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President-elect Barack Obama s’85, daughters Malia and Sasha, and first-lady-to-be Michelle Obama ’85 wave to the crowd at an election night rally Nov. 4 in Chicago. A group of black Chicago-area alumni, friends of the Obamas and campaign fund-raisers, play active civic roles in the city.

CHICAGO — In 1991, an understated young law school graduate asked John Rogers ’80 for help. He said his name was Barack Obama and he wanted to register African-Americans to vote in Chicago. The Project Vote assignment seemed an unlikely one, neither high-profile nor high-paying, certainly not the gilt-edged job that Obama, president of the Harvard Law Review, could command in the big city. But the mission rang true with Rogers, who became the financial co-chairman of Obama’s effort.

Obama would raise enough money to go far beyond a typical storefront operation. He hired 10 staffers, recruited more than 700 volunteers, and put 150,000 voters on Chicago’s rolls in time to help make Carol Moseley Braun, D-Ill., the second black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. A dozen years later, Obama would become the third. Even more improbably, in his presidential bid, he would raise more money faster than any candidate in history.

John Rogers was there early, and he is still there now, a friend and fundraiser who believes so strongly in Obama’s candidacy that he is raising money all over the country, not least within a network of Princeton friends he has built while leading Ariel Capital Management, the nation’s largest minority-run mutual fund family. Praising “the competence, the possibility, the strength of the message,” Rogers says this is the most enthusiastic he has been about a presidential candidate since Bill Bradley ’65 ran in 2000. He loves Bradley, but Obama is still more special to him: The candidate is a peer, he is rooted in Chicago, and he is black.

For Rogers and a coterie of accomplished black alumni in Chicago that includes Michelle (Robinson) Obama ’85, the prospective first lady, the Obama candidacy has become a dynamic extension of their commitment to civic affairs and their desire to push the national conversation about race to a new level.

“It’s electrifying,” says Kevann Cooke ’82, who recently left a senior job at Aon Corporation to advance Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics. “I’m old enough that in my lifetime, segregation in America was legal. To see someone who looks like me, has similar values and experience, and can put together a credible run for the presidency is nothing short of awesome.”

The Princeton graduates interviewed for this story travel in overlapping circles in a city where they belong to a potent African-American elite that is carving a growing role in civic and cultural affairs. They belong to theater and museum boards, support charter schools in struggling black neighborhoods, and serve as mentors to young and not-so-young people.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a Princeton professor of politics and African-American studies who moved last year from the University of Chicago, says the Princetonians “play a role that is probably largely invisible to ordinary African-Americans. None of them, apart from maybe Michelle Obama since the campaign, could call for a rally or a march or a boycott and have clear recognition in poor neighborhoods. They’re wielding power in ways that are more common to their white counterparts. It’s related to their connection to powerful institutions that set the agenda. That’s what we call in political science the second face of power, the agenda-setting power.”

Throughout its history, Chicago’s moneyed elite has been overwhelmingly white, and so have the political power-brokers in a city that has elected only one black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. While some African-American politicians have broken through, as part of the old Democratic machine or independently, the Princeton alumni are part of a slowly shifting portrait.

Beyond Rogers, Cooke, and Michelle Obama, there is Sharon Fairley ’82, Rogers’ wife, who gave up a senior advertising and marketing job at Pharmacia after Sept. 11 to study law and prosecute federal crimes, saying she “wanted to go out and be part of the solution.” There is Mellody Hobson ’91, who started as a college intern at Ariel and rose to become its president, a regular contributor to ABC’s Good Morning America, and an advocate for black financial literacy in Chicago and beyond. A key link was Craig Robinson ’83, Rogers’ star basketball teammate and Michelle Obama’s brother, who spent 13 years in finance in Chicago before quitting to coach college basketball, his first love. He is now head coach at Brown University.

“Just in the circles I move in — downtown and even in the academic scene and certainly in the cultural scene — every year there seem to be more and more faces popping up,” says Dwight McBride ’90, a dean at the University of Illinois–Chicago who also lectures on black culture. “That’s very encouraging to me. It says not only that black people are staying in their own community, but that black people are becoming much more important players in the city more broadly.” A board member of About Face Theater Co., which produces works about gay and lesbian communities, McBride sees Rogers and Hobson as “an important philanthropic voice for literacy and the arts.”

The ascending star undeniably is Michelle Obama, a polished and passionate speaker who is stepping up her campaign schedule in advance of the early Democratic primaries. The focus of more news items and feature stories than she can count, she is talking far and wide about public service, inclusiveness, and community. She calls herself a “South Side girl” as she tells stories of her life in Chicago, including ways that she and her husband struggled with their choices.

“When you know you’ve been blessed and know you have a set of gifts, how do you maximize those gifts so you’re impacting the greatest number of people?” Obama asks in a telephone interview. “And what do you do? Is it community organizing? Is it politics? Is it as a parent? Our answer at some level is it can be all of that. John and Mellody make way more money than me, but what is consistent among us, even my brother, is there’s a sense of entrepreneurialism. ... ‘I’m not going to do what feels safe, what everybody in our class is doing. I’m going to break off.’ ”

Rogers went big, and then he went small and became big.

After Princeton, where he captained the 1979–80 basketball team, Rogers returned to Chicago and a financial job at a large firm. But less than three years into it, he decided to set off on his own. He created Ariel from a two-page prospectus that forecast first-year expenses of $90,000. Twenty-five years later, Ariel manages nearly $16 billion in assets. The firm’s mascot is a tortoise; its motto is “slow and steady wins the race.”

Rogers set out to build a life that went deeper than his profession. He joined the board of the Chicago Urban League at 24 and later became chairman. He is a director or trustee of more than a dozen organizations, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He backed Ariel Community Academy, a public charter school, where financial literacy is a central component of the curriculum.

Growing up in Hyde Park, the diverse community that surrounds the University of Chicago, Rogers tagged along to Republican gatherings with his mother, a GOP loyalist appointed deputy solicitor general in the Nixon administration, and slipped fliers under apartment doors for his father, a Democratic precinct captain and Cook County judge.

In Ariel’s stylish 29th-floor offices overlooking Millennium Park and Lake Michigan, there are two conference rooms. One is named for legendary investor Warren Buffett (“I buy stocks when the lemmings are headed the other way”); the other, inevitably, for Pete Carril, Princeton’s hall of fame former basketball coach (“How hard do you work and how much do you contribute to what your group is doing?”).

Carril “had this ability to teach things in a way that not only did you learn what was the right thing to do, but you learned why it made sense,” Rogers says in an office suite crowded with Princeton photographs and memorabilia. “The sense of really giving back, and figuring out how to think about your teammates first, whatever you’re involved in — clearly he pounded that in and changed my life. So when I came home to Chicago, I said I want to be part of the Chicago team, and I want to become part of the African-American team.”

Northwestern University sociologist Mary Pattillo wrote about Rogers and the creation of the Ariel academy in a recent study of race and class on Chicago’s South Side. She called Rogers an example of African-American professionals who are “becoming as entrenched as the dynasties of white ethnic power brokers before them.”

“Their names invoke lineages of engagement and activism that comprise an inner circle of black Chicagoans past and present who have been deal makers across the racial divide,” Pattillo wrote in Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City. “These are brokers who do not need to make requests of a (white) superior in order to deliver. The decision rests with them.”

Stirring many pots at once, Rogers joined corporate boards and backed political projects and candidates he believed in, often spotting talent early, a skill that helped Ariel prosper. He helped underwrite Barack Obama’s voter drive five years before Obama ran for Illinois state senator. He supported a young politician with a famous name, Richard M. Daley, seven years before Daley won the first of six terms as mayor. He was Braun’s finance chairman and an important Obama backer during his race for the U.S. Senate in 2004. And he supported Bill Bradley’s ill-fated 2000 presidential campaign after finding much to like about the future politician the first day he met him — back when Bradley, still playing for the Knicks, gave the honor-code talk to the Class of 1980, then headed to play some pickup ball at Jadwin with Carril’s young players.

The Bradley campaign was Hobson’s first deep political involvement, but it was not the first time she had met the senator. Her introduction came one remarkable morning when, as a high school senior choosing between Princeton and Harvard, she was invited to breakfast with Bradley and eight businessmen, including Rogers, by Chicago venture capitalist Richard Missner ’65.

Grant Kessler s’90

Together for Chicago — and for the presidential campaign of Michelle Obama ’85’s husband — are, from left, John Rogers ’80, Sharon Fairley ’82, Mellody Hobson ’91 (sitting), Kevann Cooke ’82, and Dwight McBride ’90, at the offices of Ariel Capital Management, founded by Rogers.

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