Barack and Michelle Read online

  When Michelle and Craig asked their parents why all their white schoolmates were leaving, Marian and Fraser had no easy answers. They could not deny that racist sentiments had always run deep in Chicago and its suburbs; after being stoned by whites during a peaceful protest there in 1966, Martin Luther King said the racial hatred there was even more pernicious than what he’d witnessed in the Deep South.

  Fraser and Marian conceded to their children that, even in their tight little community, racism still existed. But they also urged their children to shrug it off, to not be defined by what others thought of them, and to focus on making themselves the best people they could be. “You can’t grow up being a black kid and not be aware of racial issues,” Craig said. “Our parents always talked to us about it.”

  While South Shore’s racial character had changed—by the late 1970s nearly all the white families had vanished—the quality of life it offered did not. When businesses like the local bank and the local supermarket threatened to pull out of South Shore, citizens banded together and pressured them to stay. Precinct captain Fraser and others with political clout made sure city services were not curtailed as they had been in other black communities, and parents lobbied aggressively for funds to keep their schools among the best in the state.

  The undeniable sense of civic pride among the residents of South Shore was mirrored inside the Robinson home, on the top floor of a dormered two-story redbrick bungalow at 7436 South Euclid Avenue. There the Robinsons were crammed into three small rooms occupying less than one thousand square feet. Mom and Dad occupied the sole bedroom, and what would have been the living room was divided with plywood panels into three parts—Craig’s room, Michelle’s room, and between them a communal study area.

  Notwithstanding the cramped quarters, the Robinsons led a reasonably secure life surrounded by uncles, aunts, cousins, and a wide assortment of family friends who dropped in to watch sports on TV, barbecue burgers in the backyard, or spend the evening listening to Motown and jazz. Cosseted in this warm and nurturing environment, Michelle was to a great extent shielded from the sting of prejudice and inequality. Even though many in their circle were devoutly religious, the Robinsons were at best infrequent churchgoers. “We believed,” Marian explained, “that how you live your life every day was the most important thing.”

  Sunday visits to her grandparents, who lived nearby in public housing, opened Michelle’s eyes to what life was like for blacks in the rural South. Fraser junior and Michelle’s namesake, LaVaughn, spoke wistfully of Georgetown County in South Carolina, though Fraser never mentioned Friendfield Plantation or that his own grandfather had once been a slave there. Still, Michelle would later recall, Fraser junior “was a very proud man. He was proud of his lineage. At the same time, there was a discontent about him.” Indeed, she said, both her father and grandfather were “bright, articulate, well-read men. If they’d been white, they would have been the heads of banks.”

  After Fraser junior moved back to South Carolina, Michelle was a frequent visitor. The heat, the Spanish moss, the dusty roads, and the nighttime din of crickets and frogs that made sleeping impossible would all be burned into Michelle’s memory. So, too, was the memory of the wrought-iron gate and the road beyond it that the Robinsons always passed without comment—the road that led to Friendfield.

  That Marian and Fraser III were willing to forgo having a living room so that their children would have their own rooms and a place to do their schoolwork spoke volumes about the premium they put on education. Michelle’s parents had both been bright enough to skip a grade in elementary school, and they certainly had the grades to get into a reputable college. But Fraser, who had grown up poor in the projects, did not see college as an option, and although Marian’s mother had wanted her to become a teacher, she went to work straight out of high school as a secretary instead. “That’s because being a teacher was her dream, not mine,” Marian said. “I didn’t like being told what to do. I really wanted to be a secretary. I liked being a secretary.”

  Still, Fraser and Marian wanted the best for their children, and they knew that education was the key. “The academic part came first and early in our house,” Craig said. “Our parents emphasized hard work and doing your best, and once you get trained like that, then you get used to it and you don’t want to get anything but As and Bs.”

  Marian had actually managed to teach both her children to read by the time they turned four, although Michelle balked at first. “She thought she could figure out how to read on her own,” Marian said, “but she was too young to say that, so she just ignored me.”

  Michelle “had her head on straight very early,” her mother recalled. “She raised herself from about nine years old.”

  Well before then, the Robinsons had taken pains to instill self-discipline in Michelle and Craig. The day before they started kindergarten, Marian gave both children alarm clocks. “You are becoming responsible for your life,” she told them. “You have to see that you get up and give yourself enough time to eat breakfast and get yourself ready.” But while Craig sprang into action when his alarm went off, Michelle just asked him to roust her out of bed when he was finished using the bathroom. At first Marian was miffed at her daughter’s response. But she quickly changed her mind. After all, she said, Michelle’s plan to get as much sleep as possible before the bathroom became available “was smart. It worked.”

  There were plenty of other character-building pursuits for the Robinson kids. Every Saturday, Michelle cleaned the bathroom. She alternated kitchen duties with Craig; he washed the dishes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday while she took Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Mom stepped in to do the dishes on Sunday.

  Their access to television was limited to one hour per day—although somehow Michelle still managed to commit to memory every single episode of The Brady Bunch (The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show were also personal favorites). That left plenty of time for trying out recipes in her child-size Easy Bake Oven and playing with her Barbies, which included Barbie’s African American friend, Christie; Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken; Barbie’s pink Corvette; and of course Barbie’s Malibu mansion.

  The Robinsons’ one extravagance: driving the 180 miles to White Cloud, Michigan, for a week’s stay at Duke’s Happy Holiday Resort, a vacation destination popular with African American families in the Chicago area. For the most part, however, they stuck close to home—and to each other. There were family games of Monopoly, Chinese checkers, and a game involving spoons called Hands Down. “My sister is a poor sport—she really does hate to lose,” said Craig, who claimed he periodically threw games of Monopoly because he had to let her “win enough so that she wouldn’t quit.”

  Michelle was driven to succeed from the beginning. “She wanted to do the right thing all the time without being told,” Marian said, “and she wanted to be the best at things. She liked winning.”

  Often the only person Michelle was competing with was herself. Once she began taking piano lessons from her great-aunt, Michelle threw herself into the process with such gusto that she exhausted herself and everyone around her. Michelle would come home from school and, without being asked, go straight to the piano and start practicing. Hours later, she would still be at the keyboard pounding away—until her frazzled mom finally ordered her to stop.

  A bossy streak also surfaced early on. When they played “office,” Michelle insisted that Craig be the businessman while she played the secretary. Then Michelle, with her chubby cheeks, pigtails, and a cute chipmunk overbite, proceeded to take on every responsibility so that in the end her older brother “had absolutely nothing to do.”

  Michelle took charge on the playground, as well. “I wouldn’t say she ran roughshod over her friends,” Craig said, “but she was sort of the natural leader.”

  If her friends were willing to let her run things, it might have been because she was always considered one of the smartest kids in the neighborhood. “As far back as any of us can remember
,” Craig said, “she was very bright.” Like her brother, Michelle skipped the second grade. “She didn’t ever come home with grades that weren’t the best,” Marian said. “She always wanted to do her best, and I don’t think it had anything to do with outdoing someone else. It’s within her.”

  That drive to succeed, and the values that would guide her, stemmed in part from long conversations over the family dinner table. “Thinking was the big deal—you had to think,” Marian recalled. “You want your kids early on to start making decisions on their own. You want them to make good decisions, but when they make mistakes you want it to be a learning experience. I think that gives kids a lot of confidence. I really did raise my children by ear, day by day.”

  Yet, in the Robinson household, parental authority was strictly observed. With Dad away at work, Mom functioned as chief disciplinarian—a position that sometimes required her to administer the infrequent spanking. Dad never had to resort to anything more than a solemn pronouncement. “I’m disappointed,” he would say, and Craig and Michelle would flee the room in tears.

  “We always felt we couldn’t let Dad down because he worked so hard for us,” Craig said. “My sister and I, if ever one of us got in trouble with my father, we’d both be crying. We’d both be like, “Oh, my god, Dad’s upset. How could we do this to him?” Agreed Michelle, “You never wanted to disappoint him. We would be bawling.”

  If at times they seemed like stern taskmasters, the life lesson they taught their children was an overwhelmingly positive one. “When you grow up as a black kid in a white world,” Michelle’s brother said, “so many times people are telling you, sometimes not maliciously, sometimes maliciously, you’re not good enough. To have a family, which we did, who constantly reminded you how smart you were, how good you were, how pleasant it was to be around you, how successful you could be, it’s hard to combat. Our parents gave us a head start by making us feel confident.”

  Confidence was something Michelle had in abundance. Unlike her five-foot-eight-inch-tall mother, who hunched over as a teenager because she was self-conscious about her then-taller-than-average height, Michelle would always stand ramrod straight—even when she grew to her full height of five feet eleven inches. “I made sure she didn’t do what I did,” Marian said. “I even walked bent over…. Michelle didn’t carry herself like it was any of her concern.”

  Nor did Michelle ever hesitate to speak her mind—a trait that delighted her mother. “I always resented it when I could not say what I felt,” Marian remembered. “I always felt, “What’s wrong with me for not saying what I feel?” Michelle always had her opinions about things and she didn’t hesitate to say so, because we allowed it.”

  Michelle also displayed a quick temper, occasionally confronting other children when she thought they misbehaved. “If somebody made noise in class, she’d whirl around and ‘sssshhh’ you,” recalled a fellow student at Bryn Mawr Public Elementary School (later renamed Bouchet Academy). “If somebody was shoving somebody or being mean, she’d tell them to stop. Michelle always had a strong sense of what was right and wrong, and sometimes she’d be a tattletale.” Observed Marian, “If it’s not right, she’s going to say so.”

  As insistent as Michelle was about everyone following the rules, she was not above challenging her teachers, particularly if she thought she deserved a better grade. She made no effort to conceal her displeasure when things didn’t go her way. When a teacher complained that Michelle was having trouble controlling her anger at school, Marian laughed. “Yeah, she’s got a temper all right,” her mom said. “But we decided to keep her anyway.”

  Marian and Fraser had always encouraged Michelle to ask questions. “Make sure you respect your teachers,” Marian told her children, “but don’t hesitate to question them. Don’t even allow us to just say anything to you. Ask us why.”

  At age ten—toward the end of a two-year stretch where, inexplicably, she insisted on eating only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—Michelle was admitted to the gifted program at Bryn Mawr Elementary. The following year, she and her gifted classmates were taking biology classes at Kennedy-King College, dissecting rodents in one of the college’s labs. “This is not,” said her friend Chiaka Davis Patterson, “what normal seventh graders were getting.”

  She may have stood tall, but Michelle learned at about this time that standing out was not always a good thing. With those around her getting far fewer opportunities and often facing hardships at home, Michelle taught herself to, as she put it, “speak two languages”—one to adults and close friends, another to the general population of students. “If I’m not going to get my butt kicked every day after school,” she said, “I can’t flaunt my intelligence in front of peers who are struggling with a whole range of things…. You’ve got to be smart without acting smart.”

  The local public high school was just one block away from their apartment, but the Robinsons had no intention of sending either of their children there. “We were always driven and we were always encouraged to do the best you can do, not just what’s necessary,” Michelle’s brother said. “So naturally we wanted to go to the best schools we could.”

  Craig was dispatched to Chicago’s Mount Carmel High, a parochial school that was famous for turning out basketball champions who went on to land athletic scholarships. At six feet six inches, Craig quickly distinguished himself as one of the best players the school had ever seen.

  A huge opportunity opened up for Michelle in 1975, when the Chicago Board of Education established the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in the city’s West Loop. Aimed at attracting high-achieving students of all races, Whitney Young—named after the longtime executive director of the Urban League—was supposed to be 40 percent black, 40 percent Caucasian, and 20 percent “other.” As it turned out, it was 70 percent African American when Michelle arrived. Still, it offered the best college prep courses available, as well as classrooms and facilities that rivaled those of any prep school in the nation. In addition to the usual AP and honors courses, the Whitney M. Young Magnet School had an arrangement with the University of Illinois that allowed Whitney Young students to take courses there for full college credit.

  Within months of Whitney Young’s opening, Michelle enrolled in the ninth grade. Instead of strolling up the block to public high school, she would have to get up extra early each morning to catch a bus and then a train into the city—a trip that usually took about an hour, sometimes two.

  The trek was well worth it. Surrounded by other earnest but friendly overachievers, Michelle fit right in. She took AP and honors courses, made the honor roll all four years, earned membership in the National Honor Society, performed ballet in school dance recitals, and summoned the courage to speak before hundreds of her classmates when she ran for student council and then for senior class treasurer. (She won that office by a single vote.)

  Athletic, long-limbed Michelle might also have been expected to play sports in high school—basketball in particular. After all, her brother was already on the fast track to a basketball scholarship. “As she got older, because she was tall and black, people assumed she played basketball,” Craig said. “She hated that. She would never do anything because other people think it’s the right thing to do.” That extended to all varsity sports. “Telling her to do something—that’s the best way to get her not to do something,” Craig added. “She didn’t want to play just because she was tall and black and athletic.” Sniffed Michelle: “Tall women can do other things.”

  But when it came to her brother’s basketball career, he had no bigger fan than Michelle. Before Craig played in a game, he recalled, “Michelle would play the piano just to calm [him] down. It usually worked.” Michelle was so close to her brother, however, that she would walk out of a game if his team was losing, because she could not bear to watch.

  With her megawatt smile, her almost regal bearing, and a casual wardrobe usually consisting of jeans worn with a crisp white shirt, Michelle cut a striking figur
e at school. The fact that she was one of the tallest girls at Whitney Young also made her stand out.

  Perhaps her closest friend during this period was the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s daughter Santita, who had grown up in a slightly more upscale part of South Shore and met Michelle in 1977 when they were both thirteen. Later, when they got their driver’s licenses, Michelle and Santita carpooled together.

  “Michelle was pretty much liked by everybody,” said one Whitney Young alumnus who knew both young women. “Michelle and Santita were really tight. Santita wanted to be a singer, and Michelle, well, you knew she wanted to do something big with her life. So it seemed to the rest of us that they belonged together—two special people.”

  She may have favorably impressed her peers. But, surrounded as she was by so many academic superstars, Michelle made little impression on most of her teachers. When she did manage to grab their attention, it was often as a result of her desire to right a wrong she felt had been done to her.

  One afternoon, Michelle took a typing test and hammered out enough words per minute to warrant being given an A. When her teacher gave her a B+ instead, Michelle objected. She pointed to the chart on the wall that clearly showed she deserved an A. But the teacher refused to acknowledge the mistake, and Michelle refused to back down. “She badgered and badgered that teacher,” her mother recalled. In the end, Marian wound up calling the school. “Look,” she warned the beleaguered typing instructor, “Michelle is not going to let this go.” Michelle got her A.

  But what really impressed her fellow students was the fact that, in the words of her classmate Norm Collins, Michelle “seemed to conquer everything effortlessly.” In reality, Michelle usually struggled with tests. “She was disappointed in herself,” said Marian, who believed that Michelle had a psychological block when it came to tests because “she was hardworking and she had a brother who could pass a test just by carrying a book under his arm. When you are around someone like that, even if you are okay, you want to be as good or better.”