Michelle Obama
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First Lady of the United States
Born January 17, 1964 (1964-01-17) (age 45
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) is the current First Lady of the United States, and the wife of the forty-fourth President of the United States Barack Obama.[1] She is the first African American First Lady.
She was born and grew up on the South Side of Chicago and graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School. After completing her formal education, she returned to Chicago and accepted a position with the law firm Sidley Austin, and subsequently worked as part of the staff of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, and for the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Michelle Obama is the sister of Craig Robinson, men's basketball coach at Oregon State University. She met Barack Obama when he joined Sidley Austin. 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.
Michelle Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois to Fraser Robinson III,[2] a city water plant employee and Democratic precinct captain, and Marian Shields Robinson, a secretary at Spiegel's catalog store.[3] 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,[4][5] where some of her family still reside.[6][7] She grew up on Euclid Avenue in the South Shore community area of Chicago,[3][8][9] and was raised in a conventional two-parent home.[10] The family ate meals together and also entertained together as a family by playing games such as Monopoly and by reading.[11] 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).[12] 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.[3] The round trip commute from her South Side home to the Near West Side took three hours out of her day.[13] She was a high school classmate of Santita Jackson, the daughter of Jesse Jackson and sister of Jesse Jackson, Jr.[11] She graduated from high school in 1981 as salutatorian,[13][14] 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.