Michelle Obama Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2015 by Peter Slevin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Slevin, Peter.

  Michelle Obama : a life / by Peter Slevin.—First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-95882-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-307-95883-9 (eBook)

  1. Obama, Michelle, 1964– 2. Presidents’ spouses—United States—Biography. 3. African American women lawyers—Biography. 4. African American lawyers—Biography. I. Title.

  E909.O24S54 2015 973.932092—dc23

  [B] 2014041100

  Front-of-jacket photograph by Ben Baker/Redux

  cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v3.1

  For Kate

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  ill.1 Marian Robinson: Obama campaign photo

  ill.2 Fraser Robinson: DuSable High School yearbook

  ill.3 Michelle and Craig: Obama campaign photo

  ill.4 Kindergarten photo: Theodore Ford

  ill.5 Michelle as a first-grader: Obama campaign photo

  ill.6 In high-school modern dance: Whitney Young High School

  ill.7 Michelle as a college freshman: Princeton University

  ill.8 Princeton University yearbook photo: Princeton University

  ill.9 With Stanley Stocker-Edwards: Kimberly M. Talley

  ill.10 With Susan Page: Kimberly M. Talley

  ill.11 With Barack in Hawaii: Obama campaign photo

  ill.12 Wedding: Courtesy of Obama campaign

  ill.13 In Kenya: OFA

  ill.14 At home in Chicago: Chicago Tribune, Zbigniew Bzdak

  ill.15 Public Allies: Courtesy of Public Allies

  ill.16 Election Day, 2000: AP Photo/Chicago Sun-Times, Scott Stewart

  ill.17 Iowa, 2007: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

  ill.18 Inaugural parade: Scout Tufankjian/Polaris

  ill.19 After inaugural ball: White House photo

  ill.20 Official photo: White House photo

  ill.21 Fashion bangle: White House photo

  ill.22 Jacob Philadelphia: White House photo

  ill.23 Hula hoop: White House photo

  ill.24 Secret Service headquarters: AP Photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais

  ill.25 Ferebee Hope Elementary: White House photo

  ill.26 Reach Higher: White House photo

  ill.27 Minnesota, 2012: AP Photo/Elizabeth Schulze

  ill.28 #BringBackOurGirls: White House photo

  ill.29 Basketball game: AP Photo/Alex Brandon

  ill.30 Gardening: The Washington Post

  ill.31 Tug-of-war: White House photo

  ill.32 Elmo: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

  ill.33 LeBron James and Dwayne Wade: White House photo

  ill.34 State of the Union: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

  ill.35 Marian Robinson with Michelle: Scout Tufankjian/Polaris

  ill.36 Ad shoot: Scout Tufankjian/Polaris

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Illustration Credits

  Introduction

  1 Chicago’s Promise

  2 South Side

  3 Destiny Not Yet Written

  4 Orange and Blackness

  5 Progress in Everything and Nothing

  6 Finding the Right Thing

  7 Assets and Deficits

  8 A Little Tension with That

  9 Just Don’t Screw It Up

  10 I’m Pretty Convincing

  11 Veil of Impossibility

  12 Nothing Would Have Predicted

  13 Between Politics and Sanity

  14 Simple Gifts

  15 I Am No Different from You

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  Introduction

  In June 2010, when Michelle Obama cast her eyes across the class of graduating high school seniors from one of Washington’s most troubled black neighborhoods, she saw not only their lives, but her own. The setting was Constitution Hall, where the Daughters of the American Revolution had prevented opera singer Marian Anderson from performing in 1939 because she was black. So much had changed in seven decades, and yet much had not. Michelle spoke to the graduates about the troubles facing African American children in Anacostia, and she spoke about racism. She pointed out that the neighborhood within sight of the U.S. Capitol once was segregated and that black people had been prohibited from owning property in parts of the community. “And even after those barriers were torn down,” she said, “others emerged. Poverty. Violence. Inequality.”

  Michelle drew a straight line from her struggles with hardship and self-doubt in working-class Chicago to the fractured world the Anacostia students inhabited thirty years later. She told them about being written off, about feeling rejected, about the resilience it takes for a black kid in a public school to become one of the first in her family to go to college. “Kids teasing me when I studied hard. Teachers telling me not to reach too high because my test scores weren’t good enough. Folks making it clear with what they said or didn’t say that success wasn’t meant for a little girl like me from the South Side of Chicago.” As she spoke of her parents—their sacrifices and the way they pushed her “to reach for a life they never knew”—her voice broke and tears came to her eyes. As the students applauded in support, Michelle went on, “And if Barack were here, he’d say the same thing was true for him. He’d tell you it was hard at times growing up without a father. He’d tell you that his family didn’t have a lot of money. He’d tell you he made plenty of mistakes and wasn’t always the best student.”

  She knew that many of the Anacostia students faced disruptions and distractions that sometimes made it hard to show up, much less succeed. It might be family turmoil or money troubles or needy relatives or children of their own. Or maybe the lack of a mentor, a quiet place to study, a lucky break. “Maybe you feel like no one has your back, like you’ve been let down by people so many times that you’ve stopped believing in yourself. Maybe you feel like your destiny was written the day you were born and you ought to just rein in your hopes and scale back your dreams. But if any of you are thinking that way, I’m here to tell you: Stop it.”

  There were no cheap lines in Michelle’s speech that day, seventeen months after she arrived in the White House as the unlikeliest first lady in modern history. In a voice entirely her own, she reached deep into a lifetime of thinking about race, politics, and power to deliver a message about inequity and perseverance, challenge and uplift. These were the themes and experiences that animated her and set her apart. No one who looked like Michelle Obama had ever occupied the White House. No one who acted quite like her, either. She ran obstacle courses, she danced the Dougie, she hula-hooped on the White House lawn. She opened the executive mansion to fresh faces and voices and took her show on the road. She did sitcoms and talk shows and participated in cyber showcases and social media almost as soon as they were invented. Cameras and microphones tracked her every move. Maddening though the attention could be, she tried to make it useful. Amid a characteristic media fuss about a new hairstyle, she said of first ladies, “We take our bangs and we stand in front of important things that the world needs to see. And eventually, people stop loo
king at the bangs and they start looking at what we’re standing in front of.”

  Michelle’s projects and messages reflected a hard-won determination to help the working class and the disadvantaged, to unstack the deck. She was more urban and more mindful of inequality than any first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. She was also more steadily, if subtly, political. Not political in ways measured by elections or ephemeral Beltway chatter, although she made clear her convictions from many a campaign stage. Rather, political as defined by spoken beliefs about how the world should work and purposeful projects calculated to bend the curve. Her efforts unfolded in realms that had barely existed for African Americans a generation earlier, a fact that informed and complicated her work. “We live in a nation where I am not supposed to be here,” she once said.

  Michelle’s prospects as first lady delighted her supporters and helped get Barack elected, but her story and its underpinnings remained unfamiliar to many white Americans in a country where black Americans often felt relegated to a parallel universe. “As we’ve all said in the black community, we don’t see all of who we are in the media. We see snippets of our community and distortions of our community,” Michelle said. “So the world has this perspective that somehow Barack and Michelle Obama are different, that we’re unique. And we’re not. You just haven’t seen us before.” She belonged to a generation that came of age after the civil rights movement. It was fashionable in some circles for people to declare that they no longer saw race, but translation would be required. As her friend Verna Williams put it, “So many people have no idea about what black people are like. They feel they know us when they really don’t.” Lambasted early as “Mrs. Grievance” and “Barack’s Bitter Half,” Michelle knew the burden of making herself understood. One of her favorite descriptions of her Washington life came from a California college student who described the role of first lady as “the balance between politics and sanity.”

  During her years in the spotlight, Michelle became a point of reference and contention. She built and nurtured her popularity and emerged as one of the most recognizable women in the world. “You do not want to underestimate her, ever,” said Trooper Sanders, a White House aide. Indeed, Michelle seemed to stride through life, full of confidence and direction. Comfortable in her own skin, friends always said. Authentic. But when asked what she would say to her younger self, as an interviewer flashed her high school yearbook photo onto a giant screen, Michelle paused to consider. “I think that girl was always afraid. I was thinking ‘Maybe I’m not smart enough. Maybe I’m not bright enough. Maybe there are kids that are working harder than me.’ I was always worrying about disappointing someone or failing.”

  At Constitution Hall, addressing 158 Anacostia seniors dressed in cobalt blue gowns, Michelle shared her history and her self-doubt. She offered advice and encouragement but skipped the saccharine. “You can’t just sit around,” she instructed. “Don’t expect anybody to come and hand you anything. It doesn’t work that way.” She asked them to think about the obstacles faced by Frederick Douglass, their neighborhood’s most illustrious former resident, born into slavery and self-educated in an era when it was illegal to teach slaves to read or write. His mother died when he was a boy and he never knew his father. But he made it, “persevering through thick and thin,” and spent decades fighting for equality. She also asked them to consider the current occupants of the White House. “We see ourselves in each and every one of you. We are living proof for you, that with the right support, it doesn’t matter what circumstances you were born into or how much money you have or what color your skin is. If you are committed to doing what it takes, anything is possible. It’s up to you.”

  ONE

  Chicago’s Promise

  In the DuSable High School swim team photograph, Fraser C. Robinson III stands in dark swimming trunks in the back row, third from the left. He is bare-chested, lean and fit. His arms are strong and his gaze is sure. The year was 1953 and the seventeen-year-old senior was close to having all the formal education he would get. In five years, he would be an army private on his way to Germany. In five more, he would be married and a father, a Democratic precinct worker soon to be on the payroll of the city of Chicago. The work he would do for much of his life, tending high-pressure boilers at a water-filtration plant, was tedious labor done in eight-hour shifts and it paid just enough for him to get by. At home, where he invested his considerable smarts and energy in his family, the swimming days of his youth would give way, far too soon, to years of physical decline. Multiple sclerosis left his brain increasingly unable to control his body. He walked with a limp, then a cane, then crutches; finally he used an electric scooter. Before work, his children watched him struggle to fasten the buttons on his blue work shirts. After work, he would sometimes call them to help carry shopping bags up the stairs to their apartment. Known on the job as Robbie, to his family as Diddley, he worked long after he could have taken disability. “The gutsiest guy I have ever known,” said water plant colleague Dan Maxime.

  In 2008, sixteen years after Fraser Robinson died, Michelle told voters that her father remained her north star. “I am constantly trying to make sure that I am making him proud,” she said. “What would my father think of the choices that I’ve made, how I’ve lived my life, what careers I chose, what man I married? That’s the voice in my head that keeps me whole and keeps me grounded and keeps me the girl from the South Side of Chicago, no matter how many cameras are in the room, how many autographs people want, how big we get.” That voice in her head emerged from Fraser’s own South Side upbringing and the narrow but steady path he followed. The oldest of five surviving siblings born to a deeply religious mother and an ambitious father who arrived from South Carolina in the Great Migration, he secured a foothold in the working class. He was the least professionally accomplished of the children, but he occupied a central position in the family—“the glue,” a cousin said—and he propelled his own two children yet further. Fraser was the one to whom the others turned with their problems, the one who kept track of the family lore, the one who worked hardest to knit together a large clan with its share of triumphs, failures, and frustrations. In the final lines of her speech to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Michelle called on voters to elect her husband Barack as president “in honor of my father’s memory and my daughters’ future.” She would also say that year, on the cusp of occupying a White House perch that she would devote to opening doors for others, “I remember his compassion. I remember the words, his advice, the way he lived life, and I am trying each and every day to apply that to how I raise my kids. I want his legacy to live through them. Hopefully it will affect the kind of first lady I will become because it’s his compassion and his view of the world that really inspires who I am, who I want my girls to be, and what I hope for the country.”

  Fraser’s story, and hers, begins in the Chicago of the 1930s, when any child of the first wave of the great black migration learned what was expected of him. Fraser would come to know possibility and the rewards of discipline and perseverance, lessons he would bequeath to Michelle and her older brother, Craig. He would encounter, too, the profound obstacles that faced African Americans in Chicago in the middle of the twentieth century, despite living hundreds of miles up the well-traveled Illinois Central tracks from the South of slavery and Jim Crow.

  RICHARD WRIGHT, author of the memoir Black Boy, pulled into Chicago on a bitterly cold day in 1927, seeking a job more than anything. Not yet twenty, he was hungry and weighed less than 125 pounds, the minimum weight for a postal worker. He was uncertain about what lay ahead, but he was sure there was nothing for him in Memphis, where he had earned $8 a week, with little chance of advancement, as an errand boy in an optical company. “I could calculate my chances for life in the South as a Negro fairly clearly now,” he wrote, remembering the decision to head north. Wright’s white co-workers in Memphis belittled his choice, and as he rumbled into town aboard a northbound train, the Chicago
that he spied through the window hardly seemed encouraging. That first glimpse “depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies,” he wrote. Once he stepped off the train, however, he witnessed scenes that brightened his mood. Before he left the station, he saw that a black man could buy a newspaper “without having to wait until a white man was served.” He saw black people and white people striding along purposefully, strikingly unmindful of one another. “No racial fear,” he thought. Yet for a young black man born near Natchez, Mississippi, even the encouraging scenes triggered anxiety: “I knew that this machine-city was governed by strange laws and I wondered if I would ever learn them.”

  The blessings of Chicago, as Wright and later waves of migrants would find, were mixed. The sense of freedom was undeniable. Indeed, for many, it was overwhelming. Many of the rules were different, and in a better way. Streetcars had no seating code. Work paid better. Decent public schools beckoned, even if overcrowding forced many black schools to operate on double shifts. Chicago offered a rich menu of music, culture, and religion, not to mention gambling, liquor, and pursuits of a less savory kind. On the one hand, so many people crowded into African American districts marked by invisible boundaries that it sometimes seemed there was no room to move. On the other, the concentrated South Side community generated energy and drive and, for some, a common purpose. Sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton described “a city within a city,” and likened the intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway to a busy town square. In their study, Black Metropolis, published in 1945, they sketched a “continuous eddy of faces.” Within view on a typical morning were black doctors, dentists, police officers, shopkeepers, and clerks, along with newsstands selling black-owned newspapers that included the Defender, the Bee, the News-Ledger, and the Metropolitan News. In one direction was a library named for Dr. George Cleveland Hall, chief of staff at Provident Hospital. In another was the Regal Theater, scene of performances by Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne and Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and Nat King Cole. Starting in 1939, the Regal was managed by a black man, a significant achievement for the time. As New York’s Harlem Renaissance ebbed away, in its place stood Chicago. One writer would christen the South Side “the capital of black America.”