Michelle Obama

by Peter Slevin

  Michelle introduced these concepts to Allies she recruited from across Chicago, adopting a training manual published by McKnight and Kretzmann. Each Ally received a copy during “Core Week,” when the concepts were introduced and the coaching and team building began. The manual proposed ways of asking questions and listening, an approach considered preferable to marching into a neighborhood to prescribe and command. It emphasized outreach to residents who had ideas and energy but did not carry the label of “community leader.” Successful workers would recognize a suffering neighborhood as a glass half empty, but work with it as a glass half full. They would see assets, in other words, not just deficits.

  Kretzmann met for coffee with Michelle as she developed her curriculum. He saw how the theories resonated with her understanding of Chicago’s black neighborhoods. Once the Allies were on board, Michelle recognized how much she enjoyed the mentoring and teaching side of the job, recalling the role that elders had played in her own life and the importance of reaching back, just as she had discussed in her Princeton thesis and all those conversations at Harvard. It all fit. “My mom and dad would always say that if just a few people would come back and live in the community, it would make all the difference in the world,” Michelle said. “We talked about it a lot.”

  At each step in her life, Michelle stretched herself in fresh ways, moving from South Shore to Whitney Young to Princeton to Harvard to Sidley to City Hall. The same was true at Public Allies. Most important, she was in charge. The organization was not prestigious, the job was not lucrative, and there was no guarantee of success, but it was hers. “The first thing that was mine and I was responsible for every aspect of it,” Michelle said. “It sounded risky and just out there.” She described her three-year stint as executive director as the first time in her working life that her talents and her passions converged. In 1995, not two years after starting, she oversaw a budget of $1,121,214, with about half coming from the U.S. government through what had become the AmeriCorps program. Summing up her experience after reaching the White House, she said, “I was never happier in my life than when I was working to build Public Allies.”

  MICHELLE ATTRACTED young Allies from DePaul University and the University of Chicago and a few from Harvard Law—but also from housing projects such as Cabrini-Green and tough neighborhoods like Little Village and North Lawndale, where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had tried nearly thirty years earlier to expose the wrongs of poverty and discrimination. Some Allies came equipped with only a high school equivalency degree. A few had criminal pasts. Many had trouble at home and little experience with high standards. “She didn’t care if you were one of the cool kids. She cared if you were one of the kids who really wanted it,” said Jobi Petersen Cates, a member of Michelle’s first Public Allies class. “She would pick the one on the edge of her seat. It had nothing to do with intellect or breeding, but that they were itching to get going. That quality of enthusiasm and earnestness was more important than just about anything else.” In bringing a wide range of people together, one of Michelle’s essential goals was to teach them to walk in unfamiliar worlds, a challenge for sheltered and unsheltered young people alike. “There’s nothing funnier,” she once said, “than to watch a kid who believes they know it all actually come across some real, tough problems in communities that test every fiber of what they believe.” On the flip side, she said, nothing was finer than to see a kid without a high school diploma sit with college graduates and realize that his “ideas are just as good, sometimes even better.” Bethann Hester, a white woman who started as an Ally and then joined the staff, recalled that “the most powerful thing she ever taught me was to be constantly aware of my privilege.… Michelle reminded me that it’s too easy to go and sit with your own. She can invite you in a kind of aggressive way to be all you can be.”

  If Michelle had only been seeking diversity of palette, she could have chosen well-mannered candidates of varying complexions from comfortable middle-class households. That would have been the path taken by a person “who wants to just look like they’re doing well,” said Cates, a white Northwestern graduate. But that was not Michelle’s approach. “She would always take risks on kids from lower-income neighborhoods—and in Chicago, that correlates with race—just to make sure that they got a chance. She was willing to drive them hard and take extra time, in addition to being executive director, to push these guys. These aren’t easy guys to work with.” Cates continued, “The people who had privilege coming into the program, she didn’t encourage us any less, she didn’t push us any less hard. But I got the sense that part of her mission in life was to push all these incredible people not to be left behind, not to let their lives go. She was hard on them, but also didn’t kick them out.”

  Krsna Golden was just eighteen when Michelle recruited him for her first class of Public Allies after meeting him at a leadership awards ceremony. By his own account, he had been in trouble—dabbling in petty crime, running with tough guys, being expelled from school—before straightening up. He was smart, equipped with a big vocabulary and a probing mind, and he was a talker. Michelle complimented him on his ability to parse problems, but she wanted him to come up with solutions. “She has a knack for building as she destroys. If she’s addressing one of your weaknesses, she makes it a priority to fill in the gaps with strengths and how, if you apply yourself, you can change,” Golden said. “She doesn’t let people off the hook … but there’s a charisma in there that makes you feel like, even if you’re in a hard place with her, you’re okay. You’re still safe, you’re still like one of her cubs.” Under Michelle’s tutelage, Golden won an award that took him to Washington and she helped him travel to Germany on a cultural exchange. He was uncommonly bright, she assured him, but he was in danger of wasting his talents. “She told me, ‘Go back to school, go back to school, go back to school.’ ” Stanford, she said, Stanford. Two decades later, still smart, still verbal, still thoughtful while cutting hair on the South Side, Golden sometimes wished he had listened and made it past barber college.

  Public Allies sought to teach young recruits how to build relationships and achieve results. This happened during their internships, but also at training sessions in the group’s downtown offices. It was in the weekly group sessions, Michelle said, “where the magic happened.” Sometimes, however, the magic was slow in coming. One night during her third year, a discussion grew so heated that an angry Ally punched a hole in an office door. When Michelle arrived at work the next morning, she did not expel him. Rather, she explained to him that his anger was self-defeating because it removed his ideas from the discussion. “You can’t be punching doors here. You lose credibility when you do that. You know what I mean?” she said, according to Leif Elsmo, a longtime colleague. Another day, Michelle sat down with an Ally who was charming but often showed up late, equipped with an elaborate excuse. The young man said he had woken up that morning and taken a drink of booze from the refrigerator. His troubled mother had then asked him to stay home and help her. “I hear that,” Michelle replied, “but that can’t be how you’re defining your choice for the morning.… Here are some ways you need to deal with that. This is about you.”

  It was a tense moment with a kid who was “pretty far gone,” said Julie Sullivan, a staff member in the room that day. She said Michelle delivered a message that was equal parts firm and empathetic. “And not in a ridiculous ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ way,” Sullivan said. “It was realistic and understanding of what people are going through.” Michelle did not, however, have polite words for black Allies who tried to use race or upbringing as a crutch, particularly if their pitch included bad-mouthing white people for a lack of understanding. In a page she could have taken from the Shields and Robinson family handbooks, she made clear that young black men had no room for error. A mediocre white kid might be able to skate by on charisma or connections, his competence assumed or his failings forgiven. Less so his black counterpart. Cates, who later worked
in City Hall, remembered supervising an African American Ally who did not do his work and resisted earnest efforts to keep him on track. She reported the trouble to Michelle, who “didn’t indulge that situation for five seconds. She didn’t use kid gloves.”

  Sullivan was impressed with Michelle’s ability to be “understood anywhere” as she crossed back and forth among Chicago’s disparate realms. She recalled drives in Michelle’s Saab. “We’d go from some burned-out shithole on the West Side, where she’s talking to really scary people, and then we’d go downtown to a meeting” with Daley’s chief of staff. “She was unafraid to put issues on the table and talk about them clearly. She always had a really, really uncanny combination of unruffled calm and extreme clarity about what needed to happen next, whether it was in the small picture or the big picture. You couldn’t not respect her, even if you were mad at her.”

  When issues of race and class surfaced in Public Allies staff discussions and training sessions, as they always did, Michelle had little tolerance for dogma or meandering debate. Getting from Point A to Point B was her focus, an approach that would become a hallmark of her professional and political life. Paul Schmitz, who ran the Milwaukee office of Public Allies at the time, said Michelle was the person who would say during a discussion, “That’s nice, but we’ve got to get things done.”

  ONE OF MICHELLE’S TASKS was to find places for the Allies to work. To do so, she drew on a web of relationships that grew with her membership in the 1993 class of Leadership Greater Chicago, an extracurricular networking and education program for promising young leaders in business, government, and other city realms. Valerie Jarrett and John Rogers preceded her in the program. Among those who followed were Barack’s close friends Marty Nesbitt and Eric Whitaker; Craig’s first wife, Janis Robinson; and future U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan. Michelle persuaded an array of colleagues and friends to talk with Allies, with one eye toward the Allies’ edification and another toward their future employment. One of the speakers she imported was Barack, steeped in the ways of community organizing and something of a student of John McKnight’s in the 1980s. For all of Barack’s talent, some Allies and staff members later laughed ruefully that they had barely noticed him, so dazzled were they by Michelle. To them, he was just Michelle’s husband, a likable guy doing some teaching and lawyering somewhere in town.

  What Barack brought to the Public Allies training sessions, however, was his knowledge of grassroots organizing and his experience of trying to pry results from City Hall. He often talked about power dynamics. “It was very focused on thinking about how you build constituencies within communities,” said Kelly James, who attended the training as an Ally in 1997, after Michelle left the organization, and later took Barack’s classes at the University of Chicago Law School. Teaching in Socratic style, he challenged his charges to examine their own thinking and move beyond conventional battle lines, many of them established during the civil rights era. He counseled them to find places where interests intersected and opponents could agree. And, as Michelle always counseled, to focus laser-like on results. Disadvantaged communities cannot be seen as “mere recipients or beneficiaries,” Barack said in 1995. “The thrust of our organizing must be on how to make them productive, how to make them employable, how to build our human capital, how to create businesses, institutions, banks, safe public spaces—the whole agenda of creating productive communities. That is where our future lies. The right wing talks about this, but they keep appealing to that old individualistic bootstrap myth: Get a job, get rich and get out.”

  In a heartbeat, the Ivy-educated couple could have gotten out. They chose to stay, but both began looking for a bigger set of tools. In the end, both chose to work from the inside. For Barack, the answer was politics. In 1995, he decided to run for the Illinois state senate, concluding that a political perch offered leverage that community organizing could not deliver. For Michelle, it was bridge building at the University of Chicago, a privileged and remote institution that tended to see the surrounding South Side black community as an unkempt and threatening backyard. She viewed her role as breaking down barriers between the university and the community. Beyond the sense of purpose, the job paid better, with fewer obligations than Public Allies, where she had served as chief cook and bottlewasher for three nonstop years. And, too, she and Barack wanted children.

  The Public Allies job “just wasn’t big enough,” said board member Sunny Fischer, who hosted a goodbye party at her home, where Michelle grew “a little teary.” Barack and Michelle had been guests there before, enthusiastic and witty partners in political conversation with the Fischers and an eclectic array of friends whom they also saw elsewhere in Chicago, including former Weather Underground leaders William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. The two had become academics and Hyde Park Little League baseball regulars after years on the lam. Fischer remembered Michelle at the farewell party as “the warmest I’ve ever seen her.” She was thirty-two years old and she felt she had accomplished much, designing the Chicago operation and building it from the ground up. Michelle had loved creating an organization, particularly this one, but Fischer never thought she would stay forever. “I always got the sense,” Fischer said, “that there was a restlessness in her, that there was something else she could be doing that had more impact, that could move social change a little faster.”

  EIGHT

  A Little Tension with That

  For decades, the relationship of the overwhelmingly white University of Chicago to the surrounding African American community had been unsavory bordering on hostile. It seemed an unlikely place for Michelle to land. “I grew up five minutes from the university and never once went on campus. All the buildings have their backs to the community,” she said. “The university didn’t think kids like me existed, and I certainly didn’t want anything to do with that place.” Yet here she was in September 1996 reporting to work on the inside as director of a student community service program—“as fate would have it,” she mused, recognizing the irony. She set out to bridge gaps of privilege and race, often finding herself walking in parallel worlds, serving as a kind of translator. The job had its bureaucratic side, but it provided freedom to devise projects that might make a difference. “What I found was that working within the institution gave me the opportunity to express my concerns about how little role the university plays in the life of its neighbors,” Michelle said. “I wanted desperately to be involved in helping to break down the barriers that existed between the campus and the community.”

  The university’s neo-Gothic spires had long stood like watchtowers along the green Midway Plaisance, where the first Ferris wheel carved steam-powered circles in the air during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The Midway bequeathed its name to carnivals around the country, and the university, bankrolled in the 1890s by John D. Rockefeller, became a magnet for smart and sober scholarship. The intellectual ferment was recognized with dozens of Nobel Prizes and one of the country’s most famous scientific discoveries. In a squash court beneath Stagg Field on December 2, 1942, Manhattan Project researchers produced the first self-sustaining atomic reaction, a precursor of nuclear weapons. It was said only half in jest that modern-day undergraduates would look up from their readings of Hegel and Dostoevsky and declare that the Hyde Park campus was the place “where fun goes to die.”

  After World War II, the university found itself doubtful about its future in Hyde Park, roughly seven miles south of downtown Chicago. In some ways, Hyde Park was a rare oasis in a segregated city, a place where middle-class black families could aspire to live alongside similarly situated white people. But as the population pressure from the Great Migration grew and barriers fell, administrators feared an influx of low-income African American residents that would repel white faculty and students. The university endorsed restrictive covenants and channeled money to white neighborhood organizations that fought to keep black people out. As Chicago courts stopped enforcing the covenants and the Supreme Cour
t outlawed them in 1948, the university’s white leadership gave thought to abandoning the leafy cloisters. “The gutters were full of half-pint whiskey bottles and crime was on the increase,” declared one 1950 report, describing a two-block stretch of 55th Street that included 53 bars. By one estimate, 20,000 white people moved out of Hyde Park and neighboring Kenwood in the next six years, while 23,000 nonwhites moved in. Between 1940 and 1956, the nonwhite population went from 4 percent to 36 percent.

  University leaders, in the end, chose to stay, but they took radical steps to create a buffer zone. Their method was urban renewal. “Social engineering on a vast and unprecedented scale,” wrote University of Chicago historian and dean John W. Boyer. Drawing heavily on federal funding, the administration oversaw plans that displaced hundreds of small businesses and thousands of residents. The largest of the projects led to the demolition of buildings where 4,371 families lived. In all, 2,534 of those families were black, most living on low incomes. “Of those who did not return to Hyde Park, the percentage of blacks was substantially greater than whites,” Boyer reported. By 1970, the university and an array of government agencies had spent $100 million on the effort. In place of the old dwellings, the university erected housing unaffordable to most of the black families who had lived there. The goal was to generate real estate prices high enough to “regulate both the number and ‘quality’ of blacks remaining,” wrote historian Arnold R. Hirsch. The project prompted critics to scoff that “urban renewal” really meant “Negro removal.” One of the university’s most attention-getting opponents was Saul Alinsky, the community organizer whose mobilizing methods influenced Barack.

  As the years passed, the University of Chicago endured, but only slowly adapted. On the summer day in 1976 when Boyer, a white man, was awarded his Ph.D., his working-class mother revealed her surprise that he had chosen to study at the university. She had been told by her mother that “people like us don’t go there.” Boyer explained, “It’s not that the university wasn’t racist. Of course it was. But it also sent signals to working-class whites—the sense of drawing up the drawbridge, of creating a moat.” In racial terms, the leadership and the student body looked nothing like Chicago, much less the South Side. One of the country’s most elite universities resided smack in the middle of the largest concentration of African Americans in the country, yet it often seemed to residents that the institution treated its neighbors as a species to be catalogued or, worse, ignored. As late as 1994, soon before Michelle started her job, Barbara Bowman recoiled when someone spoke of the university’s “illustrious history” at a campus meeting. The erudite Bowman, an expert in early childhood development and the mother of Valerie Jarrett, could not resist setting the record straight. “You know,” she said to the man, “I appreciate what you are saying, but you have to remember that as a black woman I was excluded from the leadership of that ‘wonderful’ community you are talking about. And so it is very hard for me now to think that it really was all that wonderful back then. In fact, it makes me very angry when you say that it was all that wonderful without recognizing that it excluded any black people from positions of leadership.”