Barack and Michelle Read online

  In stark contrast to the situation at many private prep schools across the country, alcohol and drugs were by all accounts not widespread at Whitney Young during Michelle’s time there. Most extracurricular fun outside of sports revolved around such quaint 1950s-era activities as dances, carwash fund-raisers, and the occasional frenzied food fight. “Compared to what was going on in other schools,” said a Whitney Young alumnus, “we were a pretty tame bunch.”

  As popular as Michelle was among the girls at Whitney Young, her sunny disposition and toothsome good looks meant that she also seldom lacked for male attention. Unfortunately for the boys who pursued her, Michelle was “difficult to impress,” her mother said. Agreed Craig, “She didn’t suffer fools.” As a result, he added, “Michelle never really had any serious, long-term boyfriends.”

  The reason for Michelle’s hard-to-get act was obvious to anyone who witnessed the relationship she had with her father. She watched her father set the bar impossibly high as he struggled each day with the debilitating symptoms of multiple sclerosis. “My dad was my dad,” Craig said. “And so she had a definite frame of reference for a guy. She had an imprint in her mind of the kind of guy she wanted.”

  Michelle bristled when Craig joked that she was looking for someone who didn’t exist. What she was looking for in a guy, she said, was intelligence, hard work, “and some guts.” Michelle later said, “In my house there were no miracles. All I saw was hard work and sacrifice. My father did not complain and went to work every single day.”

  In the middle of her junior year at Whitney Young, Michelle did start going out with a family friend she’d known since she was a toddler. “I grew up with Michelle and Craig,” David Upchurch said. “We were neighbors, and our families were close.”

  Not coincidentally, Upchurch—tall, athletic, and already sporting a mustache at seventeen—bore more than a passing resemblance to Fraser Robinson. But even though the couple dated on and off for the next eighteen months, nothing serious would come of it. Apparently Upchurch failed to live up to her dad’s formidable example. “Michelle and I really liked each other,” Upchurch said, “but you know how some high school boys are. We’re not ready to be responsible and we screw up. I was a screwup, plain and simple!”

  Even then, he said, “Michelle knew what she wanted. She was off to college. I didn’t take my future seriously, and I couldn’t stand in her way.”

  Before they parted ways, Upchurch did take Michelle to the senior prom. In keeping with her growing reputation as something of a fashion plate, Michelle wore a floor-length beige silk gown with a plunging neckline and a provocative slit up the side.

  Her family’s modest means aside, Michelle developed a taste for the finer things early on. She was adamant, however, that her parents not be faced with footing the bill.

  “What’s that?” Marian asked one afternoon, eying the stylish leather purse slung over her teenage daughter’s shoulder. Marian reached over to touch it. “Is that a Coach bag?”

  “Yes,” Michelle answered matter-of-factly. “I bought it with my babysitting money.”

  “You bought a Coach bag with your babysitting money?” Marian said, flabbergasted. “How much was that?”

  When Michelle told her the purse cost nearly three hundred dollars, Marian chided her for her extravagance. “Yes, Mom,” she explained calmly. “But you’re going to buy ten or twelve purses over the next few years, and all I need is this one.”

  Surveying the pile of old purses on the floor of her closet, Marian later came to the conclusion that her daughter had been right. “She did have that purse for quite a while, and I…didn’t.”

  Money was no object, however, when it came to her children’s education. When Craig had to choose between going to the University of Washington on a full scholarship or paying full tuition at Princeton University, his father was adamant that he choose the Ivy League school. “Go to the best school,” Fraser told both his children. “Don’t worry about the money. We’ll find a way.”

  As much as he loved basketball, Craig had his eye on a Wall Street career. So for him, the choice was obvious. “No disrespect to the other schools,” Michelle’s brother mused, “but Wall Street doesn’t happen if I’m not at Princeton. Sorry…”

  Over the next two years, Michelle visited Craig at Princeton and dreamed of someday joining him there. But back at Whitney Young, she received little encouragement. “Every step of the way,” she said, “there was somebody there telling me what I couldn’t do…. No one talked to me about going to Princeton or Harvard—or even going to college.” Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren’t good enough for an Ivy League school, Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway.

  “Princeton, the Ivy Leagues, swoop up kids like Craig,” Michelle said. “A black kid from the South Side of Chicago that plays basketball and is smart. He was getting in everywhere. But I knew him, and I knew his study habits, and I was, like, ‘I can do that, too.’”

  It didn’t hurt, of course, that her brother was already a student there—not just any student, but one who was on his way to being one of the leading scorers in Ivy League history. Undoubtedly aided by her status as a “legacy”—an applicant who is related to either a current student or an alumnus—Michelle was admitted to Princeton in 1981.

  With Fraser Robinson scarcely pulling down thirty-five thousand a year from his job at the water filtration plant, Marian went back to work after Michelle graduated from high school. The money she earned as an administrative assistant in the trust division of a bank would go almost entirely toward paying the roughly fourteen thousand dollars annually it was costing to send Craig to Princeton. Now that Michelle was going there, too, the cost was doubled—the sum total being more than their father’s gross annual income. Michelle’s college education would have to be financed almost entirely with student loans.

  Given the magnitude of her parents’ sacrifice, Michelle was not about to complain to them about the racist attitudes she was encountering at Princeton. “She didn’t talk about it,” Marian said. If her daughter “did feel different from other people, she didn’t let it bother her.”

  In truth, Michelle was deeply troubled by the way she and other black students were treated. “I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus,” she later wrote, “as if I really don’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.” Consequently, said Michelle, her undergraduate days “made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before.”

  Princeton’s social hierarchy, built around its elite eating clubs, served only to alienate Michelle and her African American friends even more. Functioning like fraternities and sororities, these elegantly appointed clubs were housed in imposing mansions along the campus’s main thoroughfare, Prospect Avenue.

  Even if she had been admitted into an eating club, Michelle knew she would have been uncomfortable there. Instead, she divided her time between the less exclusive and decidedly more affordable dining facilities in Stevenson Hall and the Third World Center, a social club set up by the university expressly for nonwhites on campus.

  Although some students balked at its name—“We were Americans, not foreign exchange students from some underdeveloped country,” said one—the Third World Center, housed in a nondescript redbrick building, was one of the few places where Michelle could feel at home in the company of other African American Princetonians.

  Michelle and her African American friends agreed that they only felt truly comfortable when they could go home and spend time with family. The next best thing was congregating with other blacks on campus—all but a handful of whom admitted to feeling the same social ostracism Michelle was experiencing. “The Third World Center was our life,” said Michelle’s pal Angela Acree. “We hung out there, we partied there, we studied there.” Classmate Laurent Robinson-Brown concurred: “We were each other’s suppo
rt system.”

  Michelle, who majored in sociology with a minor in African American studies, took an active role at the TWC, serving on its board and at one point running its after-school program for the children of Princeton’s maintenance and lunchroom crews. Michelle’s countless hours of self-imposed practice on the piano paid off when she played for children at the school each afternoon. Jonathan Brasuell, who was a second grader at the time, would recall a quarter century later how Michelle played the Peanuts theme for him. “I could not go through a week,” he said, “without hearing that.”

  The TWC also gave Michelle an opportunity to vent as a member of its Black Thoughts Table, a no-holds-barred discussion group on the topic of race. She also joined a group called the Organization of Black Unity, which had as its unofficial headquarters the Third World Center. Among other things, the Organization of Black Unity arranged for speakers and programs aimed at Princeton’s small African American population.

  Michelle had plenty of complaints about the way things were done at Princeton, and not all of them had to do with race. She was a vocal critic of the language program. “But you’re teaching French all wrong,” she told one of her teachers. “It’s not conversational enough.” Craig winced when he heard what Michelle had said. “All you can do,” he said, “is pretend you don’t know her.”

  Eager to contribute to fund-raising efforts at the Third World Center, Michelle took part in two fashion shows. In one, to benefit the TWC’s after-school program, she modeled a canary yellow Caribbean peasant skirt. For a “Secret Fantasy”–themed show to benefit the Ethiopian Relief Fund, she walked down the runway in a sleeveless red velvet ball gown.

  Raising awareness was one thing, but rocking the boat was quite another. There were student protests against apartheid and over Princeton’s investments in South Africa. Not only did Michelle decline to take part in any of these demonstrations, but she did not show up when her South Side neighbor Jesse Jackson appeared on campus to speak.

  Like many other students, Michelle did not want to risk being arrested at one of these events. “Remember, most of us black students had no social safety net,” said classmate Hilary Beard. “You had an opportunity to change the arc of your life, and you were not going to mess it up.”

  Besides, race was not the only thing that separated Michelle and her friends from Princeton’s in crowd. Far from it. “Of course it was different being black,” she said. “It was also different not being filthy rich. At the end of the year, these limos would come to get kids, and me and my brother would be carrying our cardboard boxes down to the train station.”

  Although there was no shortage of students at Princeton receiving some sort of financial aid, the university was still populated to a large extent by the sons and daughters of the well-to-do. As a group, they summered on Nantucket or in the Hamptons, competed at crew, lacrosse, or tennis, and paid hefty fees to park their Jeeps, Land Rovers, and Porsches on campus. They often knew how to land the largest suites in the most desirable residence halls, and their parents would often spare no expense in decorating them.

  Around campus, Michelle did what she could to keep up appearances. “Michelle was always fashionably dressed, even on a budget,” Angela Acree said. “You wouldn’t catch her in sweats, even back then.” But when it came to their living conditions, Michelle and her three roommates had few options. “We were not rich,” Acree said. “A lot of kids had TVs and sofas and chairs. We didn’t. We couldn’t afford any furniture, so we just had pillows on the floor, and a stereo.” To make matters worse, Michelle and her three roommates had to walk down three flights of stairs to use their dormitory’s only bathroom.

  Michelle’s stereo would prove to be a magnet for other African Americans on campus, many drawn to hear her extensive collection of Stevie Wonder records. Music was just one more thing that separated the races at Princeton. While the vast majority of the student body leaned heavily toward the white-bread likes of Van Halen, Hall and Oates, The Police, Blondie, and Billy Joel, Michelle’s group preferred R&B, Motown, reggae, and rap.

  “The white people didn’t dance—I know that sounds like a cliché—and they also played a completely different kind of music,” Acree said. “Whereas we were playing Luther Vandross and Run-DMC.”

  Michelle never allowed such distractions to get in the way of work; unlike so many college students, she did not wait until the last minute to write a paper or cram for an exam. “She was not a procrastinator,” Acree observed. Instead, Michelle did her work in advance so that she would not be facing down a deadline the following day. But within the narrow confines of their sparsely furnished dorm room—where they felt free to be themselves—Michelle and her girlfriends traded gossip and, Acree said, “giggled and laughed hysterically.”

  For Michelle, romance would not figure into the Princeton equation. Craig Robinson blamed himself. During the two years they overlapped at Princeton, Michelle was to some extent overshadowed by her big brother the basketball star. “I may have scared them off without even knowing it at the time,” Craig speculated.

  In Craig’s defense, Michelle actually sent prospective boyfriends to play basketball with her brother. “You can tell an awful lot about someone by the way they play,” Craig said. “She wanted me to size them up and report back.”

  Whatever the reason, no one asked Michelle out during her freshman and sophomore years. She fared only slightly better in her last two years at Princeton. Once again, the few young men who did ask her out seldom advanced to a second date. If there was a Robinson man to blame for this, it wasn’t Craig. “Dad again,” he said. “No one could live up to him in her eyes.” Indeed, Michelle still took such emotional sustenance from her father that, on visits home from college, she unhesitatingly curled up in his lap.

  As her four years at Princeton drew to a close, she seemed more torn than ever about her experience there. She addressed the problem head-on in her senior thesis, arguing that, at least for now, true inclusion by whites was beyond the reach of even those African Americans educated at Ivy League universities. Throughout the thesis, as if to emphasize the significance of racial identity, she capitalized the words Black and White.

  “Earlier in my college career,” she wrote in “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” “there was no doubt in my mind that as a member of the Black community I was somehow obligated to this community and would utilize all of my present and future resources to benefit this community first and foremost.” But, she continued, “as I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates…. The path I have chosen…will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.” This realization, Michelle then explained, served only to strengthen her resolve to do something for her fellow African Americans.

  Michelle dedicated her thesis to the important people in her life: “Mom, Dad, Craig and all of my special friends. Thank you for loving me and always making me feel good about myself.”

  Even before her senior year, Michelle had begun to map out a career path for herself. Already adept at networking—she had carefully cultivated friendships with some of the best and brightest at Princeton—Michelle visited the university’s career services office and pored over a list of alumni willing to give career advice.

  She ran her slender finger down the list of alumni in the Chicago area and stopped at the name of Stephen Carlson. Noting that he was a partner in the heavyweight corporate law firm Sidley & Austin (which boasted of once having Mary Todd Lincoln as a client), Michelle wrote to Carlson. But instead of advice, she asked him point-blank for a summer job.

  Unfortunately, summer jobs in law firms were invariably reserved for law school students. But Carlson was so impressed by Michelle’s chutzpah that he wrote back with a list of legal aid organizations in Chicago that did hire undergrad
uates to do research. Following Carlson’s lead, Michelle spent that summer working part-time at a legal aid agency not far from her parents’ South Side home.

  Back at Princeton, Michelle agonized over what to do following graduation. “The question was, were you a traitor to your race for going to a white-dominated school at all,” mused another black Princetonian. “Michelle had crossed that threshold in going to Princeton. But she was concerned as she considered law school, is it still an okay thing to do?”

  By the time she graduated cum laude from Princeton, Michelle had convinced herself that she would need a law degree if she was to make a real contribution to the black community in Chicago. Once again, her parents told her to ignore the cost. “It would be foolish,” said Fraser, who now walked with the aid of two canes, “to get this far in your education and wind up going to a second-rate law school.”

  When she arrived on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus of Harvard University in the fall of 1984, Michelle stepped into an environment not unlike the one she had just left. The division between whites and nonwhites—and between haves and have-nots—was clearly drawn. Once again, the student body was top-heavy with what Michelle disparagingly called “rich kids,” and the law school faculty was straight out of The Paper Chase—dour-faced white men in plaid blazers with patches on the elbows, all waiting to pounce on those students unwise enough to show up in class unprepared.

  Most galling for Michelle was the continuing assumption that the standards had been lowered to allow her and other black students in. While she had no reason to believe that was the case, other black students acknowledged that it might well have been. Michelle “realized that she had been privileged by affirmative action,” said her friend and classmate Verna Williams, “and she was very comfortable with that.”

  As she had at Princeton, Michelle became involved in the leading African American organization on campus—the Black Law Students Association—and wrote for the BlackLetter Law Journal, an alternative to the Harvard Law Review aimed at minority students. She also signed petitions demanding that there be greater minority representation on the faculty. But beyond that, Michelle demurred when asked to take part in protests or demonstrations that might result in disciplinary action or arrest.