When Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson reached school age, their family moved from Martin Luther King Drive to 74th Street and Euclid Avenue to access better schools. The kids loved it. They had friends of different races and backgrounds and were blissfully unaware of racial bias and discrimination. But that changed. Soon enough, their neighborhood was taken over by white flight. “As we moved in, white folks moved out because they were afraid of our families represented,” Obama said at the Obama Foundation Summit in 2019.
Robinson and Obama saw the changes that came with it. Investment followed the white families, leaving the once-bustling community to fend for itself. “You could feel it in the schools,” she said. “And you could feel it in the parks,” Robinson added. Obama and Robinson lived across the street from Rosenblum Park, a place that was at the heart of their childhood bliss. “And, then, each year you’d find more and more bottles, more and more glass, broken,” he said.
The fight against racism became a mainstay in their lives. Obama became even more vocal during Donald Trump’s presidency. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what our kids are seeing every day in this country — the lack of empathy, the division stoked in times of crisis, the age-old and systemic racism that’s been so prominent this summer,” she wrote following the August 2020 shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And Robinson fought a battle closer to home.
