Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  Michelle’s view, when it came time to apply to college, was that if Craig could get into Princeton, she could, too. By her reckoning, she was just as smart and certainly worked harder. Her counselors at Whitney Young, however, did not see it that way. They said her grades and scores were too low and her sights were too high. Their assessment knocked her off stride, leaving her feeling uncertain. “It made me mad, too,” she said more than thirty years later. The moment would stay with her, becoming an essential component of her campaign stump speech and her message to young audiences. She folded her story into the narrative of Barack Obama’s run for president. His election, she said, would send a message to “thousands of kids like me who were told, ‘No.’ ‘Don’t.’ ‘Wait.’ ‘You’re not ready.’ ‘You’re not good enough.’ See, I am not supposed to be here. As a black girl from the South Side of Chicago, I wasn’t supposed to go to Princeton because they said my test scores were too low.” Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard, as well as the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin. Her Princeton essay was “long, long,” recalled Marian, who said Michelle “talked her way in.” Like her brother, she was accepted and soon was on her way. She was stepping up and out, making the biggest leap of her young life.

  FOUR

  Orange and Blackness

  Princeton in September 1981 was a world away from the South Side. It was a world away from most of the world, in fact. From the leaded glass and gargoyles to the sleek and sculpted columns of I. M. Pei, the campus telegraphed privilege, a trait the university leadership did not hesitate to advertise. Every freshman knew that Nassau Hall was home to the Continental Congress in 1783 and that Princetonians had populated America’s top tier since the beginnings of the republic. Dei sub numinae viget read the Latin saying etched on Princeton’s orange and black shield. Translated, the phrase meant “under God she flourishes,” but wags rendered it as “God went to Princeton.” Princeton’s leaders touted the institution as a pinnacle of undergraduate education and had the applicant pool to prove it. Of 11,602 aspirants to the class of 1985, only 17.4 percent were admitted, a very low acceptance rate at the time. Among them were more high school valedictorians, class officers, team captains, and newspaper editors than anyone could count.

  President William Bowen addressed them on September 13, 1981, the last time they would gather as a class before commencement week nearly four years later. Standing among towering stone pillars and stained glass in the grandly opulent Princeton chapel, he urged them toward a path of self-discovery and purpose. He invited them to aim high and advocated learning for its own sake, “not merely as a means to some more prosaic end.” It would be a shame, he said, to choose narrow goals too easily achieved, ones that in retrospect “turn out to be trivial.” He challenged them to pursue “lives lived generously, in service to others,” and asserted that “the most worthwhile goals are often elusive and almost always just beyond reach.”

  For a text, Bowen read aloud a translation of Constantine P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka,” an ode to the joys of a great, lifelong journey. Ithaka was the home of Odysseus and the talismanic destination of his adventures after the fall of Troy. Bowen made an explicit reference to the racial divide that plagued Princeton and the country at large. “I sometimes feel,” he told the freshmen, “that in developing friendships, especially those that require us to reach across such complex boundaries as race and religion, we are too self-protecting.… You can spare yourselves discomfort by keeping your distance, by remaining safely aloof, by maintaining what are largely superficial friendships. But if you do, you will deprive yourselves, and others, of one of the greatest opportunities for learning and for personal growth.”

  MICHELLE ROBINSON REACHED campus three weeks early to attend an orientation for minority students and other freshmen who might want extra time to adjust. Five months shy of her eighteenth birthday, she was daunted at first, a trepidation shared by many of her classmates. “When I first got in,” she remembered, “I thought there’s no way I can compete with these kids. I mean, I got in, but I’m not supposed to be here.” During the first days on campus, she felt overwhelmed. Her sense of being at a loss was symbolized by the bedsheets she brought from home, too small for the standard university-issue mattress. She stretched the bottom sheet as far as she could from the head of the bed, then draped her covers over the part that the sheet did not reach. She slept with her feet resting on the bare mattress. Then there were the clothes, the furniture, and the cars. “I remember being shocked by college students who drove BMWs,” she said. “I didn’t even know parents who drove BMWs.”

  Michelle sometimes felt her head was barely above water. Her first semester, she took a class in Greek mythology and found herself “struggling just to keep up.” On the midterm, she got a C. “The very first C I’d ever gotten and I was devastated.” She pressed ahead, talking repeatedly with the professor and pouring heart and soul into her final paper. She soon discovered a secret of elite American universities: The tricky part is getting in the door; flunking out is hard to do. She gravitated to the sociology department and the Third World Center, created in 1971 as an oasis for the growing community of students of color. The center featured discussions about race, black culture, and the African diaspora, and served as a social hub. For Michelle, who found a work-study job there and was elected to the governing board, it became a refuge. Following the pattern set at Whitney Young, she chose not to join a sports team, nor did she try to prove her mettle in campus politics. She made close friends and stayed grounded during her first foray into an elite realm where African Americans and, especially, African American women, were a distinct minority.

  It helped, when Michelle arrived, that she had a significant anchor in Craig, who was entering his junior year as a sociology major and basketball star who spun records at Third World Center parties. His early jitters foretold her own. When he stepped off a bus on Nassau Street on a muggy August afternoon in 1979, he felt as though he was entering “a world that existed practically in its own time and space continuum.” It seemed that every second classmate had come up with a medical breakthrough or published a novel. By the time he received his midterm grades, he was standing at a pay phone, trying to keep from crying. He had agreed to an adviser’s recommendation that he enroll in the engineering program, but his record showed one C, two Ds, and an F. A worrier by nature, especially anxious about disappointing his parents, Craig told his father that he was not sure he would make it. “Maybe I’m over my head,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here. Maybe coming here I reached too far.”

  Fraser interrupted and told him to pull himself together. You won’t be finishing first in your class, he said, but you won’t be finishing last, either. With a Princeton degree in your pocket, Fraser said, “You think people will care what your grade was in freshman calculus?” Craig recalled his father saying that the Ivy League school had chosen him not because he was “just like everybody,” but “because of what made me distinctive and because of the contribution that I could make to the school.” Reassured, Craig stuck it out, although he did switch out of engineering. He later said that he loved history and African American studies, but gained the most from philosophy and religion classes—and the on-court tutelage of coach Pete Carril, who would be named to the basketball hall of fame.

  AS A FRESHMAN, Michelle was “enormously concerned as all young people are, especially black women, with identity problems,” said sociology professor Marvin Bressler, who befriended Michelle and Craig and supervised the beginnings of her senior thesis. “There existed in universities at that time various competing strains of what an ideal minority should be. She had to make up her mind to what extent she regarded herself as black, as a woman, as simply a person.” The matter of making up her mind was not an exercise performed in a vacuum. For all of its remarkable academic offerings, Princeton was by tradition and reputation the most southern of the elite northern universities. Michelle would write that the school was �
��infamous for being racially the most conservative of the Ivy League colleges.” The color barrier remained virtually unbroken for two hundred years after the university’s founding in 1746. The dawn of the civil rights movement prompted the admissions office to declare in 1963, “Princeton is actively seeking qualified Negro applicants,” yet it was years before any entering class included more than 20 African American students. The class of 1985 included just 94 black students, or 8.2 percent of the entering cohort of 1,141 students. The class was also unbalanced along gender lines, with 721 men and 420 women, a dozen years after Princeton admitted women for the first time. Tuition, room, and board cost roughly $10,000 her first year.

  Not for the last time, Michelle felt herself walking in two worlds, one black and the other white. She was living what W. E. B. Du Bois in 1897 called “two-ness.” For Du Bois, who not incidentally had been a black man at Harvard, it was the idea that an African American was in a perpetual struggle to reconcile his blackness with his Americanness, “to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon … , without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.” Being a Negro at the end of the nineteenth century, Du Bois suggested, was to face a looming question from white people: “How does it feel to be a problem?” He observed that a black man often felt at sea, striving to develop an independent identity yet enduring “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

  Hilary Beard, a friend of Michelle’s who arrived on campus one year earlier, had been stunned by what she found. “I grew up around a lot of white people. What was new to me was to be around white people who had had so little exposure to people of color. Nothing prepares you to have somebody you don’t know, and shares a room with you, ask you something like if your skin color rubs off. I didn’t just get asked that once. I got asked that all the time. I was suddenly confronted with negative assumptions about me and people who looked like me that I had never encountered before. It was shocking. I was unprepared. It was a lot, to be dropped in the middle of this environment and be confronted with that as part of your transition.”

  Minority students, more than most of their white peers, faced profound choices tied to race and ethnicity. For Michelle, questions about race, class, and values would inform her academic pursuits and her senior thesis, which explored issues of identity and purpose among black Princeton graduates. She wrote in the introduction, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really didn’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.”

  THE FIRST SIGN THAT Michelle would encounter racism at Princeton happened before classes even started. One of her freshman year roommates was a white teenager named Catherine Donnelly. She had been raised in New Orleans by her schoolteacher mother, Alice Brown, who labored, much as the Robinsons had, to position her daughter for a first-rate education. Catherine was settling into her fourth-floor room in Pyne Hall on her first day when Craig Robinson dropped by. He was searching for Michelle, who was not there. Catherine headed up campus and told her mother the news: One of her roommates was black.

  Brown was horrified. She first called her own mother, who recommended pulling Catherine out of school and driving right back to New Orleans. That seemed extreme, so Brown charged into the student housing office and demanded a room change. “I told them we weren’t used to living with black people, Catherine is from the south,” Brown said. Hoping to strengthen her hand, she returned to her room at the tony Nassau Inn, where she and a friend called everyone they knew with Princeton ties and beseeched them to intervene. Nothing worked. The housing office said no beds were available.

  Second semester, when a room came open, Donnelly moved out. At that point, she was simply glad to escape a cramped room. She had come to admire and enjoy Michelle, although they traveled in entirely different circles. She called her “one of the funniest people I’ve ever known.” Donnelly had forgotten about Michelle Robinson a quarter century later when she noticed a lovely black woman with long fingers and a familiar face, the one whose husband was running for president. She did an Internet search to test her hunch and was chagrined to learn that she was right. Looking back to her freshman year, she regretted not standing up to her mother. By then, she had another reason to shake her head at her family’s prejudice. Donnelly, a high school homecoming queen and basketball captain, had come out as a lesbian while at Princeton. When she did, she felt judged, and she learned a few things about being an outsider.

  TO BE BLACK at Princeton was to be anything but unthinking. Racial politics compelled African American students to make decisions about how to live their blackness—where to sit in the dining hall, where to live on campus, where to socialize, what friends to make and what causes to claim. The pressures came not just from white teachers and classmates, but from African Americans. Walking in a black world was not without its own dilemmas. Indeed, it was possible to sketch not just two worlds confronting a black student at Princeton, but three or more, each tugging in a different direction. “There were those black students who wanted to be part of the storied Princeton they had heard about,” said Ruth Simmons, one of a relative handful of black faculty members during Michelle’s time at Princeton. “There were those who ‘hung’ black and those who did that to an extreme degree and did tend to resent people who were too impressed with the white society of Princeton.” Simmons, who would later become president of Smith College and Brown University, felt the pressure herself. “You had to prove yourself to everybody.”

  Robin Givhan knew this well. She graduated from Princeton in 1986, one year after Michelle, and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism at The Washington Post. A black woman from Detroit, she visited the Third World Center from time to time—“it was a little like checking in with family”—but decided not to become a regular. “I didn’t want this Third World place to be the focus of my social life, because if I had wanted that, I would have gone to Howard.” She never forgot a speech at the center early in her Princeton career by a student from, she thinks, the Organization for Black Unity (OBU), a group that Michelle joined. “I had no idea who this guy was. He basically was giving this spiel about what it meant to be black at Princeton and what it entailed and what you should think. I felt what he was saying was, ‘You are not black.’ I remember coming back to my dorm and being just so upset about it, a little tearful.”

  By contrast, Sharon Holland felt a pull toward the Third World Center, which counted more than two hundred members. “I wanted to create a different social life for myself,” said Holland, a doctor’s daughter raised in Washington, D.C. Like Michelle, she took a job there, answering telephones, taking messages, typing memos, running errands. “An amazing time to be at the center. Lots of outreach, lots of attempts at multi-ethnic community building.” She recalled her Princeton years as a mix of highs and lows as she struggled to chart a path that was not constrained by white privilege or what she called black “codes of responsibility,” unwritten rules about how a black person should act toward other black people. Those were “some of the best of times,” said Holland, who would become an American studies professor at the University of North Carolina, “but they were also really difficult times.”

  Some afternoons, as Michelle drifted into the Third World Center after class, she entertained Jonathan Brasuell, the young son of the center’s director. His favorite tune was the theme song from Peanuts, the same song she had played to calm her brother’s nerves before basketball games back in Chicago. Hilary Beard remembers Michelle playing the piano as Jonathan, not yet ten, sat beside her on
the bench. “She took time to talk with him,” Beard said, “not at him.” Michelle worked with center director Czerny Brasuell to start an after-school program for the children of Princeton staff, principally young children of color whose parents wanted “a program that would be more sensitive to the needs of their children.” Simmons was one of them. She enrolled her daughter and became a Third World Center regular. Recruiting black professors to Princeton was difficult “because of the isolation that African American families felt,” Simmons said. “We spent so much time there as a family and faculty and staff because it was the one place we could go where we could feel part of that community. Just as we felt very comfortable there, others felt very uncomfortable with the activities of the Third World Center because it was, in a way, an activity that resegregated the campus.”

  As a place for discussions about social justice at home and abroad, the center welcomed speakers with political views to the left of much of the Princeton student body and more international in scope. Craig Robinson called it a “sanctuary.” “You learned about politics, you learned about culture, you learned about people from different backgrounds.… I remember using those debates as practice for my in-class debates, and how I felt so fortunate to have that kind of support that made me feel good about going into class and competing.” On weekends, the TWC, as it was often called, was central to Michelle’s social life. “She was generally where the party was,” said Ken Bruce, two years ahead of Michelle at Princeton, adding that “black parties mostly revolved around the music and dancing, and less around drinking or anything like that.” Michelle ate meals at Stevenson Hall, and she lived on campus for four years, as did almost all of her classmates. She was active in the Organization for Black Unity and helped bring speakers to campus, recalled classmate and OBU officer Lauren Robinson, later Lauren Ugorji, who became Princeton’s vice president for communications. She said Michelle also played a role in the Black Thoughts Table, an informal forum where African Americans and other interested students could talk about social and political questions. “As a black student at Princeton at that time,” Ugorji said, “whether you wanted to deal with race issues or not, you had to.”