him Mr. Cub. He and two black teammates, Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins, reached the Baseball Hall of Fame despite years on desultory squads that never saw the first inning of a World Series. Craig once said he considered baseball his main sport as a young boy. He liked to imagine himself as the next Ernie Banks.

  When Michelle launched her healthy eating campaign during her husband’s first term in the White House, she recalled how active she had been as a girl in South Shore. The streets were safe and Bryn Mawr Elementary still had recess. Before school, she played freeze tag and other games in the schoolyard until the bell rang, “and after school we’d head home to our neighborhood and play outside for hours. There were always plenty of kids around, and we’d play softball or a game called Piggy with a batter, a pitcher, a catcher, and a 16-inch softball rather than the standard 12-inch ones.” When a fielder caught a batted ball on the fly or on one bounce, the fielder got to bat. “Later, we played chase, which was basically just boys chasing girls and then girls chasing boys. And all the girls in the neighborhood knew how to jump Double Dutch. We would also ride on our bikes and ride around for hours.”

  MARIAN DEVOTED considerable time to the education of her children, starting when they were young. Craig recalled his mother’s diligence in teaching him to read at age four, before he started school. She was ready with flash cards and, as soon as he showed an interest, spent hours with him, describing the letters and sounds and how they connected. He was far ahead of his classmates when he arrived at Bryn Mawr. When she tried the same strategy with her daughter, the little girl refused. “I guess she figured she could figure out how to read on her own, but she was too young to say that,” Marian recalled. On her way to becoming grandmother in residence at the White House, Marian would report that Michelle’s younger daughter, Sasha, then age seven, reminded her of Michelle at the same age. “Just like Sasha. She always had her own opinions about things and she didn’t hesitate to say so, because we allowed it.” LaVaughn Robinson, Michelle’s paternal grandmother, told a co-worker that Michelle was “hard-headed” and needed a spanking from time to time, but that she and Craig were good kids. A friend, meanwhile, recalled hearing Michelle tell a story about a Bryn Mawr teacher who complained to Marian about the girl’s attitude. “Her mom told the teacher, ‘Yeah, she’s got a temper, but we decided to keep her anyway.’ ”

  The Robinsons’ standards for achievement were very high, but they emphasized effort and attitude over grades. They instructed the children that hard work would be rewarded. And it was. Michelle skipped second grade, and Craig, who remembered being bored in second grade, skipped third. It was known as “doing a double.” When they finished eighth grade at Bryn Mawr two years apart, Craig was the valedictorian of his class and Michelle was the salutatorian of hers. In making clear the importance of education—not just attending school, but excelling—Marian and Fraser used their own experience as an example, explaining to Michelle and Craig how much they regretted not finishing college. “We told the kids how dumb it was,” Marian said.

  The lessons at home expanded on what the children learned in school and filled gaps in a Chicago Public Schools curriculum that could not keep up with the politically charged times. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had both become law, yet the children would see on Sunday drives through the city and summer trips to the South that segregation and bigotry endured. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, when Michelle was four years old, sparking riots in black neighborhoods on the West Side and across the country. When Bryn Mawr lesson plans began to include black history and Craig began asking questions, Marian bought a set of encyclopedias “written from the black perspective,” as Craig put it. “Now I could understand not only what the tragedy of Dr. King’s killing meant, but also what he represented in terms of the dream of equality that belonged to all races,” Craig recalled. “I also learned why ‘turn the other cheek’ wasn’t always easy to do and a little more about other civil rights leaders in [the] 1960s like Malcolm X.” It was no coincidence that Malcolm was Craig’s middle name. In 1962, he said, his mother “read an article about his work and, as she was looking for a middle name for a boy if she should have one, decided Malcolm had a nice ring to it.” Or, as he put it another time, “Now, you’ve got to remember, my dad grew up in the Black Panther era—my middle name is Malcolm!”

  In the tumult of the 1960s, Malcolm X personified an array of images of black people in America, some of them contradictory. He was the petty criminal born as Malcolm Little and known as Big Red who spent time behind bars. He was the ascetic who preached against drugs, deceit, and moral decay. Lanky and stylish, operating from behind silver and black glasses that lent him a studious air, he befuddled white questioners with calm rejoinders about the fundamental rights that any decent society owed its citizens. Yet he also raised his fist in a black power salute. He advocated separatism and militancy, and asked what progress nonviolent protest had ever delivered to African Americans. He dismissed the 1963 March on Washington, which culminated in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, as the “farce on Washington.”

  Through all of Malcolm’s intellectual and spiritual wanderings, even many African Americans who were skeptical or disdainful of his fulminations drew strength from his personal narrative and his celebration of blackness. Jackie Robinson, the first black baseball player in the major leagues, offered up his opinion in The Defender in March 1964. The piece appeared in the weeks after Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight boxing title and converted to Islam, becoming Muhammad Ali. Robinson said the new champ, who called himself “the greatest,” was loud and sometimes crude, but his message of black self-worth was right. “I am not advocating that Negroes think they are greater than anyone else,” Robinson said. “But I want them to know that they are just as great as other human beings.” He said critics missed the point in worrying that Ali and Malcolm X would entice Negroes to become Black Muslims. The black people who marched for civil rights “want more democracy, not less,” Robinson said. “They want to be integrated into the mainstream of American life, not invited to live in some small cubicle of this land in splendid isolation. If Negroes ever turn to the Black Muslim movement, in any numbers, it will not be because of Cassius or even Malcolm X. It will be because white America has refused to recognize the responsible leadership of the Negro people and to grant us the same rights that any other citizen enjoys in this land.”

  “Before Malcolm X,” wrote cultural critic Ta-Nehisi Coates, “the very handle we now embrace—black—was an insult. We were coloreds or Negroes, and to call someone black was to invite a fistfight. But Malcolm remade the menace inherent in that name into something mystical—Black Power; Black Is Beautiful; It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.… For all of Malcolm’s invective, his most seductive notion was that of collective self-creation: the idea that black people c
ould, through force of will, remake themselves.” In Dreams from My Father, his memoir about his search for identity, young Barack Obama wrote of Malcolm X that his “repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me. The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. All the other stuff, the talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse, was incidental to that program.” As president, Obama said he found Malcolm’s theology, analysis, and policy advice to be “full of holes.” And yet, he told writer David Remnick, Malcolm gave voice to the growing conviction in the African American community that black people must believe in themselves and assert their worth. “If you think about it, of a time in the early 1960s, when a black Ph.D. might be a Pullman porter and have to spend much of his day obsequious and kowtowing to people, that affirmation that ‘I am a man, I am worth something,’ I think that was important. And I think Malcolm X probably captured that better than anybody.”

  WHEN MICHELLE AND CRAIG WERE in elementary school, Marian made herself a familiar presence among the teachers and students. Fraser also spent time in their classrooms, and other relatives pitched in. Aunt Robbie ran an operetta workshop for children in the school district, once casting Craig as Hansel in Hansel and Gretel when he was in second grade. He had a singing part, as did Michelle, who wore a tutu and played the good fairy. Singing a solo was “humiliating,” she said, but the performance was a win. “I liked it because of the costume.”