All eyes turn to Michelle Obama '85

Beard, who is African American, stared at him for a few moments before asking, “What did you just say?”

In 1981, the year Michelle began her studies, Princeton was not an easy environment for an African American. The climate was fraught with racial tension, stilted integration efforts and debate over how the growing number of minority students fit into the Princeton community.

As Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) made history Tuesday night, his wife, the daughter of working-class African Americans on Chicago’s South Side and a graduate of a predominately white Ivy League university, stood proudly at his side as he strode onto the stage to the crowd’s deafening cheers. Her story, told to The Daily Princetonian by friends and acquaintances from her time at Princeton, shows a woman of grace, resilience and remarkable self-assurance under intense racial pressure.

“She processed things through her own values and belief systems in a way that in retrospect was very mature for her age,” Beard said. “A lot of us were doing a lot of … exploring or experimenting or testing out the parameters of our identity. Michelle always had a certainty of some aspects of who she was and what she found important.”

In particular, friends recall, she completed homework assignments early, fulfilled all of her campus commitments and could always be counted on. In a crowd of scrambling 18-year-olds, Obama stood out immediately.

“We were young, just teenagers, and many of us were somewhat awkward,” Lauren Robinson-Brown ’85, University assistant vice president for communications and a classmate of Obama’s, recalled, “but she had a confidence, a real sense of purpose around her.”

Michelle’s time at Princeton has been most widely publicized by the attention generated by her senior thesis, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and The Black Community.”

“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before,” she wrote in the introduction.

“I have found that at Princeton 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; as if I really don’t belong.”

During her husband’s presidential campaign, some media outlets portrayed this quote and others from the thesis as a sign of her anger and bitterness toward the white community. Looking at her thesis together with a February statement implying she had not been proud of her country until this year, conservative news outlets built a narrative of an “angry black woman.”

Friends from Princeton, however, recall no trace of this bitterness in the young Michelle.

“She’s always been centered, balanced, fair, amiable,” Beard said. “At first [in the campaign], she was portrayed as this angry person, which was crazy. She has a great sense of humor, and now people are starting to see that more.”

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At Princeton, Michelle was funny, well-dressed and an excellent dancer, friends recalled. But on a deeper level, she struggled with her identity in a predominately white culture.

Her freshman class had just 94 black students out of a total of 1,141. It was a transitional time at Princeton, and though the number and visibility of minority students had increased, the resources and support for them didn’t keep pace.

“In the ’70s, when there were few blacks, people looked at it as an anomaly,” Robinson-Brown said. “In the ’80s, there was more of a critical mass of black students, and I think that provoked more white students to be expressive about our presence on campus and issues like affirmative action.”

This clamor sometimes made for an uncomfortable experience, for minority students like Michelle and her older brother, Craig Robinson ’83.

“What I saw [during the ’70s and ’80s at Princeton] was that African Americans went from being an interesting novelty to being viewed at best as outsiders and at worst as interlopers,” said Christopher Chambers ’82, a friend of Robinson’s and the first minority officer at Tiger Inn.

Beard recalled a professor questioning the source of a fellow minority student’s work. “He told her it was not possible that she had this high quality of thinking,” Beard said. “[Her work] happened to be brilliant like any other student’s on campus, but her skin was brown.”

Outside of the classroom, white students would ask Beard if they could touch her hair and whether her skin color rubbed off. “There wasn’t necessarily malicious intent, but it’s very bizarre to be on the receiving end of that lack of exposure [to African Americans].”

This kind of attention affected many minority students’ long-term perspectives on the University.

“It used to be [minority students] were so glad to get off campus,” Beard said. “People just wanted to get the hell out of Princeton so bad that they never came back. And it wasn’t because the academics were hard — we all did well. But socially it was just so difficult and hostile.”

Students had different ways of coping with this hostility, and Michelle navigated the environment with considerable grace, friends said.

“You had to develop a thick skin,” Chambers explained. “That kind of undercurrent … puts a lot of pressure on people. Some people could handle it and laugh it off, some people could not.”

“Michelle kind of stood the middle course,” he noted.

Though she had friends of all races, the focal point of Michelle’s social life was the Third World Center, now known as the Fields Center. The center, created in 1971, operated as an umbrella organization for different minority groups on campus and had more than 300 affiliated students during Michelle’s freshman year on campus.

“The Third World Center was one of the few places black students felt they got a lot of support from the University,” Robinson-Brown said.

The center hosted cultural activities, performances and parties and served as a place to hang out between classes, especially for minority students, many of whom felt out of place in the dominant campus social scene.

“Most [black students] did not feel comfortable in the eating clubs,” Beard said, attributing it partly to what she called the “culture of drunkenness” at the clubs.

“In that environment, a lot of things got said to people that might not be said when people were sober, and some of these things were disparaging racial comments,” she said.

Male students would follow African-American female students and drunkenly yell “brown sugar” at them on Saturday nights, Beard recalled. “Being on the receiving end of it was sometimes frightening, depending on how many men yelled it, but always insulting.”

Michelle did not join an eating club, choosing instead to take her meals at Stevenson Hall, a University-funded student-run institution on Prospect Avenue.

Michelle’s roommate Angela Acree ’85, who is African American, worked at Stevenson Hall. Since it contained a kosher kitchen, Acree’s and Obama’s social life came to include Jewish students as well.

“[We] did everything the Orthodox students did, which included going on a ski trip to Vermont with them one break,” Acree said. Stevenson Hall “became a whole life for me.”

Michelle and her friends felt welcomed by the Orthodox community but not always by the Princeton community at large, friends said.

“Being one of the school’s few African-American students at the time, I found there weren’t many opportunities for minorities,” Michelle told the ‘Prince’ in December 2005. “So we created a community within a community and got involved at places like the Third World Center.”

Michelle spent much of her free time at the center, in addition to holding a work-study job there throughout her four years at Princeton, working every afternoon at an after-school program for children of University workers.

“Not a day went by that I did not see Michelle at the Center,” recalled Czerni Brasuell, the Third World Center’s director at the time.

Michelle made a place for herself at Princeton, and her determination and commitment left a lasting impression on her classmates and professors.

“When anyone is in a place that may not be as sensitive to their needs as they wish, they create community to survive,” Brasuell explained. “And that’s what Michelle did.”

Sociology professor emeritus and former chair of the Center for African-American Studies Howard Taylor helped advise Obama’s now-controversial thesis and recalled her awareness and engagement with the issues facing the African-American community at Princeton and in the world at large.

“She was not an assimilationist, but she wasn’t a wide-eyed militant either,” Taylor said. “She was able to straddle that issue with great insight.”

Taylor was very impressed with Obama’s thesis and awarded it an honorary mention from the African-American Studies program. Years later, in 2005, he invited her to serve on the advisory council of the sociology department, and she accepted.

“Even back then we were saying, keep an eye on her, this Michelle is going to be something,” Taylor said. “And I’ll be god damned we were right.”