Who are you honoring today for Womens' History Month? We're celebrating Michelle Obama!!

Of course you know by now, we are in the process of celebrating Womens' History Month. Everyday we are sending out VIDEO EMAIL TRIBUTES honoring the women who have made major impacts on our history!

So far, we've honored, The Supremes, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Kahn, a spoken word tribute dedicated to our foremothers,The Queen of Gospel, Pastor Shirley Caesar, Ella Fitzgerald, Harriet Tubman, Althea Gbison, The Clark Sisters and today...Michelle Obama!!!

If you would like to be part of our VIDEO EMAIL GROUP, send me a quick note with your email address and you will be added.

If you already are in the group, check your inbox......they are all there. If you have missed or deleted any, we will resend at your request. Due to the high volume of requests, there is currently a 2-day delay. Thanks for your patience!

Michelle Robinson Obama 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. She is the sister of Craig Robinson, men's basketball coach at Oregon State University. She is the first cousin, once removed, of Rabbi Capers C. Funnye Jr., one of the country’s most prominent black rabbis.

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.

Following law school, she was an associate at the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin, where she first met her husband. At the firm, she worked on marketing and intellectual property. Subsequently, she held public sector positions in the Chicago city government as an Assistant to the Mayor, and as Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development. In 1993, she became Executive Director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit organization encouraging young people to work on social issues in nonprofit groups and government agencies. She worked there nearly four years and set fundraising records for the organization that still stood a dozen years after she left.
In 1996, Obama served as the Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago, where she developed the University's Community Service Center. In 2002, she began working for the University of Chicago Hospitals, first as executive director for community affairs and, beginning May, 2005, as Vice President for Community and External Affairs.
She continued to hold the University of Chicago Hospitals position during the primary campaign, but cut back to part time in order to spend time with her daughters as well as work for her husband's election; she subsequently took a leave of absence from her job.

She served as a salaried board member of TreeHouse Foods, Inc. (NYSE: THS), a major Wal-Mart supplier with whom she cut ties immediately after her husband made comments critical of Wal-Mart at an AFL-CIO forum in Trenton, New Jersey, on May 14, 2007. She serves on the board of directors of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Michelle Obama is the wife of U.S. president Barack Obama. She is also a lawyer and a former Chicago city administrator and community outreach worker. Reared in a blue-collar home on Chicago's South Side, she was an associate at a law firm when she met Obama; he was a summer intern and she was assigned to advise him. She has worked in the offices of Chicago's mayor and its planning commission, headed a career-training program for young adults and directed community affairs for the University of Chicago and its medical center. She caught the eye of a national audience at her husband's side after he delivered a high-profile speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and then was elected that year to the U.S. Senate. In 2007 she scaled back her own professional work to attend to family and campaign obligations during Obama's run for president. She took her turn as a speaker on the opening night of the 2008 Democratic convention, and her husband was elected president on 4 November 2008. She became First Lady with his inauguration on 20 January 2009.

She is a 1985 graduate of Princeton University. Her brother, Craig Robinson, class of 1983, was a basketball star there and is now a college coach... Although she's younger than Barack Obama, she graduated from Harvard Law School first, in 1988. She didn't cross paths there with her future husband, who graduated in 1991... The Obamas were married in 1992 and have two daughters, Malia (born 1998) and Natasha (called Sasha, born 2001).

Peace
*Kerri*

web analytics