a church, this one working to handle the sight of a teenage girl in a casket lined with purple silk. Cleopatra stood up and spoke about her daughter. Hadiya’s friends stood up and told stories about her, each one punctuated by a larger feeling of outrage and helplessness. These were children, asking not just why but why so often? There were powerful adults in the room that day—not only me, but the mayor of the city, the governor of the state, Jesse Jackson Sr., and Valerie Jarrett, among others—all of us packed into pews, left to reckon privately with our grief and guilt as the choir sang with such force that it shook the floor of the church.
* * *
It was important to me to be more than a consoler. In my life, I’d heard plenty of empty words coming from important people, lip service paid during times of crisis with no action to follow. I was determined to be someone who told the truth, using my voice to lift up the voiceless when I could, and to not disappear on people in need. I understood that when I showed up somewhere, it appeared dramatic from the outside—a sudden and swift-descending storm kicked up by the motorcade, the agents, the aides, and the media, with me at the center. We were there and then gone. I didn’t like what this did to my interactions, the way my presence sometimes caused people to stammer or go silent, unsure of how to be themselves. It’s why I often tried to introduce myself with a hug, to slow down the moment and shuck some of the pretense, landing us all in the flesh.
I tried to build relationships with the people I met, especially those who didn’t normally have access to the world I now inhabited. I wanted to share the brightness as I could. I invited Hadiya Pendleton’s parents to sit next to me at Barack’s State of the Union speech a few days after the funeral and then hosted the family at the White House for the Easter Egg Roll. Cleopatra, who became a vocal advocate for violence prevention, also returned a couple of times to attend different meetings on the issue. I made a point of writing letters to the girls from the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in London who had so profoundly moved me, encouraging them to stay hopeful and keep working, despite their lack of privilege. In 2011, I’d taken a group of thirty-seven girls from the school to visit the University of Oxford, bringing not the high achievers but students whose teachers thought they weren’t yet reaching their potential. The idea was to give them a glimpse of what was possible, to show them what a reach could yield. In 2012, I’d hosted students from the school at the White House during the British prime minister’s state visit. I felt it was important to reach out to kids multiple times and in multiple ways in order for them to feel that it was all real.
My early successes in life were, I knew, a product of the consistent love and high expectations with which I was surrounded as a child, both at home and at school. It was this insight that drove my White House mentoring program, and it lay at the center of a new education initiative my staff and I were now preparing to launch, called Reach Higher. I wanted to encourage kids to strive to get to college and, once there, to stick with it. I knew that in the coming years, a college education would only become more essential for young people entering a global job market. Reach Higher would seek to help them along the way, providing more support for school counselors and easier access to federal financial aid.
I’d been lucky to have parents, teachers, and mentors who’d fed me with a consistent, simple message: You matter. As an adult, I wanted to pass those words to a new generation. It was the message I gave my own daughters, who were fortunate to have it reinforced daily by their school and their privileged circumstances, and I was determined to express some version of it to every young person I encountered. I wanted to be the opposite of the guidance counselor I’d had in high school, who’d blithely told me I wasn’t Princeton material.
“All of us believe you belong here,” I’d said to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson girls