March 26, 2015

In 1988, a group of black students at Harvard Law School compiled a report designed to recognize the growing achievements of black students on campus and share their wisdom with newcomers. The longest essay in the 50-page newsletter was written by a 24-year-old third-year student named Michelle Robinson, who devoted more than 3,000 words to an appeal for greater faculty diversity. “The faculty’s decisions to distrust and ignore non-traditional qualities in choosing and tenuring law professors,” she wrote, “merely reinforce racist and sexist stereotypes.”

Harvard Law was a lofty perch, as privileged as it was competitive. It was no accident that the future Michelle Obama pressed ahead with her application after being waitlisted, or that she set out to make a difference. Raised in a working class Chicago family and educated at Princeton, she had lived the roiling discussions about inequality that were taking place at Harvard and around the country. At the law school by that year, “all the talk and the debates were shifting to race,” said Elena Kagan, a recent graduate and future Supreme Court justice.

During her three years on campus, Michelle represented indigent clients, worked on a law journal focused on African-American perspectives and sought to inspire a greater sense of purpose in her fellow students. Her friends were not surprised. “Michelle always, everything she wrote, the things that she was involved in, the things that she thought about, were in effect reflections on race and gender,” said Charles Ogletree, a Harvard professor and mentor to Michelle. “And how she had to keep the doors open for women and men going forward.”

Writer Scott Turow once said being at Harvard Law School meant “feeling like you were playing an unwinnable game of king of the hill.” For some African-Americans— just 10 percent of the student population—the hill seemed still steeper. Yet friends recall a sense of community and common cause, a kind of constructive embrace, that would shape many black students who enrolled at Harvard in the mid-1980s, particularly those who, like Michelle, became active in campus efforts to diversify the faculty and curriculum.

Being at Harvard with a critical mass of smart, committed black people was “a lifesaver for me,” said Verna Williams, a classmate who would become a close friend.  “It contributed to the formation of my identity as a black professional, as a black woman. Feeling like I have this opportunity, I have this incredible opportunity, and it’s not just about me. It wasn’t just about me when I got here, and it can’t be just about me when I get out of here.” Williams, now a law professor, remembered bull sessions where the friends discussed conundrums of obligation and purpose. “‘What are you going to do for black folks when we get out of here?’ We did think a lot about that, about what it means to be a lawyer, what it means to be a black lawyer.”

Such questions were central to Michelle’s thinking. They connected her looming career decisions with the lessons of her upbringing, the thinking she had done in college and the ongoing national debates about racial and gender unfairness. Her experiences at Harvard, and Princeton before that, illuminate the professional choices she would make during her 20-year professional career in Chicago and the projects she would pursue in the White House.

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In his book Michelle Obama: A Life, Peter Slevin traces the first lady’s life from working-class Chicago roots to a confident university student to the woman in the White House. All along that trajectory, a special awareness of her roots has shaped her, making her a self-conscious college student when she collided with the wealth and glamour of her richer classmates at Princeton, a driven and tenacious law student and ultimately, the self-possessed woman who would go on to meet the future president at a Chicago law firm after graduation.
What has it looked like to grow up Michelle Obama? We took a look back and gathered some photos from her adolescence and early adulthood. Here’s what she looked like before she could grab headlines just by getting bangs.
Above, Michelle Robinson’s yearbook photo from grade school in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.
https://www.barackobama.com/

When Michelle reached Princeton in the late summer of 1981 to start her undergraduate career, she found herself at sea. She was 17 years old and she was moving away from her parents and the family’s small apartment for the first time. The school was wealthy, it tended toward insularity and it was, as she would later write, “infamous for being racially the most conservative of the Ivy League colleges.” Some white students had so little experience with African-Americans that they would ask to touch their hair. The mother of her white freshman year roommate, appalled to learn that Michelle was black, demanded—unsuccessfully—that her daughter be moved.

And then there were the academics. She took a Greek mythology course as a freshman and struggled to keep up, receiving a C on the midterm: “The very first C I had ever gotten and I was devastated.” She felt punched in the stomach again during her senior year, when a professor assessed her work by telling her, “You’re not the hottest thing I’ve seen coming out of the gate.” She responded with the discipline and determination that was already her hallmark, demonstrated on high school mornings when she rose to study long before dawn.

“I decided that I was going to do everything in my power to make that man regret those words,” she said later. “I knew that it was my responsibility to show my professor how wrong he was about me.” Working as his research assistant, she poured herself into the effort. He noticed. When he offered to write an extra letter of recommendation to law school, she knew that she had “shown not just my professor, but myself, what I was capable of achieving.”

She proved that she was capable of excellence, but she never overcame the sense that white students often saw her as black first, a fellow student second. “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before,” she wrote in the introduction to her senior thesis, which critics used as a cudgel in the 2008 presidential campaign. “No matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus.”

Racial politics at the Ivy League university compelled African-American students to make decisions about how to live their blackness—where to room on campus, where to sit in the dining hall, where to socialize, what friends to make and what causes to claim. The pressures came not just from white teachers and classmates, but from fellow African-Americans. Indeed, it was possible to sketch not just two worlds confronting a black student at Princeton, but three or more, each tugging in a different direction. “There were those black students who wanted to be part of the storied Princeton they had heard about,” said Ruth Simmons, future president of Brown University and one of a relative handful of black faculty members during Michelle’s Princeton years. “There were those who ‘hung’ black and those who did that to an extreme degree and did tend to resent people who were too impressed with the white society of Princeton.” Simmons felt the pressure herself. “You had to prove yourself to everybody.”

Michelle gravitated to the Third World Center, created in 1971 as an oasis for the growing community of students of color. She socialized there and logged many hours in a campus job. Her 64-page senior thesis explored issues of identity and purpose among black Princeton graduates as she tried to square her upbringing on the South Side with the elite world she now inhabited. She described feeling conflicted, explaining that her time at Princeton “instilled within me certain conservative values.” The longer she was there, she said, the more she felt the allure of prestigious graduate schools and highly paid corporate jobs.

“My goals after Princeton are not as clear as before,” she wrote in her thesis. The elite education she had received reminded her all too often that she was a black student from the Chicago working class, while also telling her that Michelle LaVaughn Robinson could play in the big leagues. And, at Harvard Law School, where she was headed after graduation, the opportunities and the conundrums would present themselves anew.

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“Racial politics at the Ivy League university compelled African-American students to make decisions about how to live their blackness,” writes Slevin. Above, Michelle in a fashion show for a campus relief fund in 1985. | Daily Princetonian

Harvard Law School in the mid-1980s had an undeniable mystique, polished and perpetuated by the 1973 film, The Paper Chase, whose iconic Professor Kingsfield explains theatrically to his cowed students, “You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.” Robert Wilkins was worried about what he would find as a “small-town kid who didn’t really know that much about the world.” He would go on to become a federal appeals court judge, but as he finished his undergraduate chemical engineering degree at a small school in Indiana, Harvard seemed a mirage. “I almost didn’t apply,” he said. “And if I applied, I probably couldn’t afford it. And if I could afford it, I probably wouldn’t like it. The Paper Chase was all I knew.”

But Wilkins did apply, and he got in. In spring 1986, the Harvard Black Law Students Association invited him to its annual gathering of students past, present and future. He remembers being broke and unable to afford the trip until a visiting fraternity brother said he could drive him as far as Philadelphia, where he could catch a train to Cambridge. Wilkins felt welcomed that weekend. The people he met, including first-year student Michelle Robinson—“You can’t really forget her because she’s a tall, striking woman”— impressed him not only as smart and substantive, but caring.

Friends recalled Michelle’s unusual sense of perspective. She avoided getting “caught up in all that goes with being at an elite law school,” said Jocelyn Frye, who later became her policy adviser in the White House. “The thing about law school is that you get caught up in the theory so much. She has always been a person who’s thinking about the bottom line—here’s what makes sense, here are the practical results we can and should be trying to achieve.”

Toward the end of every Harvard student’s first year came the moot court competition, the first exercise where the students could stand up in a courtroom setting and act the part of the lawyers they would soon become. When it came time to choose partners, Verna Williams made a beeline for Michelle. Her calculation was simple: “I’d better ask her before someone else does.” It was a criminal case. The details escaped her memory, but Williams recalled that as they set to work, there was an easy way and a harder way to proceed. They chose the harder way. Williams was struck by Michelle’s cool forcefulness. “Damn, she is good,” she thought to herself, watching as Michelle pushed the envelope and drew objections from opposing counsel. “She is saying something that she knows is objectionable, and she’s just going to do it. The kind of question, ‘How long have you been beating your wife?’ Look at her, she knows she’s not supposed to be doing that. She’s so confident.”

The pair lost the moot court competition, but their friendship blossomed. Williams was the more overtly vocal and political, elected president of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA), while Michelle generally preferred roles out of the spotlight—helping indigent clients of the school’s legal aid bureau, adding heft to the annual BLSA conference, and doing some editing for a student-run law review, The BlackLetter Journal, that aspired to be a vehicle and a voice for African-American legal minds.

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Michelle Robinson’s yearbook portrait upon graduating from Princeton in 1985. | Office of the First Lady.

The campus air may have been rarefied, but developments at Harvard in the 1980s reflected the dawning national realization that so much and yet so little had changed in matters of race and opportunity. More than 30 years after Brown v. Board of Education, African-Americans were winning elections and stepping into academic and corporate positions in greater numbers. But the decade in race relations was largely defined by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who launched his 1980 campaign with an endorsement of states’ rights in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. He peppered his public speeches with exaggerated or apocryphal stories about Cadillac-driving welfare queens and “young bucks” who bought T-bone steaks with food stamps. Reagan opposed affirmative action programs, a product of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as a fount of unfair advantage. He curtailed the enforcement work of the Justice Department’s civil rights division and tried to defund the Legal Services Corporation. To run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he appointed Clarence Thomas, a future Supreme Court justice and unabashed foe of affirmative action.

The political debate between Reagan and his antagonists carried over to the law school. In 1987, as the country celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Constitution, Harvard and the National Conference of Black Lawyers hosted a scholarly conference, “The Constitution and Race: A Critical Perspective.” The gathering provided “time for re-evaluation in the midst of the pomp and circumstance.” Professor Derrick Bell was the keynote speaker and Ogletree and fellow law professor David Wilkins led workshops. For all of the glorification of “original intent” by conservatives—this was the year of Reagan’s highly contentious nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, an event that drew campus protests—many Harvard students and faculty thought “original sin” was more like it. After all, the men who built the framework of American democracy wrote a contradiction into the nation’s founding documents when they promised liberty but permitted slavery. They did not endorse voting rights for women, black people or men without property. Indeed, many of the founders owned slaves.

On campus, students and instructors discussed the causes and costs of three centuries of racial inequality.  One of the most noteworthy was Prof. Derrick Bell, charismatic and soft-spoken, an engaging provocateur whose high-profile protests against Harvard’s disappointing minority-hiring practices put him at the center of the school’s racial politics. He challenged the persistence of racial bias, questioning not just Ivy League demographics but the very role of laws and lawyers in building a more equitable society. As a principal purveyor of critical race theory, he argued that racism was more than simply a random array of bigots who said and did bigoted things. Rather, he posited racism as an attitude and an affliction embedded in laws, legal institutions and relationships—“a legal system,” he wrote, “which disempowers people of color.”

Many African-American students asked what could change and how. Was it appropriate to promote diversity as a tool of learning? Was affirmative action a legitimate approach? “We were trying to search for the meaning of all that. We were writing about that and talking about it,” said Wilkins, who followed Verna Williams as BLSA president. In the fierce debate over affirmative action, critics not infrequently questioned the abilities of African-American students, who were outnumbered nine to one. “The absence of minorities feeds the perception that blacks are not qualified to be here … as students, as professors, and as future lawyers,” Williams said at the time. “The idea that we’re here as a twist of fate is totally false, when in fact to be here we’ve had to sustain a great deal of stress, along with the abuse that we experience on a daily basis as African-Americans.”

Williams’s comments appeared in a profile written for a special report of the BLSA Memo. Michelle contributed an essay headlined “Minority and Women Law Professors: A Comparison of Teaching Styles.” She argued that women and people of color connected with students in fresh and valuable ways. Referring to The Paper Chase, she suggested that space should be cleared for instructors who did not conform to the Kingsfield model of imperious superiority. She believed that, however cinematic, the image of law school cultivated in the film The Paper Chase and Scott Turow’s One L, constrained student expectations and influenced faculty teaching styles—and not in a good way.

“In the name of tradition, these images serve to mold perceptions of what one should look for in a ‘genuine’ law school experience,” Michelle argued. “Unfortunately, this sense of security and comfort that students find with traditional notions of the law school experiences engenders an inherent distrust of anything that does not resemble or conform to those notions.” Michelle predicted that old-school teaching models, if left unchallenged, would be replicated in the hiring process. Instructors who tested boundaries would find themselves on the outs with a majority of students and undervalued in hiring and promotion.

When given the chance, she maintained, minority and women faculty were able to innovate and deliver new perspectives. “Now, unlike before, students are being made to see how issues of class, race and sex are relevant to questions of law. Not only do students find that these issues are relevant, they are finding them interesting,” Michelle wrote. She called for new approaches to the recruitment and assessment of law school faculty, emphasizing hands-on teaching and the human side of education, rather than intellectual heft for its own sake. Let others count angels on the head of a pin; she cared about outcomes, a trait that would long define her.

Michelle’s interests and, indeed, her orientation to the world, were close to the ground—and they would stay that way, all the way to the White House. An emerging professional skeptic, she wanted to know how the law connected to real lives, not least to African-American ones. Describing her approach, David Wilkins, who taught her in class, said she listened to others, but spoke up, “strong on what her opinions were. She was always the person who was asking the question, ‘What does this have to do with providing real access and real justice for real people? Is this fair? Is this right?’ She was always very clear on those questions.”

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They took their vows at Trinity United Church. “Barack didn’t pledge riches,” Michelle would later recall. “Only a life that would be interesting.”
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The discussion moved from theory to practice when Michelle volunteered at Harvard’s Legal Aid Bureau, a student-run clinic for low-income clients. She worked in a small house on the edge of campus and rode a shuttle to a down-at-the-heels Boston neighborhood. The volunteers met with clients and the attorneys representing the opposing party—a landlord, a spouse, the gas company or perhaps a state or federal agency. They drafted pleadings and occasionally argued the issues in court. In return for hands-on experience, students were expected to devote at least 20 hours a week to their cases. For some, the bureau defined their identity. Notable alumni included Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Yet only a small subset of each Harvard class volunteered, about 60 students a year.

Michelle worked with clients on at least six cases between September 1986 and June 1988. Three are listed in bureau records as family cases, a category that encompassed domestic disputes, divorce and custody fights. Two were housing cases, which a bureau administrator said were probably evictions. One was a matter whose details are not reflected in the files. In each of her cases, Michelle was the lawyer of record and would have been responsible for developing her strategy, consulting if necessary with one of the bureau supervisors. Ogletree, who ran a trial advocacy workshop, described her as “tenacious.”

Supervisor Ilene Seidman recalled a visit by Michelle to a satellite court in a white, upper crust Boston suburb. “People looked at her as though she was an exotic bird. You didn’t see women on the bench or in the courtroom in the same way you do now, and certainly not out of the city. Definitely very few women of color.” Michelle had labored over a careful memorandum for the judge, Seidman said, while the opposing counsel, a white courthouse regular, had come unprepared. “So she’s sitting very upright and serious with her beautiful memo and the other lawyer is flailing around. The judge started really admonishing the other lawyer, ‘She did this beautiful memo; you didn’t do anything.’ ”

Things went well. On the 45-minute ride back to Cambridge in Seidman’s minivan, they replayed the events with delight. “She had just been in a situation that might have made some people justifiably angry, because she had been treated like an alien,” said Seidman, who is white. But the two women shook their heads and laughed. Michelle was “keenly aware of everything going on around her and had a very mature way of assessing what she would respond to and how.”

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Barack and Michelle during Christmas in Hawaii, shortly after their marriage in 1992.
https://www.barackobama.com

Michelle, who worked at corporate law firms in Chicago in the summer after each of her first two years at Harvard, once conceded that she had been neither selfless nor particularly purposeful when she set out for Cambridge after Princeton. “Law school was one of those ‘Okay, what do I do next? Don’t want to work,’” she said in 1996. “It was less a thoughtful experience than ‘Hey, this is a good way to develop a good income. Being a lawyer is prestigious and socially acceptable.’ ”

Yet the conversation about responsibility and purpose coursed through her law school years. “There was a real sense among the black students at Harvard of the old adage ‘From those to whom much is given, much is expected,’” said Robert Wilkins, who later joined the D.C. Public Defender Service and played a significant role in the creation of a National Museum of African American History and Culture. He now sits as an Obama appointee on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, often considered the second most powerful court in the land.

Even as they themselves were struggling with where to land, Michelle and several friends saw a vehicle in the BLSA’s spring alumni conference, a once-substantive forum that by the mid-1980s had become little more than a social event. They decided to add a measure of meaning about the law, lawyering and black responsibility. Areva Bell Martin, who co-chaired the 1987 gathering, said one theme permeated it: “You guys, this is not just about you going to a cushy firm on Wall Street and doing the fat cat part. … You will be doing your community and your family a disservice if you leave here and buy your penthouse apartment and never do anything else. There’s more to your life than your own personal gain.”

The BLSA conference, as the organizers saw it, needed to convey a sense of purpose, even as it developed into a more effective recruiting and networking event for law firms and students. They set out to lure not just alumni and African-Americans in private practice, but also black lawyers who had chosen public interest law, elective office and other forms of public service. The keynote speaker in 1987 was L. Douglas Wilder, lieutenant governor of Virginia. In 1988, Michelle’s third year, it was Bruce M. Wright, a retired New York Supreme Court justice. Known for spotlighting racial disparities in the criminal justice system, Wright titled his 1996 memoir Black Justice in a White World.

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Before they became public figures, Michelle and Barack partook in an independent photography project documenting young couples around the country. They posed in their Hyde Park home in May, 1996.
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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 her mother Marian Robinson standing with them. Her father, 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. For all of the impassioned discussion about purpose, she chose corporate law, returning to Sidley & Austin, the name-brand Chicago firm where she had worked the previous summer, stepping onto the cushy corporate track that she had first mused about at Princeton. Her starting salary was more than twice the combined income of her parents, a city water plant worker and a secretary. The new job would cover some bills and provide some legal experience. And then she would see. It would not be long, working in a Chicago skyscraper, before she was wondering anew how to mesh her sense of obligation with the array of opportunities stretching out before her.

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.”

>via: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/michelle-obama-princeton-harvard-116390.html#.VRjbUFz045I