by Peter Slevin
While at Princeton, Michelle walked the runway in an occasional fashion show. At a February 1985 benefit that helped raise $15,000 for Ethiopian famine relief, she modeled a sleeveless red velvet gown and a voluminous white floor-length dress. She was pictured in a photograph on the front page of the school newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. To raise money for a local after-school program, she wore a yellow peasant skirt intended to suggest the Caribbean countryside. The student designer, Karen Jackson Ruffin, said she asked Michelle to model the skirt “because she is so tall and carries herself so well. Michelle is very mellow and she said, ‘Sure.’ ”
Sometimes, Michelle and Beard would team up to do Third World Center errands. “If I drove, I would speed,” Beard said. “Michelle would drive the speed limit. We were twenty years old, we were supposed to speed and do dumb, reckless things. Michelle would always do the right thing.” The same qualities struck Beard that would strike Michelle’s friends through the years. She was independent without being arrogant or aloof; she was “always rooted in her values.” When people sought her advice, and many did, she listened carefully and did not simply react, “unlike the rest of us who were twenty and thought we knew so much. When you’re twenty and you go to Princeton, you think you’re smart and life is about you.” As Beard recalled it, “Her thoughts were never the popular opinion or the Princeton opinion or the black opinion.”
Beard also said Michelle was a “fighter” who had “feistiness in her spirit.” That came out in amusing ways, as when Michelle was annoyed with her French teacher. “Michelle’s always been very vocal about anything. If it’s not right, she’s going to say so,” Marian Robinson said. “When she was at Princeton, her brother called me and said, ‘Mom, Michelle’s here telling people they’re not teaching French right.’ She thought the style was not conversational enough. I told him, ‘Just pretend you don’t know her.’ ” Her convictions emerged in sharper ways, as well. After Crystal Nix became the first black editor of The Daily Princetonian, Michelle disapproved of a story about an African American politician. She told Nix in a calm voice, “You need to make sure that a story like that doesn’t run again.” In her senior year, Michelle felt punched in the stomach when a professor assessed her work by telling her, “You’re not the hottest thing I’ve seen coming out of the gate,” despite the fact that she had aced his class. Her response was revealing: “I decided that I was going to do everything in my power to make that man regret those words.… I knew that it was my responsibility to show my professor how wrong he was about me.” She became his research assistant and poured herself into the effort. He noticed and offered to write an extra letter of recommendation. She concluded that she had “shown not just my professor, but myself, what I was capable of achieving.”
Brasuell took Michelle on her first trip to New York and made her feel welcome in her Princeton apartment, which Michelle described as “a place of peace and calm.” But her most memorable experience was folding Craig and Michelle into a rental car for a surprise Mother’s Day expedition to the Carolinas, an overnight drive from central New Jersey. The Robinsons dropped Czerny and young Jonathan in North Carolina and continued to Georgetown, South Carolina, to see their grandparents, Fraser and LaVaughn. After the visit, they picked up their traveling partners on the way back north. Time was short. “It was sort of like, ‘Are we crazy?’ But it was worth it,” said Brasuell, who invited Michelle to be a bridesmaid at her wedding. “There was an evenness about her, a self-assurance about her, a consistent center of gravity about the way she moved in the world.” Marvin Bressler, the professor who supervised the junior year independent work that led to Michelle’s sociology thesis, remembered her for a combination of discipline—“she has a certain puritanical streak”—and sense of humor, which he called “impish.” He described her as thoughtful, prone to reflection, and committed to what he considered social responsibility. “One of the things that is always said about her is that she was grounded,” said Bressler, who traced the trait to her parents, who sometimes visited. The Robinsons, he said, seemed to step from the pages of The Saturday Evening Post like characters in a Norman Rockwell painting. “That family more nearly embodied that conception than any I’ve ever seen,” Bressler said. He recalled Craig, the Ivy League’s best basketball player, a two-time player of the year, holding court in the lobby of Jadwin Gymnasium after games, “his mother standing next to him, tugging at his sleeve and saying, ‘How’s your senior thesis, Craig?’ He knew it was funny. Their father, he was disabled, was barely able to conceal his pride. He knew as a male you weren’t supposed to go around being sentimental about your children, but he was. That kind of thing sustained her.”
ON A STRETCH of Prospect Street known as the province of the university’s private eating clubs, the Third World Center was the odd building out. For generations, sophomores took part in “bicker,” the clubs’ fraternity-like interview and assessment process that determined who would receive invitations, or bids, and which bids the most coveted students would accept. Next door to the center was the all-male Tiger Inn, famous on campus for its boisterous parties. Across the street, behind a low red-brick wall and a swinging gate, was Cottage Club, whose alumni included Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, basketball star and U.S. senator Bill Bradley, and writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby. As an undergraduate, Fitzgerald began writing a Princeton-based novel in the upstairs library at Cottage and later published it as This Side of Paradise. Princeton’s president, John Grier Hibben, said after reading the book, “I cannot bear to think that our young men are merely living four years in a country club and spending their lives wholly in a spirit of calculation and snobbishness.”
Seventy years later, many of the clubs of Michelle’s era had dropped their selective status, and most admitted women, several relenting under the pressure of a civil liberties lawsuit. For all of the progress, the clubs along Prospect Street remained overwhelmingly white, while the service workers tended to be African Americans or immigrants. Black students in Michelle’s generation learned to walk with care down Prospect on party nights. “Even walking across Prospect Street when a lot of people had had a lot to drink was a very challenging experience. People would say things, they would shout things, they wouldn’t give you space on the sidewalk. It was almost like they felt a sense of ownership and they felt we were supplementary guests,” said Ken Bruce, a Princeton junior when Michelle arrived. “I don’t think they looked at us as equivalent stakeholders at the time, and I think it was hard for us to look at ourselves as equivalent stakeholders.” Bruce, an African American engineering student who played football, ran track, and went on to become a New York investment manager, sometimes found himself the only black face in class. “Across the board,” he said, “students and professors saw us as black first.”
ONE COMPLICATING FACTOR—some would say the complicating factor—for African American students in the Ivy League in the 1980s was affirmative action. A policy that delivered opportunity could also be an unwelcome cloud, especially in relations with white students and faculty. The effort, begun in the mid-1960s, was straightforward enough: Identify talented black students who previously would have gone unnoticed and invite them into the club, even if their record appeared weaker than those of white students. One result was to create a reflexive doubt in the minds of skeptics about the worthiness and smarts of black students. The policy was also deeply unpopular among the public at large. At Princeton, where the admission of a black student often meant the rejection of a white student, perhaps the son or daughter of an alumnus, the tension was unmistakable. The dangling question, which trailed African American students like a shadow, was whether they belonged. “There were the beginnings of a lot of resentment about affirmative action. People asked you over dinner what your SAT scores were,” Sharon Holland recalled of the early 1980s. Lauren Ugorji remembered the slights clearly: “The question that bothered me most was, ‘Why are you here?’ ”
Th
e public purposes of affirmative action, a policy described more precisely in Britain as “positive discrimination,” were clear enough. When it came to college, the objective was to give an increasing number of black children opportunities that were comparable to ones enjoyed for generations by white children. In the wake of the civil rights movement and assessments by the likes of the Kerner Commission, credible research suggested that black students were paying the costs of racial subjugation endured by them, their parents, and their parents’ parents, all the way back to slavery times. Compared with a white child, a black child born in the United States in the 1960s was likely to have less money, fewer models of achievement, and a poorer education. All of which, it was assumed, translated to lower scores on standardized tests and rejection letters from selective universities. When combined with the likelihood that African American families had less financial wherewithal to pay the high costs of competitive schools, it became clear to some progressive thinkers that equality of opportunity would not come naturally, at least not any time soon. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson argued the case in a speech at Howard University. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, he said, was an important step, but an insufficient one. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others’—and still justly believe you have been completely fair.” One year later, Harvard Law School began admitting black law students with standardized test scores markedly lower than those of their white classmates, and other schools followed suit.
In 1978, three years before Michelle reached Princeton, the battle over the fairness of affirmative action policies reached the Supreme Court in the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. The instigator was Alan Bakke, a white medical school applicant who said he was rejected by the University of California–Davis in favor of minority students with inferior credentials. He sued, citing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which stated that no program receiving federal money can discriminate “on grounds of race, color, or national origin.” The high court was divided. Four justices agreed with Bakke, while four justices said racial preferences were justified to overcome the residual effects of past discrimination. Justice Lewis Powell cast the deciding vote, concluding that Bakke should not have to pay for wrongs committed by others. But Powell also cited the educational benefits of various kinds of diversity and ruled that universities could consider race when deciding who should be admitted, just as they might consider grades, test scores, orchestral achievements, or speed in the 100-yard dash. The decision left it to admissions officers to determine how to weigh an applicant’s many traits. Standardized tests, increasingly shown to be culturally biased against disadvantaged minority students, would be just one factor. This benefited high-achieving black and Hispanic students while persuading critics that white students were now the losers in a rigged game.
“WE CREATED A COMMUNITY within a community,” Michelle once said, discussing the challenges of being a minority student at Princeton. She also used space on her senior yearbook page to talk about what sustained her: “There is nothing in this world more valuable than friendships. Without them you have nothing.” She grew particularly close to two women. One was Angela Kennedy, the third of three African American siblings to attend Princeton, each of whom would develop a richly meaningful career. The other was Suzanne Alele, born in Nigeria and raised partly in Jamaica before finishing high school in suburban Maryland. The three women were inseparable. They lived in dormitory rooms, using the workaday desks, dressers, and single beds provided by the university. No sofa, no television. “We couldn’t afford any furniture, so we just had pillows on the floor, and a stereo,” reported Kennedy, who said they listened to a lot of Stevie Wonder and “giggled and laughed hysterically.” During spring break one year, they went on a ski trip with a Jewish student group. “We were three black women on a trip with all of these white Jewish kids. We stuck out like sore thumbs, but we had a great time.”
Angela Sadie Edith Kennedy grew up in the nation’s capital, where her father was a postal clerk and her mother commuted to work as a teacher at the upscale and very white Chevy Chase Elementary School, known in the neighborhood as Rosemary. Henry Harold Kennedy Sr., born in 1917 in Covington, Louisiana, “never forgave American society for its racist treatment of him and those whom he most loved,” recalled Angela’s brother, Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor whose research and teaching focused on race and society. He described his father as “an intelligent, thoughtful, loving man who, tragically, had good reason to doubt his government’s allegiance to blacks and, thus, to himself.” He attended segregated schools, saw doors closed to him because of his race, and watched as African Americans were “terrorized and humiliated by whites without any hint of disapproval from public authorities.” His children saw their strong-willed father being humiliated and never forgot it. As Randall Kennedy told the story, his father was pulled over several times by white police officers as he drove the family to South Carolina, “simply because he was a black man driving a nice car. I am not making an inference here. This is what the police openly said.” As the children watched, the officers would instruct Kennedy to behave himself, since he was not “up north” any longer. Their lectures would end with the words “Okay, boy?” There would be a pause as the policeman waited for Kennedy’s response. “My dad reacted in a way calculated to provide the maximum safety to himself and his family: ‘Yassuh,’ he would say with an extra dollop of deference.”
And yet, just as Michelle would recall of her elders, the Kennedy parents made clear that there would be no hand-wringing or excuses. Nor, by the way, would there be any talk of taking to the streets and getting arrested at civil rights protests. “We were expected to get a great education and be excellent at whatever we did. Racism? So what? Overcome it by being better,” said Henry H. Kennedy Jr., Angela’s oldest brother, who came of age during the civil rights years. All three Kennedy children chose legal careers after graduating from Princeton. Henry attended Harvard Law School and became, at thirty-one, the youngest judge appointed to D.C. Superior Court, later becoming a U.S. district judge. Randall went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and then to Yale Law School before clerking for Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. Angela wrote a senior thesis titled “Attitudes Toward Femininity and Masculinity of Princeton University Women” and graduated from Howard Law School. She dedicated her professional life to defending indigent clients at the D.C. Public Defender Service, remaining close to Michelle during the White House years. Asked how the three children managed to prosper, Randall Kennedy described an approach that echoed life on South Euclid. He said of his parents, “They created a family that told the kids that they were deeply loved, no matter what. They also told the family, the kids, to be ambitious and to go out into the world and do what you want to do. They were not people who stood over us every minute.… They did have a rule that said to the kids, especially once we turned 11 or 12: ‘You have to be interested in something. You have to have a particular passion. Frankly, we don’t care what that passion is, but you have to have a passion.’ ”
SUZANNE ALERO ALELE HAD LIVED in the United States for only two years when she reached Princeton in late summer 1981. Born four days after Michelle and half a world away, she spent her early childhood in Lagos, the Nigerian capital, where her parents were doctors with medical degrees from prominent universities in the United Kingdom. Her mother was an obstetrician-gynecologist, her father a specialist in nuclear medicine who graduated from the University of London. They spoke Itsekiri and English at home. Alele spent the first half of high school in Jamaica and the second half in Bethesda, Maryland, where she attended a large suburban high school. She high-jumped and ran the hurdles, took advanced classes in biology and physics, and made the county honor roll. She was also an accomplished pianist, winning a certificate of merit at a London music school and performing in a f
olk music group during her time in Jamaica.
What fascinated Alele academically, she said in her Princeton application, were biology and biochemistry. “What are the important items in the food that I eat? Why am I 5’10” tall and why do I look like my mother?” She learned several computer languages and, as a teenager, envisioned a career in applied mathematics. Teachers commented on her “originality” and clear understanding of difficult subjects. “Integrity and a real sense of responsibility and purpose,” wrote Sharon Helling, her Advanced Placement biology teacher. “Compassionate beyond her years,” wrote guidance counselor Dorothy J. Ford.
At Princeton, Alele took science classes, ran track, and became manager of the lightweight football team. She staffed the help desk at the computer center and joined the International Center. Her academic record was mixed—she found herself on disciplinary probation—but she graduated with a degree in biology after writing her senior thesis on the molecular basis of abnormal red blood cells in sickle-cell anemia, a hereditary disease that primarily afflicts people of African descent. Friends admired her for her ability to resist the pressure to conform. “Suzanne was the spirit that we all should have, the voice inside you that tells you to listen to your own heart,” Czerny Brasuell said. Michelle, more cautious and conventional by nature, said her friend “always made decisions that would make her happy and create a level of fulfillment. She was less concerned with pleasing other people, and thank God.”