Michelle Obama has revealed how the ‘horrified’ mother of her white Princeton University roommate demanded the two girls be segregated when she learned the future First Lady was black.
In her new memoir, Becoming, Obama reveals how she felt like an ‘anomaly’ and struggled to assimilate with the majority white student population when she arrived at the Ivy League school in 1981.
Her two white roommates in Pyne Hall were both ‘perfectly nice’ – but years later one of the girls, Cathy, would come forward to reveal she switched dorms because her mother hated the thought of her daughter living in close proximity with an African American.
‘Her mother, a schoolteacher from New Orleans, had been so appalled that her daughter had been assigned a black roommate that she’d badgered the university to separate us,’ writes Obama, 54.
New student on campus: Michelle Obama has revealed how her Princeton roommate switched dorms after the girl’s mother ‘badgered’ the university to separate them when she arrived in 1981. Above Obama is pictured on campus in a photo she shared on her Instagram account
She got the last laugh: Obama, 54, admits she felt like an ‘anomaly’ as a black student at the Ivy League university and reveals her high school counselor even told her she wasn’t ‘Princeton material’
‘Her mother also gave an interview, confirming the story and providing more context. Having been raised in a home where the n-word was a part of the family lexicon, having had a grandfather who’d been a sheriff and used to brag about chasing black people out of his town, she’d been “horrified,” as she put it, by my proximity to her daughter.
‘All I knew at the time is that midway through our freshman year, Cathy moved out of our triple and into a single room. I’m happy to say that I had no idea why.’
The future Mrs Obama grew up in the black, working class Robinson family in the South Side of Chicago, her mother, Marian, a homemaker, and her father, Fraser, a boiler attendant at a water treatment plant.
‘I spent much of my childhood listening to the sound of striving,’ as she puts it, both a metaphor for her family’s aspirations and the literal sounds emanating from the apartment below hers, where her great aunt taught kids piano.
Her school days were predominately spent around fellow African Americans, culminating at Whitney M. Young High School, a magnet school in a rundown Chicago neighborhood that would nonetheless become one of the best in the city.
The former first lady tells of her experiences in her memoir, Becoming, released November 13
Opened in 1975 and named in honor of a civil rights activist, it had admission quotas set by the Chicago School board calling for 40 percent of the intake to be black, 40 percent white and 20 percent Hispanic or other.
In reality, about 80 percent on the 1,900 children were non-white.
Obama’s older brother Craig was, by then, excelling at Princeton thanks to a basketball scholarship, making his sister’s choice of university a no-brainer in spite of the family’s humble roots.
‘As had always been the case, I figured that whatever Craig liked, I would like, too,’ she remarks in the memoir, out on Tuesday.
The first hint of opposition however, came in a meeting with her school counselor who had a stark warning for the prodigious young student, who was on track to graduate in the top ten of her class and had made the National Honor Society.
‘I don’t remember whether she inspected my transcript before or after I announced my interest in joining my brother at Princeton the following fall,’ she recalls.
‘It’s possible, in fact, that during our short meeting the college counselor said things to me that might have been positive and helpful, but I recall none of it.
‘Because rightly or wrongly, I got stuck on one single sentence the woman uttered. “I’m not sure,” she said, giving me a perfunctory, patronizing smile, “that you’re Princeton material.”‘
Obama writes that she left that meeting with one thought in her head: ‘I’ll show you.’
The future Mrs Obama grew up in the black, working class Robinson family in the South Side of Chicago, her mother, Marian, a homemaker, and her father, Fraser, a boiler attendant at a water treatment plant
She says her choice to go to Princeton was influenced by the fact that her older brother, Craig was already attending the university on a basketball scholarship
Around six months later a letter arrived in the family’s mailbox in Chicago’s working class Euclid Avenue containing an offer from Princeton.
‘My parents and I celebrated that night by having pizza delivered from the Italian Fiesta. I called Craig and shouted the good news,’ she recalls.
The move to New Jersey also meant breaking up with her first serious boyfriend, David, whom she worked alongside at the book binding company.
Echoing her future husband Barack’s admissions about smoking pot, she reveals in the memoir how she and David also smoked the drug.
‘We went on real dates, going for what we considered upscale dinners at Red Lobster and to the movies. We fooled around and smoked pot in his car,’ she says.
In 2016, her daughter Malia, now 20, was also photographed smoking what appeared to be a ‘joint’ at music festival Lollapalooza.
The relationship would ultimately fizzle when Obama arrived at Princeton.
‘There was only one problem, and that was David, who as soon as we crossed the state line from Pennsylvania had begun to look a little doleful,’ she writes.
‘As we wrestled my luggage out of the back of my dad’s car, I could tell he was feeling lonely already.
‘We’d been dating for over a year. We’d professed love, but it was love in the context of Euclid Avenue and Red Lobster and the basketball courts at Rosenblum Park.
‘It was love in the context of the place I’d just left.’
After spending the summer working a grueling assembly line job at a bookbinding company, the then-17-year-old headed to Princeton for a three-week orientation program where she was surrounded with other minority and low-income students.
When fall semester began however ‘several thousand mostly white students poured onto campus, carting stereos and duvet sets and racks of clothes.
Obama’s time at Princeton would of course prove a successful step on an extraordinary journey leading all the way to the gates of the White House
‘Some kids arrived in limos. One girl brought two limos – stretch limos – to accommodate all her stuff.’
Men on campus outnumbered women two to one. Black students made up a mere nine per cent of Obama’s freshman class – making her, in her words, a ‘glaring anomaly’.
She admits she was baffled by the college terminology – ‘What was a precept?’ – and even bewildered by having her choice of five different breakfast menus.
Students played field hockey, squash and lacrosse, rather than the football and basketball she had grown up with.
Instinctively, she struck up friendships with a ‘small but tight’ group of black and Latino students.
Their home base soon became what was then called the ‘Third World Center’, a ‘poorly named but well-intentioned’ offshoot of the university that 20 years later would be renamed the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding in honor of Princeton’s first African American dean.
Obama did not know at the time why her freshman roommate, Catherine Donnelly, moved halfway through the semester.
The reason only emerged 27 years later when an apologetic Donnelly and her mother Alice Brown were interviewed during the 2008 Presidential Campaign.
Brown said she regretted the decision and was considering voting for Barack Obama, who went on to become the 44th President of the United States.
Obama says that by the time she left for Harvard Law School she says she had grown in confidence, learned to assert herself in a male, white world of wealth and privilege, and overcome a sense of inferiority born of ‘otherness’
But reflecting for the first time on the episode in her memoir, Obama conceded she was as much to blame for her struggles to form deep friendships with white peers.
‘I didn’t, in fact, have many white friends’ at all,’ she wrote. ‘I realize it was my fault as much as anyone’s. I was cautious. I stuck to what I knew.’
Obama’s time at Princeton would of course prove a successful step on an extraordinary journey leading all the way to the gates of the White House.
By the time she left for Harvard Law School she says she had grown in confidence, learned to assert herself in a male, white world of wealth and privilege, and overcome a sense of inferiority born of ‘otherness’.
‘Around me, I saw students flaming out – white, black, privileged or not,’ she wrote.
‘Some were seduced by weeknight keg parties, some were crushed by the stress of trying to live up to some scholarly ideal, and others were just plain lazy.’
Obama’s ascent, she recalls, was fueled by that same burning sentiment she felt back as a shy teenager in her school counselor’s office – ‘I’ll show you’.
She would ultimately have the last laugh when she made an surprise visit to Whitney M. Young High School earlier this week to give ABC’s Robin Robert’s a tour of her old stomping ground.
‘The college counselor here told me I wasn’t Princeton material,’ Obama told students.
‘She doesn’t work here anymore,’ the principal replied with a smile.