Michelle Obama

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama[1] (née Robinson; born January 17, 1964) is an American attorney and author who served as the first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017, being married to Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States.

Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Obama is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. In her early legal career, she worked at the law firm Sidley Austin where she met her future husband. She subsequently worked in nonprofits and as the associate dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago. Later she served as vice president for Community and External Affairs of the University of Chicago Medical Center. Michelle married Barack in 1992 and they have two daughters.

Obama campaigned for her husband's 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. She was the first African-American woman to serve as first lady. As first lady, Obama served as a role model for women and worked as an advocate for poverty awareness, education, nutrition, physical activity, and healthy eating.

Family and education

See also: Family of Barack Obama § Michelle Obama's extended family

Early life and ancestry

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois, to Fraser Robinson III (1935–1991),[2] a city water plant employee and Democratic precinct captain, and Marian Shields Robinson (1937–2024), a secretary at Spiegel's catalog store.[3] Her mother was a full-time homemaker until Michelle entered high school.[4]

The Robinson and Shields families trace their roots to pre-Civil War African Americans in the American South.[2] On her father's side, she is descended from the Gullah people of South Carolina's Lowcountry region.[5] Her paternal great-great grandfather, Jim Robinson, was born into slavery in 1850 on Friendfield Plantation, near Georgetown, South Carolina.[6][7] He became a freedman at age 15 after the war. Some of Obama's paternal family still reside in the Georgetown area.[8][9] Her grandfather Fraser Robinson, Jr., built his own house in South Carolina. He and his wife LaVaughn (née Johnson) returned to the Lowcountry from Chicago after retirement.[6]

Among her maternal ancestors was her great-great-great-grandmother, Melvinia Dosey Shields,[10] born into slavery in South Carolina but sold to Henry Walls Shields, who had a 200-acre farm in Clayton County, Georgia, near Atlanta. Melvinia's first son, Adolphus T. Shields, was biracial and born into slavery around 1860. Based on DNA and other evidence, in 2012 researchers said his father was likely 20-year-old Charles Marion Shields, son of Melvinia's master. They may have had a continuing relationship, as she had two more mixed-race children and lived near Shields after emancipation, taking his surname (she later changed her surname).[11]

As was often the case, Melvinia did not talk to relatives about Dolphus's father.[12] Dolphus Shields, with his wife Alice, moved to Birmingham, Alabama, after the Civil War. They were great-great-grandparents of Robinson, whose grandparents had moved to Chicago.[12] Other of their children's lines migrated to Cleveland, Ohio, in the 20th century.[11]

All four of Robinson's grandparents had multiracial ancestors, reflecting the complex history of the United States. Her extended family has said that people did not talk about the era of slavery when they were growing up.[11] Her distant ancestry includes Irish, English, and Native American roots.[13] Among her contemporary extended family is Rabbi Capers Funnye, her first cousin once removed born in Georgetown, South Carolina. Funnye is the son of her paternal grandfather's sister and her husband, and he is about 12 years older than Michelle. He converted to Judaism after college.[14][15]

Robinson's childhood home was on the upper floor of 7436 South Euclid Avenue in Chicago's South Shore community area, which her parents rented from her great-aunt, who had the first floor.[3][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. She and her family enjoyed playing games such as Monopoly, reading, and frequently saw extended family on both sides.[20] She played piano,[21] learning from her great-aunt, who was a piano teacher.[22] The Robinsons attended services at nearby South Shore United Methodist Church.[16] They used to vacation in a rustic cabin in White Cloud, Michigan.[16] She and her 21-month-older brother, Craig, skipped the second grade.[3][23]

Robinson's father suffered from multiple sclerosis, which had a profound effect on her. Subsequently, she was determined to stay out of trouble and perform well in school.[24] By sixth grade, Michelle joined a gifted class at Bryn Mawr Elementary School (later renamed Bouchet Academy).[25] She attended Whitney Young High School,[26] Chicago's first magnet high school, established as a selective enrollment 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.[27] Michelle recalled being fearful of how others would perceive her, but disregarded any negativity around her and used it "to fuel me, to keep me going".[28][29] She recalled facing gender discrimination growing up, saying, for example, that rather than asking her for her opinion on a given subject, people commonly tended to ask what her older brother thought.[30] She 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.[3] She graduated in 1981 as the salutatorian of her class.[27]

Education and early career

Robinson was inspired to follow her brother to Princeton University, which she entered in 1981.[31][4] She majored in sociology and minored in African-American studies, graduating cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1985 after completing a 99-page senior thesis titled "Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community" under the supervision of Walter Wallace.[32][3][33]

Robinson recalls that some of her teachers in high school tried to dissuade her from applying, and that she had been warned against "setting my sights too high".[34][35] She believed her brother's status as a student in good standing (he graduated in 1983) may have helped her during the admission process,[36] but she was resolved to demonstrate her own worth.[37] She has said she was overwhelmed during her first year, attributing this to the fact that neither of her parents had graduated from college,[38] and that she had never spent time on a college campus.[39]

The mother of a white roommate reportedly tried to get her daughter reassigned because of Michelle's race.[31] Robinson said being at Princeton was the first time she became more aware of her ethnicity and, despite the willingness of her classmates and teachers to reach out to her, she still felt "like a visitor on campus".[40][41] There were also issues of economic class. "I remember being shocked," she says, "by college students who drove BMWs. I didn't even know parents who drove BMWs."[27]

While at Princeton, Robinson became involved with the Third World Center (now known as the Carl A. Fields Center), an academic and cultural group who supported minority students. She ran their daycare center, which also offered after-school tutoring for older children.[42] She challenged the teaching methodology for French because she felt it should be more conversational.[43] As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a sociology thesis, entitled Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.[44][45] She researched her thesis by sending a questionnaire to African-American graduates, asking that they specify when and how comfortable they were with their race prior to their enrollment at Princeton and how they felt about it when they were a student and since then. Of the 400 alumni to whom she sent the survey, fewer than 90 responded. Her findings did not support her hope that the black alumni would still identify with the African-American community, even though they had attended an elite university and had the advantages that accrue to its graduates.[46]

Robinson pursued professional study, earning her Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.[47] By the time she applied for Harvard Law, biographer Bond wrote, her confidence had increased: "This time around, there was no doubt in her mind that she had earned her place".[46] Her faculty mentor at Harvard Law was Charles Ogletree, who has said she had answered the question that had plagued her throughout Princeton by the time she arrived at Harvard Law: whether she would remain the product of her parents or keep the identity she had acquired at Princeton; she had concluded she could be "both brilliant and black".[48]

At Harvard, Robinson participated in demonstrations advocating the hiring of professors who were members of minority groups.[49] She worked for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, assisting low-income tenants with housing cases.[50] She is the third first lady with a postgraduate degree, after her two immediate predecessors, Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush.[51] She later said her education gave her opportunities beyond what she had ever imagined.[52]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Obama