Michelle Obama

About Michelle Obama

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) is an American lawyer and the wife of Illinois senator Barack Obama, the 2008 Democratic presumptive nominee for President. She was born and grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and she was educated at Princeton University and Harvard Law School. After completing her formal education, she returned to Chicago and went to work for the law firm Sidley Austin, on the staff of the Mayor of Chicago Richard M. Daley, and for the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Hospitals. She is the sister of Craig Robinson, men's basketball coach at Oregon State University.

She met Barack when he came to work for Sidley Austin. The Obamas live on Chicago's South Side, choosing to remain there rather than moving to Washington, D.C.

Michelle Robinson was born in Chicago, Illinois to Frasier Robinson (who died in 1990), a city water plant employee and Democratic precinct captain, and Marian Robinson, a secretary at Spiegel's catalog store. She grew up in the South Shore community area of Chicago, and was raised in a conventional two-parent home where the family convened around the dinner table nightly. She and her brother, Craig (who is 16 months older), skipped the second grade. Michelle mostly traces her roots to pre-revolutionary African Americans in the American South; much of her family still resides in the state of South Carolina. Michelle graduated from Whitney Young High School in 1981 and went on to major in sociology and minor in African American studies at Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude with an A.B. in 1985.