Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Fraser Robinson III, a water plant worker and Democratic precinct captain who managed multiple sclerosis throughout his adult life, and Marian Shields Robinson, a homemaker and secretary. She and her brother Craig were raised in a one-bedroom apartment in South Shore, and Fraser's ability to provide a stable, loving household despite his illness and modest income was a defining model of quiet dignity and sustained commitment that Michelle would reference repeatedly throughout her public life. She was an excellent student — skipping second grade, graduating salutatorian of Whitney M. Young Magnet School in 1981, chosen for the National Honor Society — and won admission to Princeton University, the first member of her family to attend an Ivy League institution.
Michelle Robinson's experience at Princeton was formative in ways she documented in her senior thesis — 'Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community' — an examination of the relationship between elite education and Black identity, and the tension between individual achievement and community obligation that she felt personally. After Princeton she attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1988, and joined the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin as an intellectual property attorney. It was there that she met Barack Obama, who arrived as a summer associate in 1989 and whom she was assigned to supervise — she resisted his initial romantic interest for months, concerned about the professional optics, before eventually agreeing to date him. They married in 1992. She left Sidley Austin to work in the public sector — as an Assistant Commissioner for Planning and Development for the City of Chicago, then as Executive Director of Public Allies Chicago, then as Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago, then as Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Michelle Obama's eight years as First Lady (2009-2017) were defined by the Let's Move! initiative — a complete campaign to reduce childhood obesity through better nutrition and more physical activity, which she launched in February 2010 and which included policy advocacy, partnerships with the food industry, and her personal cultivation of a vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the White House. She was also the architect of the Reach Higher initiative, focused on post-secondary education access for first-generation and low-income students, and the Let Girls Learn initiative, addressing barriers to girls' education globally. Her personal style — both in fashion and in communication — redefined what a First Lady could look like and sound like: she wore American designers but also J.Crew; she spoke with directness and humor; she appeared on television shows in ways that previous First Ladies had not.
Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming, published in November 2018, became the best-selling memoir in publishing history — selling more than 17 million copies worldwide in its first two years and generating a Netflix documentary of the same name. The book traced her life from the South Side of Chicago through the White House with a frankness about personal difficulty — including therapy during a period of marital stress, fertility challenges and IVF, and the tensions of raising children in the public eye — that was rare for anyone who had held the position she held. Her subsequent higher education initiative, the Global Girls Alliance, and her voter registration organization, When We All Vote, have continued her public commitments without the constraint of official position. She is consistently ranked in polls as one of the most admired people in the United States.
