Family and education,

Michelle Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois to Fraser Robinson III, a city water plant employee and Democratic precinct captain, and Marian Shields Robinson, a secretary at Spiegel's catalog store. Michelle can trace her roots to pre-Civil War African Americans in the American South; her paternal great-great grandfather, Jim Robinson, was an American slave in the state of South Carolina, where some of her family still reside. She grew up on Euclid Avenue in the South Shore community area of Chicago, and was raised in a conventional two-parent home. The family ate meals together and also entertained together as a family by playing games such as Monopoly and by reading. She and her brother, Craig (who is 21 months older), skipped the second grade. By sixth grade, Michelle joined a gifted class at Bryn Mawr Elementary School (later renamed Bouchet Academy). She attended Whitney Young High School, Chicago's first magnet high school, where she was on the honor roll four years, took advanced placement classes, was a member of the National Honor Society and served as student council treasurer. The round trip commute from her South Side home to the Near West Side took three hours out of her day. She was a high school classmate of Santita Jackson, the daughter of Jesse Jackson and sister of Jesse Jackson, Jr. She graduated from high school in 1981 as salutatorian, and went on to major in sociology and minor in African American studies at Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1985.


At Princeton, she challenged the teaching methodology for French because she felt that it should be more conversational. As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a thesis entitled, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." "I remember being shocked," she says, "by college students who drove BMWs. I didn't even know parents who drove BMWs." She obtained her Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.While at Harvard, she participated in political demonstrations advocating the hiring of professors who are members of minorities. She is the third First Lady with a postgraduate degree, following Hillary Rodham Clinton and Laura Bush. 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.


Barack and Michelle Obama.She met Barack Obama when they were among very few African Americans at their law firm, Sidley Austin, (she has sometimes said only two, although others have pointed out there were others in different departments) and she was assigned to mentor him while he was a summer associate. Their relationship started with a business lunch and then a community organization meeting where he first impressed her The couple's first date was to the Spike Lee movie Do the Right Thing. The couple married in October 1992, and they have two daughters, Malia Ann (born 1998) and Natasha (known as Sasha) (born 2001). After his election to the U.S. Senate, the Obama family continued to live on Chicago's South Side, choosing to remain there rather than moving to Washington, D.C. Throughout her husband's 2008 campaign for President of the United States, she made a "commitment to be away overnight only once a week—to campaign only two days a week and be home by the end of the second day" for their two children.

The marital relationship has had its ebbs and flows. The combination of an evolving family life and beginning political career led to many arguments about balancing work and family. Barack wrote in his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, that "Tired and stressed, we had little time for conversation, much less romance". However, despite their family obligations and careers, they continue to attempt to schedule date nights.

She once requested that Barack, who was then her fiancé, meet her prospective boss, Valerie Jarrett, when considering her first career move. Now, Jarrett is one of her husband’s closest advisors.

The Obamas' daughters attended the University of Chicago Lab School, a private school, and now attend Sidwell Friends School in Washington after also considering Georgetown Day School. According to an Obama interview on the 2008 season premiere of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the couple does not intend to have any more children. They have received advice from past first ladies Laura Bush, Rosalyn Carter and Hillary Rodham Clinton about raising children in the White House. Marian Robinson has moved into the White House to assist with child care.