FirstLadyB | Connecting Faith and Hollywood
Michelle Obama the girl from the “South Side” of Chicago, who became First Lady of the United States has penned some encouraging words in the Chicago Defender for her neighborhood.
Mrs. Obama reflected on how back in 1975, an opinion piece in a local newspaper called her elementary school (Bryn Mawr) a “run-down slum” governed by a “ghetto mentality.
Her principal, Dr. Joseph A. Lavizzo, Jr. wasn’t having it. He fought back! Calling the charges “an outrageous lie, which seems designed to incite only feelings of failure and flight.”
As I write in my memoir, Becoming, failure is a feeling long before it is an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear. That’s what Dr. Lavizzo and so many others in our community fought back against.
Today, when someone compliments my mother on the successes of her children (my brother is an executive in professional basketball), she just chuckles and replies that neither of us was anything special. When we were growing up, she’ll say, the South Side was full of thousands of little Michelles and Craigs—good kids who worked hard and knew the difference between right and wrong. The rest of the world just didn’t get to see that very often.
And that’s why I’m writing to all of you—because all of that is still true of the South Side today. It’s true of all of Chicago’s neighborhoods. I just want to make sure you all see it, too.
I know that many of you are up against more than my family ever had to deal with. I know that every day can feel like a struggle and it can be harder for families to get ahead. I know that gangs rule too many streets, that guns and drugs have infested too many neighborhoods, and that too many people who’ve never lived here or even visited find it too easy to just write off parts of this city.
But what I also know is that at its heart, the South Side is still the same place that shaped me. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. As First Lady, I saw it in the students at Harper High School in West Englewood, where, in the year before I visited, 29 students and recent graduates had been shot, 8 of them fatally. The kids I spoke to were shouldering far more than I’d ever experienced growing up—far more than any kid should ever have to carry. Those kids had every reason to give up. But what they showed me wasn’t despondency, it was resilience. It was hope. Those students were just as smart and hardworking as my daughters or any other teenager in America, and beyond that, they had a hard-won grit that their peers couldn’t compete with.
