Obama, Michelle

Born in 1964, Michelle Robinson Obama is the first African American First Lady in U.S. history. She is married to President Barack Obama, who was sworn in as the 44th president on January 20, 2009. They have two daughters, Malia and Natasha (Sasha), born in 1999 and 2001, respectively.

Throughout her life, Obama has blazed trails and broken barriers. She has been praised for changing perceptions of African American women and of African American families. She has high approval ratings in January 2010, 78 percent of Americans approved of the job she was doing as First Lady. Born in the South Side of Chicago six months after President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, Obama grew up in a home that stressed the value of education and hard work. Her father, Fraser Robinson, was a pump operator for the Chicago Water Department, living with multiple sclerosis.

Her mother, Marian Robinson, stayed home to raise Obama and her older brother, Craig. Obama attended Chicago's first magnet high school, where she was salutatorian, traveling two to three hours each day on public transportation to school. Obama [Page 1043]followed her brother to Princeton University, where she majored in sociology and minored in African American Studies, graduating cum laude in 1985. The national debate on affirmative action at the time influenced Obama's years at Princeton. In fact, she has written that it was at Princeton that she first felt self-conscious about her race. When Obama enrolled, there were only 94 African Americans (out of 1,100 students) in her class. She wrote a much-analyzed thesis titled “Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community” for which she surveyed African American alumni to determine whether they felt more comfortable with blacks or with whites at different times in their lives—before Princeton, at Princeton, and after Princeton.

Michelle Obama, after Princeton, attended Harvard Law School, from which she graduated in 1988. At Harvard, she joined the Black Law Students Association and worked in the school's legal aid bureau, providing poor people with legal services.

She returned to Chicago to join the prominent national law firm Sidley Austin as an associate in the intellectual property group. It was there that she met Barack Obama in 1989, when he was a summer associate at Sidley and she was assigned to be his adviser. The Obamas began dating that summer and were married in 1992. In 1991, Obama left Sidley and her career focus shifted. She served as assistant commissioner of planning and development in Chicago's city government before becoming the founding executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that prepares youth for public service.

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