as they sat, many of them looking a little awestruck, in the Gothic old-world dining hall at Oxford, surrounded by university professors and students who’d come out for the day to mentor them. I said something similar anytime we had kids visit the White House—teens we invited from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; children from local schools who showed up to work in the garden; high schoolers who came for our career days and workshops in fashion, music, and poetry; even kids I only got to give a quick but emphatic hug to in a rope line. The message was always the same. You belong. You matter. I think highly of you.
An economist from a British university would later put out a study that looked at the test performances of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson students, finding that their overall scores jumped significantly after I’d started connecting with them—the equivalent of moving from a C average to an A. Any credit for improvement really belonged to the girls, their teachers, and the daily work they did together, but it also affirmed the idea that kids will invest more when they feel they’re being invested in. I understood that there was power in showing children my regard.
* * *
Two months after Hadiya Pendleton’s funeral, I returned to Chicago. I’d directed Tina, my chief of staff and an attorney who herself had spent many years in the city, to throw her energy into rallying support for violence prevention there. Tina was a bighearted policy wonk with an infectious laugh and more hustle than just about anyone I knew. She understood which levers to pull inside and outside government to make an impact at the scale I envisioned. Moreover, her nature and experience wouldn’t allow her voice to go unheard, especially at tables dominated by men, where she often found herself. Throughout Barack’s second term, she would wrestle with the Pentagon and various state governors to clear away red tape so that veterans and military spouses could more efficiently build their careers, and she’d also help engineer a mammoth new administration-wide effort centered on girls’ education worldwide.
In the wake of Hadiya’s death, Tina had leveraged her local contacts, encouraging Chicago business leaders and philanthropists to work with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to expand community programs for at-risk youth across the city. Her efforts had helped yield $33 million in pledges in just a matter of weeks. On a cool day in April, Tina and I flew out to attend a meeting of community leaders discussing youth empowerment, and also to meet a new group of kids.
Earlier that winter, the public radio program This American Life had devoted two hours to telling the stories of students and staff from William R. Harper Senior High School in Englewood, a neighborhood on the South Side. In the previous year, twenty-nine of the school’s current and recent students had been shot, eight of them fatally. These numbers were astonishing to me and my staff, but the sad fact is that urban schools around the country were contending with epidemic levels of gun violence. Amid all the talk of youth empowerment, it seemed important to actually sit down and hear from the youth.
When I was young, Englewood had been a rough neighborhood but not necessarily as deadly as it was now. In junior high, I’d traveled to Englewood for weekly biology labs at a community college there. Now, years later, as my motorcade made its way past strips of neglected bungalows and shuttered storefronts, past vacant lots and burned-out buildings, it looked to me as if the only thriving businesses left were the liquor stores.
I thought back to my own childhood and my own neighborhood, and how the word “ghetto” got thrown around like a threat. The mere suggestion of it, I understood now, caused stable, middle-class families to bail preemptively for the suburbs, worried their property values would drop. “Ghetto” signaled that a place was both black and hopeless. It was a label that foretold failure and then hastened its arrival. It closed corner groceries and gas stations and undermined schools and educators trying to instill self-worth in neighborhood kids. It was a word everyone tried to run from, but it could rear up on a community quick.
In the middle of West Englewood sat Harper High School, a large sand-brick building with multiple wings. I met the school’s principal, Leonetta Sanders, a quick-moving African American woman who’d been at the school