The altered trajectory of Michelle Robinson

In 1975, under pressure from the Supreme Court decision desegregating public schools, Chicago opened a racially integrated high school for high achievers that changed young Michelle Robinson's life, writes Sheryl Gay Stolberg for The New York Times. Her now husband, Barack Obama, attended a prep school in multicultural Hawaii, but Mrs. Obama was raised in a one-bedroom apartment and later a house in South Shore, a neighborhood experiencing rapid white flight. By 1980, the year she turned 16, it was 96 percent black, as were its schools. Yet the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School seems to have truly changed Mrs. Obama's life, getting her out of her neighborhood and exposing her to a truly diverse educational environment. Mrs. Obama credits Whitney Young with setting her on a path to Princeton University and Harvard Law School. But even at Whitney Young, Mrs. Obama often recounts how adults insisted she was not Ivy League material. "Get this," Mrs. Obama has told students, "some of my teachers straight up told me I was setting my sights too high." Mrs. Obama has always cast such conversations in terms of achievement, not racial dynamics. To that, Charles Ogletree Jr., her law professor at Harvard, said, "And she never will." But, he adds, "You can read between the lines." More

Source:  Public Education News Blast

Published by LEAP

Los Angeles Education Partnership (LAEP) is an education support organization that works as a collaborative partner in high-poverty communities.