Sitting next to Barack at the parade after he’d renewed his vows to the country, I watched the flow of floats and the marching bands moving in and out of snappy formation, already able to savor more than I had our first time around. From my vantage point, I could barely make out the individual faces of the performers. There were thousands of them, each with his or her own story. Thousands of others had come to D.C. to perform in the many other events being held in the days leading up to the inauguration, and tens of thousands more had come to watch.
Later, I’d wish almost frantically that I’d been able to catch sight of one person in particular, a willowy black girl wearing a sparkling gold headband and a blue majorette’s uniform who’d come with the King College Prep marching band from the South Side of Chicago to perform at some of the side events. I wanted to believe that I somehow would have had the occasion to see her inside the great wash of people flowing through the city over those days—Hadiya Pendleton, a girl in ascent, fifteen years old and having a big moment, having ridden a bus all the way to Washington with her bandmates. At home in Chicago, Hadiya lived with her parents and her little brother, about two miles from our house on Greenwood Avenue. She was an honor student at school who liked to tell people she wanted to go to Harvard someday. She’d begun planning her sweet-sixteen birthday party. She loved Chinese food and cheeseburgers and going for ice cream with friends.
I learned these things several weeks later, at her funeral. Eight days after the inauguration, Hadiya Pendleton was shot and killed in a public park in Chicago, not far from her school. She and a group of friends had been standing under a metal shelter next to a playground, waiting for a rainstorm to pass. They’d been mistaken for gang members, sprayed with bullets by an eighteen-year-old belonging to a different gang. Hadiya had been hit in the back as she tried to run for cover. Two of her friends were injured. All this at 2:20 on a Tuesday afternoon.
I wish I’d seen her alive, if only to have a memory to share with her mom, now that the memories of her daughter were suddenly finite, things to be collected and hung on to.
I went to Hadiya’s funeral because it felt like the right thing to do. I’d stayed back when Barack went to the Newtown memorial, but now was my time to step up. My hope was that my presence would help turn the gaze toward the many innocent kids being gunned down in city streets almost every day—and that this, coupled with the horror of Newtown, would help prompt Americans to demand reasonable gun laws. Hadiya Pendleton came from a close-knit, working-class South Side family, much like my own. Put simply, I could have known her. I could have been her once, even. And had she taken a different route home from school that day, or even moved six inches left instead of six inches right when the gunfire started, she could have been me.
“I did everything I was supposed to,” her mother told me when we met just before the funeral started, her brown eyes leaking tears. Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton was a warm woman with a soft voice and close-cropped hair who worked in customer service at a credit rating company. On the day of her daughter’s funeral, she wore a giant pink flower pinned to her lapel. She and her husband, Nathaniel, had watched over Hadiya carefully, encouraging her to apply to King, a selective public high school, and making sure she had little time to be out on the streets, signing her up for volleyball, cheerleading, and a dance ministry at church. As my parents had once done for me, they’d made sacrifices so that she could be exposed to things outside her neighborhood. She was to have gone to Europe with the marching band that spring, and she’d apparently loved her visit to Washington.
“It’s so clean there, Mom,” she’d reported to Cleopatra after returning. “I think I’m going to go into politics.”
Instead, Hadiya Pendleton became one of three people who died in separate incidents of gun violence in Chicago on that one January day. She was the thirty-sixth person in Chicago killed in gun violence that year, and the year was at that point just twenty-nine days old. It goes without saying that nearly all those victims were black. For all her hopes and hard work, Hadiya became a symbol of the wrong thing.
Her funeral was filled with people, another broken community jammed into 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.