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| Barack Obama and Michelle Obama |
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) 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, Obama attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School before returning to Chicago to work at the law firm Sidley Austin, where she met her future husband. 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 is the mother of daughters Malia and Sasha. 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]
Family and education
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 (née 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[6] to pre-Civil War African Americans in the American South. Specifically, she is descended from the Gullah people of South Carolina's Lowcountry region.[7] Her paternal great-great grandfather, Jim Robinson, was an American slave in the state of South Carolina,[8][9] where some of her paternal family still reside.[10][11] Her maternal great-great-great-grandmother, Melvinia Shields, also a slave, became pregnant by a white man. His name and the nature of their union have been lost. She gave birth to Michelle's biracial maternal great-great-grandfather, Dolphus T. Shields.[12] Some of her distant ancestry also includes Irish and other European roots.[13] In addition, her cousin is the Jewish Rabbi Capers Funnye.[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] The family entertained together by playing games such as Monopoly and by reading.[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 now the men's basketball coach at Oregon State University. By sixth grade, Michelle joined a gifted class at Bryn Mawr Elementary School (later renamed Bouchet Academy).[21]
She attended Whitney Young High School,[22] 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.[23] She was on the honor roll for four years, took advanced placement classes, a member of the National Honor Society and served as student council treasurer.[4] Michelle graduated in 1981 as the salutatorian of her class.[23]
Michelle was inspired to follow her brother to Princeton University;[5] Craig graduated in 1983. At Princeton, she challenged the teaching methodology for French because she felt that it should be more conversational.[24] As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a thesis entitled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community."[25][26] "I remember being shocked," she says, "by college students who drove BMWs. I didn't even know parents who drove BMWs."[23] 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.[27] Robinson majored in sociology and minored in African American studies and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1985.[4][28] She earned her Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.[29] At Harvard she participated in demonstrations advocating the hiring of professors who were members of minorities[30] and worked for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, assisting low-income tenants with housing cases.[31] She is the third First Lady with a postgraduate degree, after her two immediate predecessors, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Laura Bush.[32] 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.[33]
Religion
Michelle Obama is a Protestant Christian. She was raised Methodist and joined the Trinity United Church of Christ, where she and Barack Obama married, performed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright. On May 31, 2008, Barack and Michelle Obama announced that they had withdrawn their membership in Trinity United Church of Christ stating that "Our relations with Trinity have been strained by the divisive statements of Reverend Wright, which sharply conflict with our own views".[49]
The Obama family has attended several different churches since moving to Washington D.C. in 2009, including Shiloh Baptist Church and St. John's Episcopal Church. At the 49th African Methodist Episcopal Church’s general conference, Michelle Obama encouraged the attendees to advocate for political awareness, saying “To anyone who says that church is no place to talk about these issues, you tell them there is no place better – no place better, because ultimately, these are not just political issues – they are moral issues, they’re issues that have to do with human dignity and human potential, and the future we want for our kids and our grandkids.”[50]
Career
Following law school, she was an associate at the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin, where she first met her future husband. At the firm, she worked on marketing and intellectual property.[4] She continues to hold her law license, but as she no longer needs it for her work, it has been on a voluntary inactive status since 1993.[51][52]
In 1991, she held public sector positions in the Chicago city government as an Assistant to the Mayor, and as Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development. In 1993, she became Executive Director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit organization encouraging young people to work on social issues in nonprofit groups and government agencies.[22] She worked there nearly four years and set fundraising records for the organization that still stood 12 years after she left.[20]
In 1996, she served as the Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago, where she developed the University's Community Service Center.[53] In 2002, she began working for the University of Chicago Hospitals, first as executive director for community affairs and, beginning May 2005, as Vice President for Community and External Affairs.[54] She continued to hold the University of Chicago Hospitals position during the primary campaign, but cut back to part-time in order to spend time with her daughters as well as work for her husband's election;[55] she subsequently took a leave of absence from her job.[56] According to the couple’s 2006 income tax return, her salary was $273,618 from the University of Chicago Hospitals, while her husband had a salary of $157,082 from the United States Senate. The Obamas' total income, however, was $991,296, which included $51,200 she earned as a member of the board of directors of TreeHouse Foods, and investments and royalties from his books.[57]
She served as a salaried board member of TreeHouse Foods, Inc. (NYSE: THS),[58] a major Wal-Mart supplier with whom she cut ties immediately after her husband made comments critical of Wal-Mart at an AFL-CIO forum in Trenton, New Jersey, on May 14, 2007.[59] She serves on the board of directors of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.[60]
Support of Barack Obama US House and Senate campaigns
Although Obama has campaigned on her husband's behalf since early in his political career by handshaking and fund-raising, she did not relish the activity at first. When she campaigned during her husband's 2000 run for United States House of Representatives, her boss at the University of Chicago asked if there was any single thing about campaigning that she enjoyed; after some thought, she replied that visiting so many living rooms had given her some new decorating ideas.[61]
In February 2004, Michelle wrote a fundraising letter, to help her husband Barack raise funds for his US Senate campaign, in which she wrote that the federal ban on partial-birth abortion “is clearly unconstitutional” and “a flawed law.”[62]
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