“Michelle was always Craig’s little sister, and Barack was the little sister’s boyfriend,”

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Sat Dec-13-08 03:11 PM
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“Michelle was always Craig’s little sister, and Barack was the little sister’s boyfriend,”

NYT:

Obama’s Friends Form Strategy for Staying Tight-Knit

By JODI KANTOR
Published: December 13, 2008

Barack Obama in Hawaii last summer with Martin Nesbitt, one of a group of friends with whom he has often vacationed.

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And Mr. Obama is not even president yet. Soon they will no longer be the best friends of a newly successful politician but of the most powerful man in the world. Though Mr. Obama’s friends vow their friendships will not change, they all sound a bit worried: that others will try to take advantage, that they will no longer be regarded on their own terms but in relation to Mr. Obama, or that they will say something that will reflect badly on him. For all of their immense pride in the Obamas, for all the dazzle of the campaign and the White House, being a first friend “is not all fun and games,” Dr. Whitaker said.
The Obama social universe is large, multiracial and far-flung, spanning law school buddies, political allies and friends who kept Mrs. Obama company during her husband’s long absences. But the Obamas’ closest friends are the tight bunch from the South Side of Chicago, who never expected to find themselves in this situation.

Like Mrs. Obama, whose father worked for the city water department, most are from modest backgrounds. (When Mrs. Obama directed a student-volunteerism program at the University of Chicago in the mid-1990s, she was employed by the same office for which her mother had once worked as a secretary). Mr. Nesbitt, now a real estate executive, is the son of a steel mill worker and a nurse; Mr. Whitaker’s mother was also a nurse, his father a bus driver. Like Mr. Obama, they attended private schools on scholarship.

When they arrived at elite universities, they often found they were among the only blacks in their classrooms. In medical school in Chicago, Dr. Whitaker and Mr. Nesbitt’s wife, Anita, were taken under the wing of Dr. James Bowman, Ms. Jarrett’s father and the first black tenured professor in his department. (Dr. Whitaker also earned a public health degree at Harvard, where he played basketball with a certain lanky law review president with a funny last name.)
“How many African-Americans are there going to be at the University of Chicago?” Mr. Nesbitt said, explaining how he and Craig Robinson, Mrs. Obama’s brother, now a college basketball coach, became close at business school there, years after meeting on a basketball recruiting trip.
Initially, the Obamas were nowhere near the most successful members of the group. “Michelle was always Craig’s little sister, and Barack was the little sister’s boyfriend,” said John W. Rogers Jr., founder of the first black-owned money management firm in the nation.

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As years passed and babies arrived, the group meshed over barbecues, husbands-against-wives Scrabble games and tennis lessons. They vacationed together: in December, with the Obamas in Hawaii; in August, with Ms. Jarrett on Martha’s Vineyard. Mr. Nesbitt’s wife, Dr. Anita Blanchard, delivered nearly all the children, and the adults became their godparents.

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Dr. Whitaker founded a South Side medical clinic with a barbershop that offered free haircuts to lure black men to get health care; Ms. Jarrett, as city planning commissioner and then a real estate executive, championed mixed-income development to replace housing projects; and Mr. Rogers founded a charter school that focuses on financial literacy.
They threw themselves into another cause, too: Mr. Obama’s political career. When Mr. Obama ran for Congress in 2000, Bobby Rush, the incumbent, derided him as an overeducated outsider — charges that appalled Mr. Obama’s Harvard- and Princeton-educated friends.
“Rush basically mocked Barack with the worst anti-intellectualism that flew in the face of everything that we as young African-Americans had been told to aspire to,” said Dr. Whitaker, who is married to Cheryl Rucker-Whitaker, a cardiologist.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/us/politics/14friends.html?hp