Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  While Alele counted herself a member of the Third World Center, she decided to bicker at selective eating clubs. She was invited to join Cap and Gown, a club with a decidedly upper-crust feel across the alley from Cottage Club. There, she knew Terri Sewell, who had been mentored by Michelle through a Third World Center program designed to support new black students on campus. Sewell arrived at Princeton from Alabama. She had graduated as valedictorian of her class at Selma High School, where her father taught math and her mother, the first black woman on the Selma City Council, worked as a librarian. She attended Brown Chapel AME Church, the starting point of Martin Luther King Jr.’s fateful Selma-to-Montgomery march. “She never accepted the status quo,” Sewell’s mother once said, “from grade school on up.” At Princeton, she became a varsity cheerleader and junior class president and wrote an award-winning senior thesis, “Black Women in Politics: Our Time Has Come.” After graduation, she moved on to Oxford and Harvard Law School. In 2010, she became the first black woman elected to Congress from Alabama.

  MICHELLE SPENT the summers after her freshman and sophomore years in Chicago, living on Euclid Avenue and commuting to the downtown office of the executive director of the American Medical Association. She spent much time as a typist, later lamenting that meaningful internships and summer jobs with community groups “seemed to be a luxury that a working-class kid couldn’t afford.” Such positions paid little, if anything, and students on financial aid could not justify giving up a paycheck for the adventure or the experience. “I felt guilty to even ask parents who were already working hard to let me take a summer or a semester off to do something like that,” Michelle said during the White House years in praising a law designed to triple the size of AmeriCorps, a national service program underwritten by the federal government. “So, oftentimes I never asked. I studied. I worked. I worked and I studied.… I had to work all the time because I had to have enough money for books for the year and I had to help out with tuition.”

  In 1984, the summer before her senior year, Michelle and Angela signed up as counselors at a camp in the Catskills for underprivileged girls from New York City. They reported to Camp Anita Bliss Coler—Camp ABC, for short—sixty-five miles north of Manhattan, where 216 girls between the ages of nine and twelve arrived for one of four two-week summer sessions, sleeping in wooden cabins without doors, electricity, or running water, taking long hikes, and listening to nature, often for the first time. Activities at the rustic facility, one of four New York Times Fresh Air Fund camps, ranged from swimming and dance to sewing and pottery. Many of the games organized by counselors were noncompetitive, designed to build trust and self-esteem. Each day, the girls sang grace before lunch. “Being in the woods builds up their confidence,” camp director Beverly Entarfer said in 1985. “Especially the girls [who] have been told that they can’t do this and they can’t do that. Well, they go walking through the forest at night without a flashlight, build a fire or go without hot water for a while, and they find out they can do a lot.”

  Urban church groups and community service organizations chose the campers. In 1984, the summer Michelle was there, some campers came from the Rheedlen Foundation, whose educational director was Geoffrey Canada, the future head of the Harlem Children’s Zone. Canada believed that many impoverished children could get ahead if they had support and caught a break. These were fundamentally good kids, he said, who lacked the experiences and opportunities considered elemental in a middle-class upbringing elsewhere. “Average kids with a chance,” he called them. His thinking would mirror Michelle’s own. As first lady, she called Canada “one of my heroes.”

  At first, Canada was skeptical that the Fresh Air Fund adventures would make a difference. He pointed out that many children in his program, economically disadvantaged and living in broken or violent households, were two years behind their peers in reading and math. Their summers were, at best, unstructured and all of the kids had “a problem with adult authority.” In the end, however, he concluded that the summer projects worked. The children got out of town, they tasted something new, they learned about themselves. “I liked the hayride, and getting away from my enemies in the city,” an eleven-year-old girl said of Camp ABC in the summer of 1984. Another camper in the same era said, “The first time I came here, I liked the nights here, the way you could sit by the lake, talk to people with the moon shining.” Counselors who converged on the camp from the United States and Europe also tended to grow. Helen Macmillan, a young Scottish woman who worked at Camp ABC the year Michelle was there, said, “You learn a lot about yourself here—what you can’t tolerate, what your boundaries are, and what makes you mad.”

  WHEN MICHELLE RETURNED to Princeton for her senior year, the politics-plagued Los Angeles Olympics were over and Ronald Reagan was coasting toward a lopsided reelection victory during a stretch that would see five of six presidential elections won by Republicans. Her largest task before graduation was her senior thesis, which would combine her sociology studies with her interest in African American affairs. She spent many hours designing and refining a study of the racial attitudes and habits of black Princeton alumni, trying to assess the likelihood that successful African Americans would work to help less fortunate black people. Her sixty-four-page paper revealed much about the questions that interested her as she tried to square her upbringing on the South Side of Chicago with the elite world she now inhabited.

  In a survey sent to four hundred black alumni, she asked their reaction to nine statements about “lower class Black Americans and the life they lead.” Among the choices were “I feel guilty that I may be betraying them in some way” and “I feel ashamed of them; they reflect badly on the rest of us.” Other options included “I feel lucky that I was given opportunities that they were not given” and “I feel they must help themselves.” The final choice: “There is no way they can be helped; their situation is hopeless.” For each statement, she asked the respondents to mark boxes ranging from “very true” to “false.” The six-page survey also asked the graduates about their upbringing, their heroes, their connection to God, their relationships of various kinds with white people and black people, and how they perceived those relationships before, during, and after their time at Princeton.

  The thesis was built on twin truths that applied beyond Princeton as African American class differences grew. The first was that some black people were making their way to ever higher rungs on the ladder. The second was that vast numbers of black people were being left behind. Michelle and her friends had opportunities their parents could hardly have imagined, a fact they recognized every time they sat down to Christmas dinner with their extended families. The broad racial solidarity of the civil rights movement was giving way to economic stratification. It was an “illusion” of the Civil Rights Act, wrote University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson in 1978, “that when the needs of the black middle class were met, so were the needs of the entire black community.” As it happened, it was Wilson’s drives through the nicest parts of South Shore, Michelle’s increasingly middle-class Chicago neighborhood, that crystallized his recognition of the growing divide. But where did the obligations lie? Michelle had been taught from childhood that every rising African American must reach back with a helping hand. It was a familiar understanding—“From those to whom much is given, much is expected”—and she considered it part of her cultural DNA. Now she was asking whether success far above the norm had changed the equation.

  Michelle’s literature review sketched a continuum of opinion about black identity and the wide array of essentially political choices available to African Americans in U.S. society. At one end of the spectrum, she borrowed a 1967 definition of black power from Charles V. Hamilton and former Freedom Rider and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Stokely Carmichael. “Before a group can enter the open society,” they wrote in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, “it must close ranks. By this, we mean that group solidarity is necessary
before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society.” From Andrew Billingsley’s Black Families in White America, she described the idea that African Americans must take responsibility for black communities and “define themselves by new ‘Black’ standards different from the old White standards.” And from the other end of the spectrum, distant from Hamilton and Carmichael, she cited the conciliatory position of her thesis adviser, Walter L. Wallace, who taught a class called “Race and Ethnicity in American Society.” In his Black Elected Officials, he argued that blacks and whites must work together toward “representative integration.” Michelle wrote that such integration, according to Wallace and his co-author, James E. Conyers, meant the inclusion of black politicians and public servants in “various aspects of politics.” She explained, “They discuss problems which face these Black officials who must persuade the White community that they are above issues of race and that they are representing all people and not just Black people.” Michelle’s description strikingly foreshadowed a challenge that she and her husband would face twenty- two years later as they aimed for the White House.

  To say that during her Princeton years she could not envision an African American president is like saying that the sun rises and sets every day. Even the acceptance of black people as equals seemed unlikely. The “White cultural and social structure will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society, never becoming a full participant,” she wrote in her thesis. Indeed, Michelle believed that there existed a separate “Black culture” and “White culture.” Among the reasons she perceived black culture to be different were “its music, its language, the struggles, and a ‘consciousness’ shared by its people.” Those elements “may be attributed to the injustices and oppressions suffered by this race of people which are not comparable to the experience of any other race of people through this country’s history.” She expected her research to show that the more thoroughly a Princeton student or graduate became immersed in white culture, the less connected that person would feel to the plight of lower-class black people—the “black underclass,” as Wilson described it, “in a hopeless state of economic stagnation, falling further and further behind the rest of society.” But, to Michelle’s surprise, the eighty-nine surveys returned by black alumni did not confirm her hypothesis. Black graduates could, and did, care about the fate of African Americans who had been less successful.

  To Michelle, the most interesting finding suggested that African American students identified more with other black people while they were at Princeton than they had before or after. Indeed, after graduation the sense of identification “decreased dramatically.” She called it her major conclusion. The survey did not address the reasons, but Michelle offered two. Calculating the ages of the respondents, she reasoned that most had been on campus in the 1970s and might have sought solidarity in keeping with the teachings of the black power movement. Her other theory was rooted in the isolation that she and others felt. Noting that the university had just five tenured African American professors, a small African American studies program, and only the Third World Center “designed specifically for the intellectual and social interests of Blacks,” she suggested that black students turned to each other for support “because it is likely that other Blacks are more sensitive to respondents’ problems.”

  As for her own views of Princeton and life beyond, she wrote that her sense of alienation made her more determined to muster her skills “to benefit the Black community.” And yet in a season when recruiters for blue-chip banks and companies descended on Princeton, she felt her professional aspirations shifting and the temptation of a large paycheck growing. “It is conceivable,” she wrote, “that my four years of exposure to a predominately White, Ivy League university has instilled within me certain conservative values. For example, as I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates—acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high paying position in a successful corporation.” Howard Taylor, a sociology professor who helped advise Michelle while she was working on her thesis, said she “was not an assimilationist, but she wasn’t a wild-eyed militant, either. She was able to straddle that issue with great insight.”

  The questions Michelle was asking represented familiar territory for black students at the time, said fellow graduate Ken Bruce. “How her experience at Princeton would affect her place in society, that’s pretty much what all of us were thinking. You get this great education and what do we do with that, both in the majority environment and in our minority environment?” Few questions seemed to have easy answers, and one conundrum led to another, even about where to live. “Do you become the wealthiest person in a black neighborhood,” Bruce asked, “or the only black person in a white neighborhood?”

  MICHELLE EARNED sociology department honors. Her thesis also won an honorable mention and a $50 prize from the African American studies program. The questions she raised would stay with her. “One of the points I was making, which is a reality for black folks in majority white environments, is it is a very isolating experience, period. The question is how do people deal with that isolation. Does it make you cling more to your own community or does it make you try to assimilate more? Different people handle that in different ways,” Michelle said in 2007. Tacking to the value of diversity, she continued, “It is incumbent on us, whether we are in city government or sitting around the corporate boardroom or in policy or education, to have critical masses of diverse voices at the table. I challenged my colleagues in the nonprofit world to look around and say, ‘What does the leadership look like? Does it look like you? What are you doing to branch out and to make sure there aren’t just one or two black folks, women, or Hispanics around the table?’ In all sectors, we still struggle with that. At many of the top universities, we still struggle with that. That’s one of the core points that comes out of my thesis and I don’t think that’s changed significantly since I wrote it. We’ve made marginal change. The question for Princeton is what does the ratio of underrepresented minority students look like today? What about faculty? What about top administrators? Those are the questions we have to continue to ask as a country.”

  ALTHOUGH MICHELLE WORRIED that her time at Princeton would diminish her desire to serve, there never seemed much chance that she would forget her South Side roots. For one thing, her parents had drilled the message of community deep into her consciousness. “We teased them about how some people went away to college and never came back to their community,” Marian said of Michelle and Craig. For another, Michelle nurtured a connection to family not five blocks from the lush Princeton campus. From time to time, she crossed Nassau Street and the town-gown divide to visit a woman who lived in a small apartment at 10 Lytle Street, just downhill from the gates of the university. Born in 1914, barely two generations removed from slavery, the woman was raised in rural South Carolina and made her way to Princeton to find work. When Michelle knew her, she was cooking and cleaning for a prosperous white family. Although her name was Ernestine Jones, Michelle knew her as Aunt Sis, for she was a younger sister of her paternal grandfather, Fraser C. Robinson Jr. How sweet it was, considering the southern world that Jones had known and the Princeton she had first encountered, that two of her brother’s grandchildren would graduate from one of the finest schools in the land.

  Four years at Princeton left Michelle freshly conflicted about her own ambitions. “My goals after Princeton are not as clear as before,” she wrote in her thesis. The picture-book university, with its neo-Gothic quadrangles of carved stone and its clutches of self-assured white people, was an elite realm that delivered an elite education. It was a combination that cut both ways, reminding her all too often that she was a black student from the Chicago working class, while also telling her that Michelle LaVaughn Robinson could play in the big leagues. After another summer back home, she moved on to Harvard Law School, where the opportunities an
d the conundrums presented themselves anew.

  FIVE

  Progress in Everything and Nothing

  Harvard Law School, when Michelle arrived in 1985, was a lofty perch, every bit as privileged as Princeton, but certainly more competitive once classes began. Some critics derided the school as a factory, in part because it was the largest law school in the country, in part because it turned out so many corporate lawyers. At graduation, diligence would be rewarded with admission to the upper echelons of American society. It was no accident that nearly half of the Supreme Court justices appointed after 1955 bore a Harvard pedigree or that Michelle pressed ahead with her application after being waitlisted, despite being accepted everywhere else she applied. The place had an undeniable mystique, polished and perpetuated by the 1973 film The Paper Chase, whose iconic Professor Kingsfield explains theatrically to his cowed students, “You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.” Chicago writer Scott Turow turned anxiety into memoir in One L, published in 1977. He said Harvard beckoned “those of us compulsively pursuing some vague idea of distinction.” A former federal prosecutor who wrote a string of crime thrillers, he drew a stark portrait of the first-year pressures. “It is Monday morning, and when I walk into the central building, I can feel my stomach clench,” he wrote. “For the next five days I will assume that I am somewhat less intelligent than anyone around me. At most moments I’ll suspect that the privilege I enjoy was conferred as some kind of peculiar hoax. I will be certain that no matter what I do, I will not do it well enough.” Years later, Turow said being at Harvard meant “feeling like you were playing an unwinnable game of king of the hill.”