by Peter Slevin
BLSA LEADERS HAD BEEN MEETING in small groups to discuss protest options since April 1988, when law school dean James Vorenberg announced that he was stepping down. The new dean would be Professor Robert Clark, who had been dismissive of Derrick Bell’s protests. The students, concluding that the moment before Vorenberg’s departure was an opportunity to petition for faculty diversity, decided on an overnight sit-in in Vorenberg’s office, where they would present a dozen demands. Seeking maximum publicity, they drafted a mock complaint resembling a lawsuit and assembled a list of likely media outlets. The target was May 10, two days before a full faculty meeting. One objective was to be invited to the meeting to argue their case.
When Robert Wilkins presented the plan to BLSA members, the response was far from the unanimous support he had expected. It was exam season and some students said they could not afford to take time away from their books. Others worried that an arrest would hurt their professional chances. Wilkins reminded his audience that a generation of protesters in the South had risked beatings and jail for their convictions and, anyway, nothing so severe was going to happen in the hushed halls of Harvard Law. Whether or not they joined the sit-in, he and others argued, BLSA members should not weaken the impact of the demonstration by voting against it. The leadership counted enough votes to go forward.
Geneva Crenshaw would have been proud. The vote was a victory, however modest, for Derrick Bell’s cherished activism and the narrowing of the distance between theory and practice. Verna Williams described a determination to make BLSA “something more, not a social club,” and she gave Bell some of the credit. “He said nothing’s going to happen unless you speak up. He was always reminding us of that.” If three years at Harvard had confirmed anything to the most politically active students, it was the elemental lesson from Frederick Douglass that power concedes nothing without a demand.
THE TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR SIT-IN began on schedule on Tuesday, May 10. Roughly fifty students participated, the majority of them African American. The BLSA leadership called it a “study vigil.” Television news footage showed students seated quietly in Vorenberg’s suite preparing for exams. Wilkins presented the demands to the dean, among them that the law school hire a black female professor that year and add at least twenty women or members of minority groups in tenured or tenure-track jobs over the next four years. The list called on the administration to do more to prepare black and minority students to teach law and to “diversify the curriculum to reflect the experience of people of color and women,” a page from Bell’s playbook and Michelle’s BLSA essay. For good measure, the students also demanded that Bell be named the next dean and Ogletree be offered tenure. A student press release said the protest had become necessary when Vorenberg and the faculty appointments committee showed “a refusal to take any concrete steps or make any tangible commitment.” The statement went on to say that minority hiring was important to address “the breadth of legal issues that face America’s lawyers. Many of these issues are now omitted by the predominately White male faculty.”
In response, Vorenberg made no promises on hiring, but pledged to support a broadening of the curriculum and efforts to give students a stronger voice. Wilkins was permitted to speak to the faculty at its meeting, the day after the sit-in ended. He recalled a decidedly mixed reaction from the assembled professors. Some applauded, some folded arms, some showed stern faces. At least one faculty member did not look up from his newspaper.
GRADUATION DAY DAWNED GRAY, but the rain-soaked outdoor ceremony in Harvard Yard carried the familiar pomp of commencement exercises everywhere, this one all the sweeter because it was Harvard. The recipients of honorary degrees at the university’s 337th commencement included soprano Jessye Norman, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Óscar Arias from Costa Rica, who admonished the graduates to acknowledge their rare and privileged position and embrace the accompanying responsibilities. “The majority of young people in this world are neither here nor in other university graduations,” he said. “That majority, if they are lucky, got up early today to plow fields or to start up machines in factories. Young people like yourselves are dying in futile wars or barely subsisting with no hope. The privilege of knowledge bears a social responsibility.” Harvard president Derek Bok, too, spoke of civic duty that day. He lamented the low salaries paid to teachers and public servants and contrasted those roles with the career choices of the graduates of Harvard Law. He pointed out that just 2 percent of the graduates of one of the most prestigious law schools in the country entered government jobs right after graduation. An even smaller number, he said, chose public interest or legal aid work. The vast majority joined corporate law firms.
After the ceremony, David Wilkins saw from a distance the Robinson family sheltering under an arch. Michelle was there, elegant and tall, her brother Craig still taller, and Marian Robinson standing with them. Fraser, who would die less than three years later, sat alongside in a wheelchair. Wilkins introduced himself to the Chicago visitors. “Harvard Law School is a hard place,” he told them. “It’s a hard place for anybody, but it’s a particularly hard place for black students and more for black women students. Michelle not only did well in this place, but she did something quite unique: She tried to change it. I don’t know what your daughter’s going to do, but I promise you, whatever she decides to do, she’s going to be somebody special.”
Michelle was leaving Harvard more confident and skilled, if not necessarily more certain about her direction, than when she arrived nearly three years before. For all of the impassioned discussion about purpose, she chose corporate law, returning to the name-brand Chicago firm where she had worked the previous summer, stepping onto the cushy corporate track that she had mused about at Princeton. The new job would cover some bills and provide some legal experience. And then she would see. In the Harvard yearbook, her parents bought space for a message, reminding her with proud bemusement that she might have fancy degrees from Harvard and Princeton, but she was still a South Side girl, still a Robinson: “We knew you would do this fifteen years ago when we could never make you shut up.”
SIX
Finding the Right Thing
When Michelle packed her boxes in Cambridge and moved back to Chicago after seven years in the Ivy League, she traded one privileged institution for another, embarking on the corporate path that she had begun to foresee in her college years. She started work in the summer of 1988 as a first-year associate at Sidley & Austin, one of the city’s most prominent firms—very white, very male, very pleased with its blue-chip client list. By education and affiliation, she was now a certified member of the elite, and from her first day on the job, she was earning more money than her parents combined. And yet she was no closer to resolving her essential dilemma, the one that had informed so many conversations at Princeton and Harvard: What is possible for a black person, especially a black woman, in America? What is desirable? What is right when judged by whom?
It was more than Michelle’s fine education that made her new career possible, although the pair of diplomas inked in Latin offered impressive evidence of her potential. The fact was, Chicago was changing. The city she found when she returned to the bungalow on South Euclid was not the Chicago of Richard Wright or her grandfathers or her parents. It was not the city where a talented young black woman’s options ranged about as far as the nearest classroom or secretarial pool. Nor was it the Chicago of Richard J. Daley, who had wielded power atop a largely white power structure from 1955 until his death in 1976. A generation after Martin Luther King’s northern campaign fizzled, black economic and political clout was growing. African Americans accounted for nearly 40 percent of the city’s population, sprawling across dozens of square miles. There were more than one million black people within the city limits, compared with 240,000 in 1930, when Michelle’s grandparents were coming of age. With the population and the changing times came greater opportunity and perhaps the biggest shift of all: The mayor of Chicago
during much of Michelle’s time away had been Harold Washington, a black man.
Chicago’s election, in 1983, of its first African American mayor came later than most. Five years after New Orleans and Oakland. Ten years after Detroit, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Sixteen years after Cleveland and Gary. Frustration with the white establishment had been growing, fueled by the unequal treatment of black neighborhoods and residents. Anger had spiked in 1968, as it had in many cities, with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and again in 1969 when Chicago police raided an apartment and killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, leaders of the Black Panthers. In 1972, police mistreated two black dentists, Herbert Odom and Daniel Claiborne, fueling the conviction that the rock-no-boats strategy of the Silent Six black aldermen had run its course. “I have been asked why it took me so long to take a stand,” Representative Ralph Metcalfe, an Olympic gold medalist who had been one of the six, said that year as he broke with Daley and the Democratic machine. “My answer is this: It’s never too late to become black. And I suggest some of you try becoming black also.”
After Daley’s death in December 1976, Harold Washington lost the race to succeed him. In 1983, however, he rode into office with the backing of an energized coalition. The election, for all the progress it represented, also revealed the city’s enduring racial fissures. Washington received just 11 percent of the white vote in the primary. Many white Democrats chose race over party and voted Republican in the general election. But the bitterness of the campaign and the lateness of the date made the achievement all the sweeter for Washington’s supporters, particularly residents of the heavily black communities on the South Side and West Side. It was like the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the Wicked Witch of the West melts away. Washington had paid his own dues to Daley and the Democratic machine, rising within it, yet his election promised progress and patronage alike.
“His picture was everywhere,” wrote a young community organizer who arrived in Chicago in July 1985, two years into Washington’s tenure. “On the walls of shoe repair shops and beauty parlors; still glued to lampposts from the last campaign; even in the windows of the Korean dry cleaners and Arab grocery stores, displayed prominently, like some protective totem.” A black barber in Hyde Park asked the organizer if he had been in Chicago during the election. No, the newcomer said, he had not. The barber explained, “Had to be here before Harold to understand what he means to the city. Before Harold, seemed like we’d always be second-class citizens.” Another man spoke up and said it was “plantation politics.” The barber agreed. “That’s just what it was, too. A plantation. Black people in the worst jobs. The worst housing. Police brutality rampant. But when the so-called black committeemen came around election time, we’d all line up and vote the straight Democratic ticket. Sell our soul for a Christmas turkey. White folks spitting in our faces and we’d reward ’em with the vote.”
The new organizer who went to the barber shop and recalled the conversation was Barack Obama, who spent three years doing grassroots political work on the South Side. He headed off to Harvard Law School in 1988, just as Michelle was settling into her job at the law firm. They would not meet until the following year.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER Washington won a second term, Alan Greene sat down to dinner in Cambridge with twenty-three-year-old Michelle Robinson. It was the fall of 1987 and she was in her final year at Harvard, starting to choose among job offers from prominent Chicago law firms. One of those firms was Chadwell Kaiser, whose specialty was complex business litigation, particularly the profitable work of defending corporations against anti-trust complaints. She had spent the summer after her first year of law school at Chadwell, where the partners had been impressed. It was unusual for the firm to hire a first-year law student, but Michelle was “so obviously a quality candidate,” Greene said. The lawyers were struck by her aptitude for the law, her self-confidence, and her accomplishments at Princeton and Harvard. Greene described her as “hard-charging” and “sophisticated,” not somebody “you would just stick in a library to do research.” And there was something else. Michelle was a talented black woman entering a hypercompetitive field that for decades had been very white and mostly male. The firm needed her. Not because it was the moral thing to do—an argument that was appealing but insufficient—but because its business model demanded it.
“Our firm, like everybody else in the mid-eighties, was realizing that the world of law firms was too insular,” Greene said. The firm’s interest in Michelle, he said, “started with the idea that here is somebody who seems to get along fine.” If all went well and she proved to be as talented as she appeared, she could become a magnet for black clients and minority lawyers, as well as for other clients who valued a diverse team. The firm had once been entirely Protestant, male, and white, only later hiring Catholics, Jews, and women. “So, she would be the next breakthrough in the firm. That’s a lot of pressure and it didn’t seem to faze her, which was one of the things in her favor.”
Despite Greene’s entreaties, Michelle chose to start her career at Sidley & Austin, a larger, more dynamic, and marginally more diverse firm—the clients of one black Sidley attorney included Muhammad Ali and boxing promoter Don King. It was not a hasty decision; hasty was not her style. She aimed to build her credentials and start to repay student loans that totaled tens of thousands of dollars. She had a good idea of the air she would breathe, having been a summer associate at Sidley the previous year. The firm was founded in 1866, five years before the Chicago Fire tore through the heart of the city. It was a classic white shoe operation that had expanded and changed through mergers and collaborations. One of the firm’s best-known partners in the modern era was Newton Minow, a Democrat, who, as director of the Federal Communications Commission, famously decried television as a “vast wasteland.” Yet the firm’s politics were broadly Republican, and there was no disguising the fact that the firm’s business was distinctly corporate. There would be no trips to distant courthouses to work with indigent clients, no sit-ins for change. When she rode the elevator to her office on the forty-seventh floor of a downtown skyscraper, she was halfway to the clouds. And yet, as the novelty wore off, she would recognize ruefully that she could stand in her gleaming window and still not quite see the South Side neighborhood of her youth.
MICHELLE’S ASSIGNMENTS as a young associate at Sidley ranged from the AT&T account to a series of marketing matters for Coors beer and Barney, the purple dinosaur on public television. One colleague said the work could be thankless and, frankly, dull—for example, reading storyboards to determine whether a beer advertisement conformed to television industry rules and standards. “I knew Michelle was frustrated,” said John Levi, a senior partner who remained a friend. “Things in that group were unsettled at that time.” Colleagues recall her efforts as thorough and her voice as independent. “She was very at ease with herself. Confident in her attitude. I don’t think she suffered fools easily,” said Mary Hutchings Reed, one of the firm’s few senior women attorneys, who supervised Michelle in Sidley’s intellectual property group. Other young lawyers had stronger records when they were hired, but Michelle’s personality and high standards stood out, another senior colleague recalled. “A lot of people come with great résumés, but without a lot of common sense and without the kind of personal strength that she had,” said Nate Eimer, who joined the firm in 1973. “She was very poised, she was extremely articulate, she was very smart, she obviously was not intimidated by anything or anybody,” Eimer said. “She was the perfect associate, the perfect lawyer for Sidley. She would have done extraordinarily well had she stayed there.”
Early on, in a conversation with Levi, Michelle volunteered to play a role in the firm’s recruiting efforts. She had not been at Sidley for a year, but Levi invited her to sift applications from Harvard students, and help recruit the best of them. He reasoned that she knew the school, possessed a winning personality, and would speak positively about the firm. The fact that she was African America
n was a bonus. In the next step of Sidley’s hiring and orientation process, her race played a role. “There was always a bit of an effort to introduce black people who were coming through to black people who were here, just to let them know they wouldn’t be the sole black person here,” said Steven Carlson, a white Princeton graduate who had been Michelle’s first contact at Sidley. That year, the firm invited a black first-year law student from Harvard to join Sidley’s class of summer associates in 1989, just as Chadwell Kaiser had done with Michelle. He was a star and the firm wanted him to have a good summer. Would Michelle, the higher-ups wanted to know, be his adviser?
ON HIS FIRST DAY, Barack was late. Michelle took note. Despite what she described as “all this buzz about this hotshot,” she expected to be unimpressed. For one thing, after examining the photograph he had sent for the Sidley directory, she concluded that he was not much of a looker. It was the ears, she later said. For another, she knew how little it sometimes took for well-meaning white people to be wowed by a black person. Everyone was making a big fuss, she thought to herself, because Barack was “probably just a black man who can talk straight.”
“But he walked into the office and we hit it off right away because he is very charming and he was handsome—I thought he was handsome. And I think we were attracted to each other because we didn’t take the whole scene as seriously as a lot of people do. He liked my dry sense of humor and my sarcasm. I thought he was a really good, interesting guy, and I was fascinated with his background because it was so different than mine.” How different? “Well, Barack grew up in a multiracial environment,” she explained in 1996. “His mother is white, his father is Kenyan, he lived in Hawaii.” He had spent several years as a child in Indonesia with his anthropologist mother and he had seen some of the world. His worldliness gave him a dimension that she did not encounter on the South Side or among the well-heeled lawyers at Sidley, where “you tend to find people that sort of fit one mold.”