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homes. If the families did find a home, banks would not lend them money to buy it. If they didn't need a bank, they might find that a law prevented the house from being sold to anyone who wasn't white. As a result, African Americans tended to be stuck in crowded homes and apartment buildings in just a few neighborhoods. Because African Americans couldn't easily leave, landlords took advantage of them. Buildings weren't repaired. Rents were higher than elsewhere in the city.
    Breaking these housing barriers wasn't easy. In 1951, an arsonist burnt down three houses that had been sold to African American families, to prevent the families from moving into the white neighborhood. But thanks to hard work by civil rights lawyers and others, a few neighborhoods opened up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Unfortunately, what happened next was a step backward. As African American families moved in, white families moved out.
    Michelle's family saw this happen a few years after they moved into their neighborhood. When Michelle and Craig were young, the neighborhood was mixed. People got along. Then, one by one, the white families left.
    Often the reason was just money. Like many families, most of their wealth was in their homes. They feared that as more African Americans moved into the neighborhood, the value of their homes would go down, because no new white families would come. Real estate agents, who wanted to make money from selling the houses, spread this fear. (Selling was often a mistake. Property values went up in some neighborhoods as African Americans moved in.)
    Michelle's brother Craig still remembers this: A moving truck in front of a neighbor's house, a car packed with valuables, and the last white family in the neighborhood saying goodbye before leaving Chicago for the suburbs.
    In Michelle's neighborhood, the breakdown of old barriers happened peacefully. But Chicago endured serious riots over this problem. People died. Although Michelle was too young to understand these issues at the time, the conflicts shaped her parents' thoughts, and she absorbed their lessons.
    The message to African American parents in Chicago was: The school system does not care about educating your child. It does not believe your child can be educated. This was the same message Michelle's great-grandfather Fraser Sr. had heard in South Carolina at the turn of the century. He rejected it then, and Michelle's parents rejected it too. Fraser Sr. had brought newspapers for his children. Without even knowing that fact, Michelle's parents had the same instinct and brought home workbooks for Michelle and Craig.
    The lesson Michelle understood was, opportunities are out there, but you won't reach them unless you cross some boundaries that you may not be supposed to cross. She talked about this when she was back in South Carolina during the 2008 campaign. She was meeting with girls at a community center for kids in public housing. Their lives seemed to be a mix of Michelle's South Carolina roots and Chicago politics. "Does everybody here want to go to college?" she asked. "What do you think it's going to take to get from here to college?" The replies were vague, noted Holly Yeager, a reporter who witnessed the scene. Then Michelle became stern. "You've got to take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way. All right? Trust me, I was right where you guys are. I grew up in the same kind of neighborhood. The thing that made me different from a lot of other kids who didn't have opportunities was that I tried new stuff and I wasn't afraid to be uncomfortable. You guys have got to do that, because the things you want in life will not get handed to you. There is a lot of opportunity out there. But you've got to want it."
    Michelle's experience at Whitney M. Young High School was a sign of how far the city had come. The way she grabbed that opportunity was a sign of how far she had come. But the school had not magically erased all of Chicago's old