Michelle Obama Born: Redefining the First Lady

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, on the South Side of Chicago, the daughter of a city pump operator and a homemaker who had been a secretary at Spiegel's catalog store. She grew up in a one-bedroom apartment on Euclid Avenue, where she and her brother Craig slept in the living room with a sheet dividing their space. Her high school counselor at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School told her she was not Princeton material. She went to Princeton, where she wrote her senior thesis on the experiences of Black alumni, then to Harvard Law School. At the corporate law firm Sidley Austin, she was assigned to mentor a summer associate named Barack Obama. She was skeptical of him; he kept asking her out, and she kept declining on the grounds that it would be inappropriate since she was technically his supervisor. He eventually persuaded her by suggesting they get ice cream on a hot afternoon. They married in 1992. At the White House, she launched the Let's Move campaign against childhood obesity, planted an organic kitchen garden on the South Lawn that was the first food garden on the property since Eleanor Roosevelt's wartime Victory Garden, and championed education for girls worldwide through the Let Girls Learn initiative. After leaving the White House, she published Becoming, which sold more than ten million copies in its first year, making it the best-selling memoir in American publishing history. She remains one of the most admired public figures in the United States.