by Peter Slevin
Michelle herself, although competitive and skilled at sports in a sports-minded house, generally avoided joining teams, although she put in some time with the track squad. “Tall women can do other things. I wasn’t going to be typecast that way,” she said. She would grow to five feet, eleven inches, yet basketball was Craig’s sport and she was already known as Craig Robinson’s little sister in many other things. She started with ballet as a girl and continued to dance at Whitney M. Young High School, where a 1981 yearbook photograph shows her in a leotard onstage, springing off her left foot, her right leg raised high, toe extended, arms stretched out for balance, her body fully under control. As an adult, Michelle hung on her wall a photograph of Judith Jamison doing her iconic solo dance performance, “Cry,” which choreographer Alvin Ailey dedicated in 1971 to “all black women everywhere—especially our mothers.” Jamison wrote that her character in the dance “represented those women before her who came from the hardships of slavery, through the pain of losing loved ones, through overcoming extraordinary depressions and tribulations. Coming out of a world of pain and trouble, she has found her way—and triumphed.”
MICHELLE’S HIGH SCHOOL WAS NAMED for a black man born into segregation in Kentucky. Whitney Young took control of the National Urban League in 1961 and maneuvered the organization into a position of influence. Yet at a time of growing racial ferment, Young drew criticism among some African Americans for courting the support of Lyndon Johnson and white business leaders. Pushing for what would become known as affirmative action, he saw himself as a bridge and considered constructive compromise a virtue. “I think to myself, should I get off this train and stand on 125th Street cussing out Whitey to show I am tough? Or should I go downtown and talk to an executive of General Motors about 2,000 jobs for unemployed Negroes.” Michelle learned his story and praised him. At a White House film screening of The Powerbroker: Whitney Young’s Fight for Civil Rights, a documentary about his life, she told schoolchildren that Young “drew on his decency. He drew upon his intelligence and his amazing sense of humor to face down all kinds of discrimination and challenges and all kinds of threats.”
The high school named for him was something of an experiment when it opened in 1975, a magnet school designed to mix talented students of different races and ethnicities. It would “force you outside your bubble,” said Ava Greenwell, a black graduate from the South Side. The Chicago Urban League called the school “probably the finest ever built in Chicago. It has facilities, equipment and a curriculum plan which give it unique power to attract students.” The league had been pushing the concept for years, while recognizing the quandary the new public school created: Each year, several hundred students would win a coveted spot, but thousands of Chicago teenagers would be left behind in second-rate schools. “We are delighted with the recent progress of the magnet school idea,” league director James W. Compton said. “But we do not want this idea to be advanced at the cost of neglecting the interests of areas and people who need help first.”
By 1974, as the city’s African American population grew, 51.7 percent of high school students were black, along with 57.8 percent of elementary school students. Only 28.3 percent of elementary school students were white. At Whitney Young, enrollment goals by race and ethnicity were explicit. By design the school would draw students from all over the city. Plans called for a student body that was 40 percent black, 40 percent white, and 10 percent Spanish-speaking, with 5 percent “other,” and 5 percent in the patronage-friendly category of “principal’s option.” Overall, when geography was factored in, the principal’s option accounted for 10 percent of all students. Academically, at least 80 percent of entering students would be “average or above” on citywide test scores. Principal Bernarr E. Dawson, in describing the waiting list, said the information accompanying the applicant’s name would include residence, race, sex, “achievement grouping,” and comments from the applicant, teachers, and counselors. He said he would choose “in such a way that students’ characteristics are best matched with the educational program of Whitney Young.”
Opened two years before Michelle arrived, the school brought together teenagers from the South, West, and North Sides. The fortunate ones who made their way to a rundown area just west of downtown Chicago soon discovered that Whitney Young was an island—some thought an oasis—populated by students who would not otherwise have met. They studied, attended classes, and hung out together on campus. But when they scattered to their homes in far-flung neighborhoods, they often would not see each other again until the morning bell. Jeffrey Wilson was in the group of students that entered in 1975. He played center and defensive tackle on the football team and sang in the choir. It felt odd to be away from his West Side neighborhood, where he had friends from the earliest years of elementary school. Instead of walking to a nearby school, he rode an L train and walked the last two blocks.
“Whitney Young was built in the middle of a slum. It was barren,” Wilson recalled. “There were different mills and factories, brick buildings, around. And most of them were empty. There was a skid row just two blocks away on Madison, where transient and homeless people walked through the neighborhood all the time. We’d be at football practice and they’d be standing on the sideline. Sometimes they’d talk to us in the middle of practice.” Wilson said the school’s purpose and spirit were clear. “It was a grand experiment in integration at a time when Chicago was considered the most segregated city in the country. I think we just dealt with it matter-of-factly. I had white friends. I had black friends. I had white male friends, white female friends.” At the same time, as an African American student, he learned that there were neighborhoods where a black teenager should not go. “It wasn’t all that unusual for a black kid to go off to a certain neighborhood and get his brains beaten in. That affected all of us,” said Wilson, who appreciated the ways that life inside the school was different from life outside. “At the end of the day, back in those days, your white friends went where they went and your black friends went where they went. The only time they would mingle would be at school or an event connected to school, or if you were dating someone in another neighborhood.” Wilson laughed about the classroom material delivered by Chicago daily life. “Particularly for the social studies teachers, it was like Christmas. They got to bring the message directly to where we lived. It wasn’t abstract.”
Wilson remembers feeling tugged between different worlds, not just between white and black, but within different black communities. His upbringing was thoroughly working class in a family so large—he had seven siblings—that they could never go anywhere in the same car. His father came from Mississippi and worked as a mixer at Entenmann’s bakery. His mother came from Alabama and spent twenty-eight years working on a conveyor belt at Sara Lee. Starting at 4 a.m. more than an hour’s drive away, she fit dough into pans before they rolled into the oven. His parents delivered a clear and timeless message: Life is hard. You can make it. Keep pushing. Education, education, education. Yet when Wilson enrolled at Whitney Young, some kids in the neighborhood mocked him. They said he must be so special, so smart, so stuck up. One of Wilson’s defenses was to talk black, even at Whitney Young. In the hall one day, he said to a friend, “I’m fixin’ to go to the gym,” but in his telling, the words were guttural and slurred, something like “Ahmfinninuhgotagym.” A French teacher overheard and said, “Young man, why did you say that?” Wilson repeated the phrase. The teacher motioned him into her classroom, closed the door, and commanded, “Don’t ever say that again.” She made him say the sentence correctly several times and sent him back into the hall. “Not two minutes later, someone else asked me where I was going and I said it the same way, ‘Ahmfinninuhgotagym.’ ” The teacher was still watching. “I saw her fixing me with this icy stare and I never did it again.” He loved being at Whitney Young. “We enjoyed being in school that much, we would stay and watch the basketball team, the volleyball team, the swim team just practice.”
MICH
ELLE WAS THIRTEEN when she started riding public transportation from the South Side to Whitney Young, then in its third year of operation. She caught a bus not far from her house and traveled a route that led to Lake Shore Drive, then about eight miles north along Lake Michigan into a thicket of skyscrapers downtown. From there, she caught another bus or a train and walked the final stretch. The trip took at least an hour in each direction. In the depths of Chicago’s winters, she would travel both ways in the dark. Sometimes, to get a seat on the crowded northbound bus, she would catch a different bus south and board the downtown bus a few stops earlier. The maneuver could take thirty minutes, but it guaranteed her a chance to sit and study. Her frequent traveling companion and closest friend was Santita Jackson, daughter of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader and future presidential candidate. The girls visited one another’s homes as teenagers and remained close as young adults. Jackson would sing at Michelle’s wedding.
For the Robinsons, the distance was daunting, but the decision to apply to the new magnet school was straightforward. South Shore High School had been plagued by construction defects, vandalism, and a lack of supplies since its opening. Envisioned as a “model in function and design” when proposed in the mid-1960s, it had opened two years late, millions of dollars over budget and still unfinished. Craig bypassed the school to attend the all-male Mount Carmel High School, where he played varsity basketball and described himself as “the outsider, the racial minority and the brainy athlete I had always been.” In attending Whitney Young, Michelle knew she was taking a valuable step beyond the limitations of her neighborhood high school, yet just like James W. Compton, the Chicago Urban League director, and Lena Younger in A Raisin in the Sun, she also knew that hundreds of her peers would not have the same option. It was the kind of thing she noticed from a young age. When she and Craig shared a bedroom, they often compared notes before they fell asleep. He said, “My sister always talked about who was getting picked on at school or who was having a tough time at home.”
Once at Whitney Young, Michelle built on the work she had done in the gifted program at Kennedy-King and the record that had made her salutatorian of her eighth-grade class. She sang in a choir that traveled around the city. She helped organize social activities and ran for office, becoming treasurer of her senior class after a close race that required her to give a speech that jangled her nerves. She served on the publicity committee for school fundraisers, took Advanced Placement classes, and made the National Honor Society, whose president was Santita Jackson. College was the goal, she said. “I signed up for every activity that I could fill up my applications with, and I focused my life around the singular goal of getting into the next school of my dreams … It seemed like every paper was life or death, every point on an exam was worth fighting for.” She earned extra money by teaching piano, babysitting, and training the occasional dog. Her senior year, she worked in a bookbinder’s shop and witnessed at close range the lives of adult co-workers who were low on options and relegated to doing the same repetitive job for the rest of their working days.
A trait not lost in the transition to high school was Michelle’s confidence in challenging authority. A typing teacher at Whitney Young told the students that their grades would be calculated according to their typing speed. By the end of the course, Michelle typed enough words per minute to earn an A, according to the teacher’s chart, but the teacher said she simply did not give As. “She badgered and badgered that teacher,” Marian said. “I finally called her and told her, ‘Michelle is not going to let this go.’ ” Another time, a substitute teacher did not know her name. “Michelle said, ‘What is my name?’ ” her mother related. “She sat on his desk until he knew her name. I told her, ‘Michelle, don’t sit on a teacher’s desk.’ ” Michelle’s diligence paid off. In addition to her job in the bindery, she spent three summers as a typist at the Chicago headquarters of the American Medical Association.
Michelle’s ambitions grew at Whitney Young as her gaze expanded. As a young girl, she wanted most to be a mother, “because that’s who I saw. I saw my mom caring for me. Those were the games that I played. I didn’t play doctor, I didn’t play lawyer.” New professional imaginings developed toward the end of her high school years. For a time, she thought she would become a pediatrician, but she felt she was not strong enough in math and science and, anyway, did not much like those subjects. Test taking was a weakness, although in her mother’s eyes, smarts were not the problem. “I’m sure it was psychological, because she was hardworking and she had a brother who could pass a test just by carrying a book under his arm,” Marian said. “When you are around someone like that, even if you are okay, you want to be as good or better.”
The disparity in work ethic and test results was also something Craig thought about. “She saw I never studied. I could always take tests and do well,” he said. “She always studied. She was always up late, until 11 or 12 o’clock, doing homework.” She burned the candle at the other end, too. Frustrated that the house felt crowded and noisy, she sometimes rose at 4:30 or 5 a.m. to do homework when she could hear herself think. Marian recalled those late nights, telling Michael Powell of The New York Times, “She’d study late but she had a discipline about her. I would ask, ‘Aren’t you through yet?’ And she’d just keep going. She’s always been pretty good in school, and if she works for the grade, you’d better give it to her. She was very independent, very strong-willed.”
MICHELLE GRADUATED thirty-second in her class, solid if not stellar. As she headed to college, she received a small scholarship from a South Side foundation created by Ora C. Higgins, who had helped integrate Spiegel, the Chicago retailer. The company was ahead of its time in 1945, when M. J. Spiegel hired Higgins, a Chicago Urban League fieldworker, as a “personnel counselor” and tasked her with hiring hundreds of African Americans for the company’s catalog business and its twenty-six Chicago department stores. She recruited and hired workers in dozens of capacities, from secretaries and typists to stencil cutters, commercial artists, accountants, and packers. Word got around fast, particularly at a time when decent jobs for African Americans were scarce. “They said, ‘Go to Spiegel. There’s a black lady there who can get you hired,’ ” recalled Reuben Crawford, Fraser Robinson’s high school classmate, who worked on a Spiegel loading dock. Another beneficiary was Marian, who worked as a Spiegel secretary as a young woman. Seeing Higgins’s success, other department stores hired her, making her a noted Chicago figure. She earned two degrees from Northwestern University, and in the 1960s, traveled to Washington, where she spoke at the Labor Department and had her picture taken with President Johnson.
Higgins was Michelle’s great-great-aunt. She was a regular at Shields family gatherings, as was her daughter, Murrell Duster, a college administrator who was married to Benjamin C. Duster III, a civil rights lawyer and grandson of Ida B. Wells. “They talked about everything,” Murrell Duster said of family gatherings. “My mother always talked about human rights. We were very aware as children of what was going on in Chicago and other places.” When Higgins turned 100 in 2010, Michelle sent a letter of congratulations from the White House, saying what an inspiration she had been.
AS MICHELLE WAS FINISHING high school, Craig was taking his final exams at the end of his sophomore year at Princeton. He had starred at Mount Carmel and played well at a summer basketball camp in Wisconsin that was scouted by a Princeton assistant coach. When the Ivy League program flew him east for a recruiting trip, the school’s head coach, Pete Carril, picked him up at the Newark, New Jersey, airport wearing a trademark gray sweatshirt and messily smoking a cheap White Owl cigar. Craig, who remembered equating Princeton and Yale with “Princestone” and “Shale” in The Flintstones cartoons, appreciated the attention. He was all the more impressed when Carril flew out to Chicago and made his way to South Euclid Avenue, where he climbed the steep stairs and met the Robinsons. One day, the mail brought a fat acceptance letter. Craig said, “People react
ed as if I were Neil Armstrong just come back from the moon.”
Marian recalls being clear with Craig that Princeton was the right choice: “It’s like I say, ‘You’re tall and black. Nobody’s going to notice the smartness.’ So you had to go.” Yet there was the matter of money. Craig felt torn. Other colleges were offering him full scholarships, while Princeton’s financial aid package would require Fraser and Marian to come up with perhaps $3,000 toward the yearly cost. “It might as well have been $2 million to me,” Craig said years later. As his mother stood at the sink doing the dinner dishes one night, Craig sat at the kitchen table and told his father that he craved the chance to go to an Ivy League school, but he was thinking of accepting an offer from the University of Washington. Good school, good coach, good basketball program—and it was a free ride. His father did not react with histrionics or tell his son what to do. Rather, after a deep sigh, he nodded and stroked his chin and said in a measured voice, “Well son, you know I’d be awfully disappointed if I thought you were making a decision this important on the basis of what we could afford.” Craig said nothing after the conversation with his father. He simply agreed to think about it overnight, but he felt elated, “like the weight of the world was being lifted off my shoulders.” His father’s offer, as his health worsened and Michelle remained at home, testified to a “generosity greater than I have ever witnessed in any other human being.” Craig, who later learned that his parents financed much of their share of his Princeton education with credit cards, would recall that conversation as one of the most important of his life.