A Study in Courage and Grace – Spotlight on Michelle Obama

Former First Lady Michelle Obama: lawyer, executive with a public service focus, author, style icon, role model, devoted mother of two daughters, and a true partner working for the good of the country alongside her husband, the 44th president of the United States.

Obama’s eight years as First Lady were marked by her devotion to causes such as nutrition and fitness, education, and addressing the problem of poverty. Alongside her friend, former Second Lady and future First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, Obama founded the Joining Forces initiative in 2011 to care for military service members and their families. 

Always quick to speak up for justice, and to show empathy and compassion for people everywhere, she became a beloved cultural figure, even consistently outranking President Barack Obama in popularity polls. Since President Obama left office, Mrs. Obama’s star has continued to shine brightly, and never more so than in the moments of national crisis the country has withstood in 2020.

Here’s what you need to know about this amazing woman and activist:

She is a powerful voice for democracy and decency.

Michelle Obama has spoken out with increasing directness—yet always with her typical poise and generosity of spirit—in support of the protests for racial justice taking place under the banner of Black Lives Matter, and in opposition to the divisive, deceitful, and dangerous actions of President Donald Trump.

In a video broadcast at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, Obama addressed these issues head on. She described what it means when “racism, fear, and division” become weaponized and urged the country to support democracy by voting for Joe Biden.

And, in the wake of Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election to Biden, Obama again spoke out with insight and passionate conviction. On her Instagram, she wrote that this behavior only threatens the safety and security of all Americans: “Our love of country requires us to respect the results of an election.” 

She lives up to her motto “when they go low, we go high.”

Obama has particularly noted how hard it was for her on Inauguration Day 2017 to welcome the Trumps to the White House after what the 45th president had put her family through over years of racist lies about President Obama’s birthplace and citizenship. She found this history impossible to forgive.

Yet she and President Obama warmly welcomed the Trumps to the White House. They ordered their teams to prepare detailed notes for the Trump team. They were further instructed to treat the incoming administration with the same graciousness and helpfulness that former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, had shown to the Obamas. 

“I had to find the strength and maturity to put my anger aside,” Mrs. Obama said, knowing she had to rise above the personal to support the wellbeing of the country. This perspective also found voice in her words during the 2016 election season, when Trump heaped vitriol on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Obama famously lifted the spirits and the conscience of the country by saying, “When they go low, we go high.”

She grew up on Chicago's South Side.

In her 2018 memoir Becoming, Obama reflects deeply about the events that have made her the person she is. Publishing experts calculate the book is likely the best-selling memoir in American history,

Born Michelle LaVaughn Robinson in Chicago in 1964, she grew up on the city’s South Side. Historically diverse, the South Side has since the mid-20th century been noted for its robust African American community, whose origins trace back to pre-Civil War days. Later, Chicago was a destination for African Americans fleeing the segregated and often violent South for the industrialized North in the decades of the Great Migration beginning in the 1920s. 

Young Michelle Robinson’s mother, Marian, was a secretary and homemaker who would later move into the White House as the Obama daughters’ beloved grandmother and caregiver. Michelle’s father, Frasier Robinson, worked for the city in a water-purification installation. Her parents lived a modest lifestyle, but she remembers how they “lit the flame in me and kept it burning.”

She comes from a close-knit family and was a gifted student.

Years later, Michelle Obama devoted herself to championing the rights of girls and women. She observed that a young woman silenced in her home becomes afraid to speak up in class or in the workplace, until, “before long, her flame has been snuffed out.” In her case, having a loving family facilitated her academic and professional success.

Michelle was the second of two children. Her brother, Craig, less than two years older, is an award-winning basketball coach. Her close-knit household engaged in such activities as reading, playing games, and eating dinner as a family.  

Michelle could read by age 4, skipped second grade, and by middle school was studying French and advanced biology. She graduated from Whitney M. Young Magnet High School for gifted students in 1981, then studied sociology and African American studies at Princeton University. At Harvard Law School, she participated in demonstrations urging the school to open its doors to more students and professors of color. 

She worked in corporate law as well as public service prior to her time as First Lady.

In 1989, she met Barack Obama when he worked as an intern in the Chicago law firm where she had taken her first job. They married three years later. By then, Michelle Obama had left corporate law for public service.

After working in the office of Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley, she served as the city’s assistant commissioner of planning and development. Over the next few years, she served successively as executive director in the local branch of the youth leadership training program Public Allies; associate dean of student services at the University of Chicago; and executive director of community relations for the university’s hospital system.

In 2005, she accepted the job of vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago’s Medical Center. She also served as a board member for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and continued to work part-time until just before her husband’s inauguration. 

She has successfully leveraged her visibility as a former First Lady to lift up the stories of others.

Post-presidency, Obama and her husband signed a deal with Netflix to produce a series of documentary films, with their Higher Ground production company’s American Factory garnering an Oscar in 2020. Michelle Obama felt that the story of blue-collar factory workers mirrored her father’s life, as it did those of so many Americans of all backgrounds.

She began the Michelle Obama Podcast in 2020. She has covered topics ranging from her childhood, to her husband’s presidency, to the epochal changes in the world today, from the coronavirus pandemic to the power of a diverse group of voices coming together in peaceful protest.  

Speaking in 2016 at the Democratic National Convention, Mrs. Obama reflected on how surreal it had been to wake up each day for eight years in the White House, “a house that was built by slaves.” She spoke with deep gratitude of the generations who had lived in servitude, under Jim Crow laws, and during segregation, “but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done.” 

She never forgets where she came from.

Her heritage, on both her parents’ sides, includes enslaved people in the ante-bellum South. She later remembered being “afraid to hope” that her husband would become the first African American president of the United States, due to the lasting prejudices and inequities that remain the legacy of slavery and segregation. 

When she was young, others even told her she was setting her sights too high as a young African American woman. But Obama was not about to give up, and she has not given up on other young women, on other marginalized dreamers and doers, or on Americans as a resilient people.

A new memorial marking the Georgia gravesite of Michelle Obama’s maternal great-great-great-grandmother, Melvinia Shields, reads: “She was born a slave in South Carolina in 1844 [. . .] A five-generation journey that began in oppression and would lead her descendant to become First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama.”