Fraser and Marian Robinson brought their daughter, Michelle, into the South Side of Chicago in 1964. Hundreds of miles away, I was a ninth grader in a junior high school in the suburban fringe of a Midwestern city and then, as now, a White guy. From the time I was in second grade until I left for college we lived in the same building where my mother had her business, what she called a beauty shop. My father had been dead five years. My step-father worked on an assembly line. He was a racist, outspokenly critical, as I recall, of "nigger music". Mom was practically a Bohemian, though I didn't know much about that at the time. Mom had two sons. My brother, four years older, graduated high school in 1963.
My mother had maintained connections between my brother and our father's family that lived in the deep South. We took family vacations by car to that part of the country and observed Jim Crow at work. The effects of racism permeated everything.
The year Michelle Obama was born was a firecracker year for the civil rights movement and current affairs were no stranger to our dinner table, provoking many a shouting match between the civil rights minded live at home college freshman brother and the racist step-father. As I read about the First Lady's 50th birthday, I realized that I remember a few things from 1964. Follow me out into the tall grass if you would like to talk about what.
All of my mother's customers were White, as were all of her employees, including "the girl" who cleaned the residence once a week, on Wednesday. I often went with Mom to the beauty supply house where they didn't have products for non-White people. The beauty business was de facto racially segregated.
The factory where my step-father worked six days a week was divided into several divisions. A design, fabrication, paint, assembly and shipping division turned out lighting fixtures in a union plant that only allowed the shipping department to employ Black people. That's not what the racist step-father called them. No Black people were managers. One Black guy was a foreman on packing, which interfaced with assembly. He was the only Black person the assembly line guys bothered to learn the name of. Sylvester.
The pressure was on in 1964 to end Jim Crow with federal law. Outside of the South, a lot of White kids in the suburbs were pretty passionate about civil rights and many had idolized martyred President Kennedy and his First Lady.
My brother's high school class was special. A suburban school district had just organized on the fringes of a Midwestern city and built a combination Junior Senior High School. My brother's class started there in 7th grade the year the school first opened. By the time his class reached 10th grade, the old dual purpose school became just the junior high and the district opened a high school. His class then completed high school at the new building, becoming the first group to complete the new district's secondary curriculum.
That class was special in another way. There was, like, one Black kid in a class of hundreds but they elected him class President.
So, I'm 14 yo, in that same junior high school and watching my brother become more politicized by the Civil Rights movement. At the time, I idolized him. Night after night talk at dinner was disrupted by the news of the day. It was better than TV. I was on my brother's side. No one was on the racist step-father's side. So, step-father and Mom went square dancing, until Mom figured a way to turn the basement into a dance hall and make a buck off of that.
There was a lot of harsh racial talk in my world at that time. I sometimes then harkened back to when my mother's sister had instructed me about what words I could and couldn't use when speaking of non-White people.
Visiting my Southern kin was an eye opener. That year, we visited my uncle in California, a retired Navy officer and younger brother of my father. He hated Martin Luther King, thought King was a Communist and ought to be in prison. He was racist to the bone and his wife was worse. She hated anyone who wasn't enough like herself, and she considered herself a Cadillac, swimming pool lady with a pass to the Club. Aside: this Aunt, in her middle years, was wont to roll down her car window and shout to long haired men in the street, "Do you squat to pee?".
When we visited the Southern Southerners the picture wasn't any pettier. The patriarch uncle, Uncle D, had worked with other uncles during WWII contracting local "labor" for the government to use for the war effort. That's the business they talked about, but they used a different word for labor and it was racist. They were only recruiting a certain kind of labor. They talked of their "round-ups". The family operated a prominent boat business on a sheltered coastal Atlantic channel. All of their skilled employees were White. The children all attended an all White segregated public school. They lived in decent size town and the "Whites Only" signs were plainly visible and always around. They attended all White churches.
But it wasn't really that much different at home. When riding in the car with many of my relatives, I recall them locking the doors at stop lights in "certain neighborhoods" where the people were never white.
By 1964, when Michelle Obama was born, I had discovered girls and was very distracted by it. But I noticed these things marring my world. Even without de jure Jim Crow, racism's hold on non-Southern America was still tight and widespread. Races simply did not mix. Black and White faces appeared together in news photos of civil rights events, but in day to day life, not so much.
Michelle Obama herself is Exhibit A that her 50 years have been 50 years of positive change. The price of that success is that we must now fight against the conservative canard that the struggle is over. The struggle is not over. It has far to go. The prints of racism's once firmer grip still scar our society.