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surprised to learn a few classmates remember Michelle as quiet. This wasn't shyness. It was a no-nonsense attitude about work. But as Barack would one day realize, even before her family did, there was also a more serious element to it. There was some fear. She was still a kid who could see from her father's example that trouble could appear at any moment.
    As a result of her quiet focus, classmates say she appeared to accomplish her goals with ease. She seemed to get along with nearly everyone. She had time for activities, like dance. She was student council treasurer. Whitney M. Young was a school where an enthusiastic student like Michelle fit right in. A lot of her classmates were the same. Like Michelle, they had chosen to be part of this experiment. Whitney M. Young wasn't "just a bunch of kids that [came] here from different neighborhoods," Dagny Bloland said. It was "a real shared commitment." Behind the students were supportive parents. As Bloland told Mundy, parents sent their kids to Whitney M. Young thinking, "My child is going to have a wider world."
    Race was part of that. Fortunately for the students, it was just as the planners had hoped: no big deal.
    The original idea had been that forty percent of the students would be African American, forty percent would be white, ten percent Spanish-speaking, five percent other races, and five percent the choice of the principal. (The politicians who agreed to the school wanted to be able to ask for a favor.) It didn't recruit quite as many white students as the planners had hoped, even though standards were lowered for white students so more of them could get in. But the ones who came were happy to be breaking down the barriers of the city's closed ethnic neighborhoods. Robert Mayfield, president of Michelle's senior class of 1980–1981, remembered, "It was racially diverse, it was ethnically diverse; it had great school spirit. It was pretty new, and it was fantastic."
    The school even had a program for deaf and hearing-impaired students at a time when educators debated whether those students should go to regular schools. The ones who went to Whitney M. Young were like Michelle's father and great-grandfather: Unwilling to be sidelined.
    From sports to the homecoming court, Michelle's school was, in the all-American words of her classmate Michelle Ealey Toliver, "a melting pot."
    Thirty years later, this description of Whitney M. Young might seem common. It could apply to schools all over America. At the time, it was a significant achievement. The struggle to create this opportunity for students like Michelle began at about the time Michelle was born. It had violently fractured Chicago over the course of Michelle's childhood.
WILLIS WAGONS
    Schools were one of the most important issues in the civil rights movement in Chicago. A few months before Michelle was born, two hundred thousand Chicago students—about half of the total number in the city's schools—stayed home from classes as a protest against the city's superintendent of schools. Their parents were furious because the schools in African American neighborhoods were overcrowded. Instead of investing in new schools, Superintendent Benjamin Willis offered portable classrooms, which came to be called "Willis Wagons," in school parking lots and empty lots. Then, trying to double the number of students each school could teach, he started two shifts of classes a day. These were cheap, halfhearted responses to the problem. They only created new trouble. The shift system meant that some kids had very different schedules than those of their working parents. The portables were not made for Chicago's frigid winters.
    African American students might have been sent to schools in other neighborhoods, which had room. But Chicago's government worked to keep the city segregated. African Americans parents were also blocked from moving to the neighborhoods with better schools. Most real estate agents would not show them