Michelle Obama – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) is an American lawyer and writer. She is the wife of the 44th and current President of the United States, Barack Obama, and the first African-American First Lady of the United States. Raised on the South Side of Chicago, she is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and spent the early part of her legal career working at the law firm Sidley Austin, where she met Obama. Subsequently, she worked as part of the staff of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, and for the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Throughout 2007 and 2008, she helped campaign for her husband's presidential bid. She delivered a keynote address at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and also spoke at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. She and her husband have two daughters together. As the wife of a senator, and later the first lady, she has become a fashion icon and role model for women, and an advocate for poverty awareness, nutrition, and healthy eating.[1][2]
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois, to Fraser Robinson III,[3] a city water plant employee and Democratic precinct captain, and Marian (ne Shields), a secretary at Spiegel's catalog store.[4] Her mother was a full-time homemaker until Michelle entered high school.[5] The Robinson and Shields families can trace their roots to pre-Civil War African Americans in the American South.[3] On her father's side she is descended from the Gullah people of South Carolina's Low Country region.[6] Her paternal great-great grandfather, Jim Robinson, was a slave on Friendfield Plantation in the state of South Carolina,[7][8] the state where some of her paternal family still reside.[9][10] Her grandfather Fraser Robinson, Jr. had built his own house in South Carolina, and he and his wife LaVaughn (ne Johnson) returned to the Low Country after retirement.[7]
Among her maternal ancestors was her great-great-great-grandmother, Melvinia Shields, a slave on Henry Walls Shields' 200-acre farm in Clayton County, Georgia; he and his children would have worked along with the slaves. Her first son, Dolphus T. Shields, was biracial and born into slavery about 1860. Based on DNA and other evidence, in 2012 researchers said his father was likely 20-year-old Charles Marion Shields, son of her master. (Charles later married a white woman and had white children).[11] Melvinia did not talk to relatives about Dolphus' father.[12] Dolphus Shields moved to Birmingham, Alabama after the Civil War, and some of his children migrated to Cleveland, Ohio and Chicago.[11]
All four of Michelle's grandparents were multiracial, reflecting the complex history of the U.S., but her extended family said that people didn't talk about the era of slavery when they were growing up.[11] Michelle Obama's distant ancestry also includes Irish and other European roots.[13] In addition, a paternal first cousin once-removed is the African-American Jewish Rabbi Capers Funnye, son of her grandfather's sister.[14][15]
Michelle grew up in a two-story house on Euclid Street in Chicago's South Shore community area. Her parents rented a small apartment on the house's second floor from her great-aunt, who lived downstairs.[4][16][17][18] She was raised in what she describes as a "conventional" home, with "the mother at home, the father works, you have dinner around the table."[19] Her elementary school was down the street. The family enjoyed playing games such as Monopoly and reading, and frequently saw extended family on both sides.[20] They attended services at nearby South Shore Methodist Church.[16] The Robinsons used to vacation in a rustic cabin in White Cloud, Michigan.[16] She and her 21-month older brother, Craig, skipped the second grade. Her brother is a former basketball coach at Oregon State University and Brown University.[21] By sixth grade, Michelle joined a gifted class at Bryn Mawr Elementary School (later renamed Bouchet Academy).[22]
She attended Whitney Young High School,[23] Chicago's first magnet high school, where she was a classmate of Jesse Jackson's daughter Santita.[20] The round-trip commute from the Robinsons' South Side home to the Near West Side, where the school was located, took three hours.[24] Michelle Robinson was on the honor roll for four years, took advanced placement classes, was a member of the National Honor Society, and served as student council treasurer.[4] She graduated in 1981 as the salutatorian of her class.[24]
Michelle was inspired to follow her brother to Princeton University,[5] where Craig graduated in 1983. At Princeton, she challenged the teaching methodology for French because she felt that it should be more conversational.[25] As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a thesis entitled Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.[26][27] "I remember being shocked," she says, "by college students who drove BMWs. I didn't even know parents who drove BMWs."[24] While at Princeton, she got involved with the Third World Center (now known as the Carl A. Fields Center), an academic and cultural group that supported minority students, running their day care center, which also included after school tutoring.[28] Obama (then known as Robinson) majored in sociology and minored in African American studies; she graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1985.[4][29] She earned her Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.[30] At Harvard she participated in demonstrations advocating the hiring of professors who were members of minorities[31] and worked for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, assisting low-income tenants with housing cases.[32] She is the third First Lady with a postgraduate degree, after her two immediate predecessors, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Laura Bush.[33] In July 2008, Obama accepted the invitation to become an honorary member of the 100-year-old black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, which had no active undergraduate chapter at Princeton when she attended.[34]
She met Barack Obama when they were among the few African Americans at their law firm, Sidley Austin (she has sometimes said only two, although others have pointed out there were others in different departments),[35] and she was assigned to mentor him as a summer associate.[36] Their relationship started with a business lunch and then a community organization meeting where he first impressed her.[37] The couple's first date was to the Spike Lee movie Do the Right Thing.[38] They married in October 1992,[37] and have two daughters, Malia Ann (born 1998) and Natasha (known as Sasha, born 2001).[39] After his election to the U.S. Senate, the Obama family continued to live on Chicago's South Side, choosing to remain there rather than moving to Washington, D.C. Throughout her husband's 2008 campaign for US President, she made a "commitment to be away overnight only once a week to campaign only two days a week and be home by the end of the second day" for their two daughters.[40]
She once requested that her then-fianc meet her prospective boss, Valerie Jarrett, when considering her first career move.[19] Jarrett is now one of her husband's closest advisors.[41][42] The marital relationship has had its ebbs and flows; the combination of an evolving family life and beginning political career led to many arguments about balancing work and family. Barack Obama wrote in his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, that "Tired and stressed, we had little time for conversation, much less romance."[43] However, despite their family obligations and careers, they continue to attempt to schedule date nights while they lived in Chicago.[44]
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Michelle Obama - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia