michelle obama leadership essay

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First lady or fearless leader michelle obama’s 10 most admirable leadership qualities.

Last updated: 4 August 2020

Here’s a fun fact for you about the Obamas:

When they left the White House in January, Michelle was more popular than former President Barack Obama.

Don’t believe us? Check out the results of the final Gallup poll published in the Washington Post to get a better idea of their “popularity” at the moment they were packing up their bags and leaving the White House.

Surveys aside, there was clearly something about Michelle many people loved and admired.

Some of her celebrated qualities? She stood out as one of the most passionate and accomplished First Ladies in history because of her charisma, compassion and powerful speech-making.

That said, even before Michelle’s rise to fame during her time in the White House, she was already an accomplished lawyer, writer and community activist.

Once in the White House, her special mix of talents and accomplishments made Michelle a role model for millions of women around the world.

Especially given that First Ladies have the freedom to define their roles as they see fit, during her 8 years in Washington, Michelle chose to address racism, women’s rights and public health.

She called herself “Mom-in-chief,” and applied herself to issues ranging from children’s education to the needs of military families.

This included launching the Let Girls Learn initiative to fund girls’ education projects tackling everything from leadership to poverty.

She was also a risk-taker and stepped outside traditional first lady stereotypes.

Given her achievement and clear leadership skills, rumor says many Democrats wanted Michelle to run for office after her husband’s presidency ended in January 2017.

Although for now, the Obamas have ruled out a political career for Michelle… that said, it pays never to say never.

After all, Hillary Clinton went from First Lady to within an eyelash of becoming the first female president in U.S. history.

The Obamas have been an inspiration to many, and the legacy they leave behind is partly owed to Michelle.

Regardless of your political beliefs, it’s hard not to feel inspired by Michelle’s achievements as First Lady… but also as a leader.

So why don’t we take a look Michelle Obama’s 10 greatest leadership qualities to see how they’ve shaped her legacy and inspired millions.

1. Strong Character

We said it before – Michelle Obama wasn’t your typical First Lady. Her capacity to motivate, inspire and call others to action was rooted in her strong personality.

Her strong character helped her fight for social issues, regardless of how controversial they were.

She was also vocal and honest about some of the harsh realities faced by minorities in America.

This came to a head in a 2015 commencement speech at Tuskegee University where she reminded black students to stay strong and persevere against the odds.

Michelle’s stance on social issues made her an iconic figure – and will remain her legacy.

To truly lead and inspire others means standing up for what you believe in and living by your values – regardless of opposing views or fear of rocking the “status quo” boat.

This is what will inspire courage in others to do the same. Plus, you’ll build a sense of purpose by sticking by your convictions when the going gets tough.

2. Compassionate

“All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do — that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.” – Michelle Obama

When it comes down to it, leadership is about much more than having a “type-A” personality. It’s about being compassionate to people from all walks of life.

Before Michelle was First Lady, she was a practicing lawyer and fought against injustice through her work at Chicago City Hall where addressed her community’s social issues.

Later, she went on to establish the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, a national service network to help prepares youth for a career in the civil service.

But being a successful leader is more than just having good business skills. You also need empathy and compassion in order to build healthy relationships within an organization.

Make no mistake: compassion is your ticket to people’s hearts. It will also help you earn the trust and respect of your employees – which is essential if you want to be an influential and inspiring leader.

3. Self-Confidence

“One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.” – Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama demonstrated her self-confidence in numerous ways. Whether it was her uplifting DNC inauguration speeches or championing courage and self-esteem for women , Michelle never shied away from standing up for what she believes in.

Biographers say Michelle’s willingness to speak her mind goes all the way back to her college years, where she criticized one of her professor’s teaching methods. She credits her parents and older brother for helping her find her “voice” at an early age.

That voice would later resonate with the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world.

While not everyone is as fortunate as Michelle to have had a strong support network growing up, the great thing about confidence is that it can be improved once you make the decision to do so and start appreciating who you are and what unique qualities you have to offer.

Yes, these efforts take time – but most worthwhile pursuits in life usually do.

The former First Lady’s example showed that everyone matters and everyone has a voice that can change the world.

But remember, it all starts with one thing… your choice to believe in yourself. Once you do, your capacity as a leader will rise ten fold.

4. Powerful Speaker

Michelle Obama had an uncanny way of captivating her audience during her husband’s 8 years in office.

She had an amazing way of making people feel as if they were part of something bigger. And she did it by relating her own experience.

As First Lady, she also gave powerful speeches about her experience as a black woman competing in academia, as well as the need to stand up for women’s rights.

She also didn’t shy away from calling out lewd behavior, including sexist remarks by politicians. And when doing so, she never lost her cool.

Some of her most inspirational speeches include:

2012 DNC Speech:

International Women’s Day speech:

5. Perseverance

Here’s a simple fact: life isn’t always easy. Many great accomplishments take a significant amount of time and hard work. As the saying goes:

The only time “success” appears before “work,” is in the dictionary.

So to achieve amazing feats, perseverance is key.

Michelle became the first African-American First Lady in U.S. history – all while the odds were firmly stacked against her and her husband.

She also achieved several important milestones while in the White House, such as passing a bipartisan School Lunch program to provide free and reduced-price meals to more than 20 million low-income children.

In 2014, she also launched the Reach Higher Initiative to inspire young people across the country to put their education first.

Even her life before becoming First Lady was filled with accomplishments that demonstrated her perseverance.

This included graduating cum laude from Princeton University before finishing up her law degree at Harvard.

Michelle’s life story shows us how a strong commitment to one’s values can lead to tremendous change in the world.

Not all of us will get to influence public policy like Michelle, but you can all learn to stay committed to your goals regardless of what life throws at you.

To sum it up, the art of perseverance sets great leaders – and great organizations – apart.

6. Inspirational

“You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.”  – Michelle Obama

Needless to say, the former First Lady’s life story has inspired millions of people.

Her ongoing efforts to fight poverty, inequality and obesity gave her a sense of purpose that transcended political lines and racial divides.

Michelle was adamant in her claim that the power of the individual is paramount, and why you shouldn’t underestimate your ability to inspire real change in your community.

“We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters… that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules… and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square.”  – Michelle Obama

Great leaders are honest about their strengths, weaknesses and expectations. This applies to the business world and any other life endeavour.

Michelle Obama was dedicated to many important social causes before and during her husband’s presidential tenure.

And authenticity was one of her most valued leadership traits . Michelle’s success can largely be attributed to her honesty as well as her dedication to show up each day and work towards her goals.

So here’s a tip: if you want to be an inspiring leader – start off by being honest. Honesty is more than just telling the truth – it’s about creating a culture of transparency.

8. Graceful Under Pressure

A lot of attention has been paid to Michelle Obama’s sense of style. But her sense of style was more than just fashion.

She spoke eloquently, walked with grace and portrayed herself in a positive and respectful light.

Whether you supported her husband or didn’t agree with him at all, it was difficult not to like the former First Lady.

Make no mistake: the way you carry yourself says a lot about you and your values.

Make it your aim to carry yourself with confidence and composure, even when no one is watching – and as if everyone was watching.

9. Relatable to Others

“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.”  – Michelle Obama

As you can imagine, when you’re the First Lady, it’s very easy to become detached from reality.

Not Michelle Obama.

Throughout her husband’s 8-year term, she talked openly about her personal life. Everything from her experience at school to her first date with Barack – her story resonated with millions of women across the country.

She also empowered African-American women to fight against stereotypes. She did all this by being relatable. Many women saw some of themselves in Michelle Obama.

Although your business or passion might not be political, your ability to inspire others to action is an important leadership quality.

That’s why it’s important to speak from the heart and show vulnerability when expressing your hopes – and even your weaknesses. Effective leaders inspire others to see their vision – so when it comes to relating to others, remember to be genuine!

10. Time Management

“My first job in all honesty is going to continue to be mom-in-chief. Making sure that in this transition, which will be even more of a transition for the girls… that they are settled and that they know they will continue to be the center of our universe.”   – Michelle Obama

From her dozens of accomplishments to raising Malia and Natasha, Michelle made it a priority to manage her time so she could focus on what was most important to her – with her children always at the top of the list.

The fact of the matter is – there often aren’t enough hours in the day, so you need to define your non-negotiables and be realistic about what you can manage – and what you need to delegate or say no to.

So there you have it. Our pick of Michelle Obama’s top 10 most inspiring leadership qualities and how she used them to inspire change.

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Transformative Leadership Characteristics of Michelle Obama

April 19, 2021 by csp5295

Transformational leadership is defined in the lesson commentaries as a form of leadership that “serves to change the status quo by appealing to followers’ values and their sense of higher purpose…[they] engage with followers and create a connection that raises the level of motivation and morality in both the leader and the follower (Hamel, 2021).” One iconic member of society that is famously known for their transformational leadership style is former First Lady Michelle Obama. She held the qualities of a transformational leader by having vision, rhetorical skills, image and trust building, and personalized leadership.

In her latest documentary she was shown having a meaningful discussion with young women, empowering them to become leaders in their own ways and stressing how important education was for herself, and for them. Through this, she was able to depict the vision characteristic, or known amongst leaders as those able to “recognize the problems of a present system and offer a vision to overcome these problems (Hamel, 2021).” She discussed the issue of the lack of female leaders, and ways to fix this issue by stressing the importance of education for women around the world. Additionally, this demonstrated her rhetorical skills as a transformational leader, as she was able to share her vision across her followers and across the country of women empowerment and working hard to achieve one’s goals. From this, her followers were able to embrace her vision and share it with others.

Michelle also represented qualities such as image and trust building. This characteristic states that transformational leaders “build trust in their followers through an image of self-confidence, moral conviction, and personal example and self-sacrifice (Hamel, 2021).” She fulfills this characteristic through her story of coming from a low-income neighborhood in Chicago, where neither of her parents had the opportunity to achieve a higher education. Her story of self-sacrifice, hard work and dedication to receive the prestigious education she had has been shared everywhere and has inspired millions. Her image is known globally as a woman who leads by example and who radiates self-confidence in herself and in her work. 

Additionally, Michelle continues her work as a leader through personalized leadership, the final characteristic described in the lesson commentary as transformational leaders that “share strong, personal bonds with followers,” and “are sensitive to the emotional states of followers and are adept at picking up social cues (Hamel, 2021).” In many of her speeches, she spoke on race and the discrimination she faced an African-American. She was able to empathize with the Black community and other marginalized groups about their experiences and created a strong, personal bond with them because of this.

With all these characteristics satisfied, it is clear that Michelle was a prominent transformational leader that paved the way with her foundations, books, and historical achievement as the first African-American First Lady for eight years. Her advocacy for poverty awareness, education, nutrition, and other important issues led to her being a role model for all and a leader for her followers to admire and follow her vision.

Hamel, R. (2021). Lesson 11: Servant Leadership, 2021

Northouse, P.G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

April 19, 2021 at 8:04 am

Michelle Obama is a great example of a transformational leader. She has so many admirable qualities and has influenced so many people throughout the world. The vision she had for the country and all the issues she wanted to focus on was something that stood out as her time as First Lady. I really like how you described her life story and went into detail on why she was such a great leader. She is very well respected and someone that people look up to as a leader and one that is very impactful on people’s everyday lives.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Hero — My Hero: Michelle Obama

My Hero: Michelle Obama

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Published: Dec 16, 2021

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Michelle Obama: Empowering Leadership and Inspiring Advocacy

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• Napier, S. J. (2016). Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing contemporary Japanese animation. St. Martin's Press.

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Michelle Obama: A Charismatic Leader?

• Barbara Kellerman

“Mighty Michelle” they called her in London – the president’s wife who is taking Europe by storm. Whatever Barack Obama’s accomplishments on his first foray as diplomat-in-chief, the First Lady is a hit, a star in her own right, in the limelight. Comparisons are being made between her and Jacqueline Kennedy, the last woman in […]

“Mighty Michelle” they called her in London – the president’s wife who is taking Europe by storm. Whatever Barack Obama’s accomplishments on his first foray as diplomat-in-chief, the First Lady is a hit, a star in her own right, in the limelight.

• Barbara Kellerman is the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and is author and editor of many books and articles on leadership.

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First Lady Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is a lawyer, writer, and the wife of the 44th and current President, Barack Obama. She is the first African-American First Lady of the United States. Through her four main initiatives, she has become a role model for women and an advocate for healthy families ,  service members and their families , higher education , and  international adolescent girls education .

When people ask First Lady Michelle Obama to describe herself, she doesn't hesitate to say that first and foremost, she is Malia and Sasha's mom.

But before she was a mother — or a wife, lawyer, or public servant — she was Fraser and Marian Robinson's daughter.

The Robinsons lived in a brick bungalow on the South Side of Chicago. Fraser was a pump operator for the Chicago Water Department, and despite being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at a young age, he hardly ever missed a day of work. Marian stayed home to raise Michelle and her older brother Craig, skillfully managing a busy household filled with love, laughter, and important life lessons.

A product of Chicago public schools, Michelle Robinson studied sociology and African-American studies at Princeton University. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988, she joined the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she later met Barack Obama, the man who would become the love of her life.

After a few years, Mrs. Obama decided her true calling was working with people to serve their communities and their neighbors. She served as assistant commissioner of planning and development in Chicago's City Hall before becoming the founding executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that prepares youth for public service.

In 1996, Mrs. Obama joined the University of Chicago with a vision of bringing campus and community together. As Associate Dean of Student Services, she developed the university's first community service program, and under her leadership as Vice President of Community and External Affairs for the University of Chicago Medical Center, volunteerism skyrocketed.

Mrs. Obama has continued her efforts to support and inspire young people during her time as First Lady.

Michelle Obama as an Administrator: Reflections

• First Online: 18 August 2018

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• Barbara J. Edwards 4  

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Too often, the overall professional experiences of former First Lady Michelle Obama are overlooked. In this essay, Edwards addresses Obama’s background and experiences as an African American administrator. Mrs. Obama’s acquired management and leadership skills propelled her to become one of the most effective First Ladies to implement her agendas to address childhood obesity, education, veteran and family affairs on a national and international level. Mrs. Obama’s impact on girls and women of color will go down in history as one of her many outstanding achievements.

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Edwards, B.J. (2018). Michelle Obama as an Administrator: Reflections. In: Duster, M., Seniors, P., Thevenin, R. (eds) Michelle Obama’s Impact on African American Women and Girls. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92468-7_3

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A virtual museum of his presidency

Through a collection of deeply reported stories, videos, photographs, documents and graphics, experience Barack Obama’s historic time in office: as the first black president , as commander in chief , as a domestic and foreign policymaker, and as a husband and father .

Continue to the gallery of stories or keep reading: How Michelle Obama became a singular American voice .

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How Michelle Obama became a singular American voice

Three weeks after Inauguration Day in 2009 and still a long way from crafting an agenda, Michelle Obama climbed into her motorcade and paid a visit to Mary’s Center, a Latino community services agency a few miles north of the White House. She read “ Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? ” to the young children and met with teenagers who asked why she had come.

The first reason, she said, was that Washington was now the Obamas’ home and they had always been taught to listen and not just pass on by. The second reason identified the audience and framed the approach that would define this most uncommon first lady’s agenda for the next eight years.

“I think it’s real important for young kids, particularly kids who come from communities without resources, to see me, not the first lady,” she said. “To see that there is no magic to me sitting here. There are no miracles that happen. There is no magic dust.”

With the 13 teenagers seated in a semicircle, Obama shared the setbacks and self-doubt she faced as the daughter of black working-class parents in Chicago. When people told her she couldn’t achieve something, she set out to prove them wrong. One step at a time, she climbed, and now she felt an obligation to share.

“When you get, you give back,” she said.

Obama would give much bigger speeches on much bigger stages as she became one of the most famous people in the world. For many Democrats, she was the moral voice of the 2016 presidential campaign, calling out Republican Donald Trump for trafficking in “prejudice, fears and lies.” For other fans, she was simply the first lady who went viral, making them smile with her eclectic fashion choices and her energetic, sometimes goofy pitches for healthier eating.

The heart of Obama’s efforts, however, was a message about the persistent inequities of race, class and gender in America. In scores of speeches and projects, she turned again and again to the stacked deck. These were the themes and conundrums that animated her work before she reached the White House and now seem certain to shape her choices after she departs.

For all the grief she took from critics who conjured radicalism, grievance or, bizarrely, racism from her finely tuned remarks, Obama’s antidotes were fundamentally timeless and conservative. More than anything, she used the strength of her own Chicago-to-Princeton-to-the-White-House narrative to urge kids to believe in themselves and never quit. She mastered the levers of popular culture and harnessed the convening power of her office and her carefully curated brand to establish partnerships with the private sector.

Obama addressed obesity, which disproportionately affects low-income families and children of color. She worked to increase arts education in poorly performing schools and ease the path for aspiring first-generation college students. She dispensed hugs to thousands of children, saying in a simple embrace that she believed in them. At a BET special, she called out, “Black girls rock!”

A straight-talker by temperament, she modulated her tone in deference to the role. Eternally disciplined and pragmatic, she never swung for the fences. Critics on the left chided her for not being bold enough, as she acknowledged last year. Her answer: “These were my choices, my issues, and I decided to tackle them in the way that felt most authentic to me — in a way that was both substantive and strategic, but also fun and, hopefully, inspiring.”

When Obama took up her unpaid job three days after her 45th birthday, she faced vast and conflicting expectations. She was the first African American first lady in a country that was anything but post-racial. She was the magnetic campaigner who told audiences that power concedes nothing without a struggle. She was the highly educated, professionally accomplished mother of two young daughters who smilingly adopted the moniker of “mom in chief.”

“From the moment we walked in the door, people have wanted to get inside her head and figure her out. ‘Is she in this box or that box? Why isn’t she doing this or doing that?’ ” said Jocelyn Frye, a Harvard Law School friend who became Obama’s first policy adviser. “She’s not a person who lives in boxes. It’s just not that simple.”

The personal story that Obama carried into the White House in January 2009 was enough to etch her name in the history books even if she did not accomplish anything more. She called herself “the little black girl from the South Side of Chicago.” As she would say later, her ancestors had arrived in the United States in chains and now she and Barack Obama were living in a home that slaves helped build.

But in other ways, too, Obama brought a set of experiences markedly different from her modern-day predecessors. Of the previous eight presidents, four had been governors, four had been vice presidents. Their wives had lived in the public eye. Obama was a young Chicago professional, a working mother in a big city who spoke openly about juggling jobs, chores and child-rearing with her increasingly famous and preoccupied husband.

By upbringing, she was urban and attuned to issues of prejudice, hardship and inequality. She adored her father, Fraser C. Robinson III, a gregarious aspiring artist who spent his working life as a shift worker in the city water plant. A swimmer, boxer and soldier as a young man, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in his 30s. His health deteriorated, and he went from one crutch to two to a motorized cart. He died in 1991 at age 55, still working at the plant.

Both of Obama’s grandfathers had come north in the Great Migration, and many members of the Robinson and Shields families lived nearby. Purnell Shields, a talented carpenter and Obama’s maternal grandfather, was barred as an African American from the labor unions that claimed the highest-paying jobs. Fraser C. Robinson Jr. spent much of his career as a postal worker. If he had been born white, Obama once said, he would have been a banker.

Obama spent time with this extended family. She knew them all, from those who were prospering to those who were ailing or just getting by. She also knew countless schoolmates who seemed hardly different from her, yet had fallen short of their ambitions. When Barack Obama met her in 1989, he detected a sense of vulnerability that he traced to Michelle’s sense that life was “terrifyingly random.” She called herself “a statistical anomaly.”

After ditching the prosperous law firm, where she found the work soulless and many colleagues narrow, she spent two years doing economic development work at City Hall with future White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. Next, in what she described as the happiest phase of her working life, she built the Chicago office of Public Allies, a nonprofit leadership training program with roots in community organizing.

Next, she spent a dozen years as an administrator at the University of Chicago, where she elevated the interests of neighboring African American communities. Much as she would in the White House, she searched for ways to connect a powerful and often remote institution with communities where it could do some good. Comfortable and connected in both worlds, she saw herself as a bridge.

In 2001, protesters seeking more construction jobs for African Americans at the university medical center said she should be fired. One said Obama and her colleagues were looking out for themselves and did “not have the best interests of blacks at heart.” Obama persisted. In the next seven years, 42.9 percent of the hospital’s spending on new construction, or $48.8 million, went to firms run by minorities or women, according to university figures.

The focus was not new. At Harvard Law School, where the tenured faculty was 96 percent white and 92 percent male, Obama spoke up for greater diversity. Charles Ogletree, a mentor and professor, pinpointed her passions early.

“Everything she wrote, the things that she was involved in, the things that she thought about,” he recalled of her law school years in the mid-1980s, “were in effect reflections on race and gender. And how she had to keep the doors open for women and men going forward.”

One of Obama’s signatures was the push for a seat at the table — or in “the room where it happens,” to borrow from “Hamilton,” the Broadway musical the Obamas admire. A few years ago, she told a gathering of White House interns that if they were not prepared to risk their power when they claimed that seat, they needed to make room for someone who would.

In reaching the most rarefied of tables, she figured she had four years, maybe eight, to make something happen, to “move the needle,” as she put it. As the media made a fuss over a new hairstyle, she once explained how she saw the role of first lady: “We take our bangs and we stand in front of important things that the world needs to see. And, eventually, people stop looking at the bangs and they start looking at what we’re standing in front of.”

Obama saw early that she could connect with disadvantaged young people by describing her South Side upbringing and the choices she made in her life. Even as the Obamas set out unambiguously to be the president and first lady for the entire country, they were determined “to look out for people who historically have not had people looking out for them,” Valerie Jarrett said in an interview. “Certainly, African American women and girls see themselves in her in a unique way.”

The White House portfolio included Let’s Move, her childhood obesity project, and efforts to open the White House and its grounds to kids who barely knew where it was and never imagined stepping inside. She established Joining Forces to help the military and their families with jobs and workplace issues and started a small mentoring program that became a personal cause.

She worked on homelessness among veterans and pushed Reach Higher, seeking to increase post-secondary education for low-income adolescents. Finally, she launched Let Girls Learn, an international initiative designed to improve access to secondary school for millions of girls around the world who found themselves on the outside looking in.

Throughout, Obama made clear to her staff that she favored coherent projects backed by creative but realistic thinking. She sought buy-in from federal agencies, state governments and private partners, and she wanted to make use of every opportunity. She told her aides, “Don’t just put me on a plane, send me someplace and have me smile.”

“She never looked at things esoterically or theoretically. It was practical and real,” said Democratic strategist Stephanie Cutter, who advised her at key moments. “Her focus was never ‘How do I move Washington?’ It was much bigger than that. It was ‘How do you mobilize a country? How are real people outside of Washington going to see things?’ ”

At the White House, she staged arts events, from dance, music and spoken word to food and design workshops. She made sure that artists who were performing for well-heeled East Room audiences at night were teaching children at the White House or local schools during the day. Her tastes tilted to designers, artists, playwrights and directors of color, choices that alerted millions of Obama-watchers to work they might not have seen or heard.

In 2011, she helped launch Turnaround Arts, a program designed to deliver arts teaching, inspiration and supplies to some of the worst-performing schools in the country — often in places where arts programming was a budget casualty. From eight pilot programs in 2011, the project now reaches 68 schools, with 20 to be added in 2017.

“She knows the power of the arts. It’s visceral and it’s who she is,” said Megan Beyer, executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. “Every time we do an event, she’ll look at the audience and she’ll say, ‘This is not a fluke. This is what happens when you invest in these kids.’ ”

To critics on the right, including former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who mocked or denounced new science-based standards for school lunches as overly intrusive, Obama urged them to look more closely. She pointed to the millions of low-income children who depend on those meals and the federal government’s help in paying for them.

“We simply can’t afford to say, ‘Oh, well, it’s too hard, so let’s not do it,’ ” Obama said in 2014. When lobbyists persuaded Congress to count one-eighth of a cup of tomato paste in pizza sauce as the equivalent of a half-cup of vegetables, she wrote dismissively in the New York Times, “You don’t have to be a nutritionist to know that this doesn’t make much sense.”

Inside the East Wing, Obama commanded intense loyalty from her staff and set her own agenda, down to the number of public days on her schedule — two at first, while Malia and Sasha were getting settled, and later three. She stayed closer to home than Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who each traveled abroad more than twice as much, and put limits on her campaign trips, especially when not campaigning for her husband.

She tightly controlled her message. In eight years, she never gave a news conference, although she held a select few roundtables with reporters. She rarely granted interviews to the beat reporters who knew her work the best. More often, and more strategically, she granted face time to grateful personalities and comedians, along with media outlets carefully chosen for the audiences they reached.

Aides and friends were barely more accessible. When reporters called, former chief of staff Jackie Norris once said, Obama expected her friends to “check in and have conversations and make sure that it’s good for her.” Mostly, the friends did.

Since the beginning of the first presidential campaign nearly 10 years ago, Obama has credited her girlfriends with keeping her grounded amid the maelstrom. “When you’re isolated, that’s when you need your girls. They can keep you together when no one else can,” said Angela Kennedy, a D.C. public defender and former Princeton roommate who sees Obama regularly. “She’s smart. She recognized that.”

Not trailed by the presidential press pool, Obama escaped to the gym, restaurants, theaters and her friends’ houses, as well as the occasional trip to the presidential retreat at Camp David. It helped to have her mother, Marian Robinson, now 79, living on the third floor of the White House. “I can always go up to her room and cry, complain, argue,” Obama said. “And she just says, go on down there and do what you’re supposed to do.”

Obama spoke often of what it meant to have normal family dinners and activities with Malia and Sasha, talking about the girls’ doings and keeping things light. She has always been able “to stay above the fray,” said Frye, her Harvard friend, in part by “meeting with real people and talking about real-world problems. At the end of the day, she has kept her head.”

Obama’s ascendance — as mother, mentor, leader and critic — carries many meanings in American culture, particularly as an African American woman, said Nell Irvin Painter, an emeritus professor of American history at Princeton.

“Her power is a symbolic power,” Painter said, noting the way Obama “has conducted herself as first lady. She has grace, there is no question, but I would add elegance. It’s a kind of assurance that is also something new for a black woman in public life. She is the symbol of what an American can be. Michelle Obama has presented a universal American identity.”

On May 9, 2015, Obama took the stage at Tuskegee University in Alabama and delivered the most thorough and personal speech about race and racism of her tenure. As a speechmaker, said author Garry Wills, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his study of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “I don’t know that she has any competitors in women’s history.” She wowed millions of fans with keynote addresses at three successive Democratic National Conventions, but she also had a serious body of work that received less attention in mainstream circles.

Many times before her Tuskegee appearance, she had spoken about the country’s history of violence and discrimination against African Americans. She did it in Orangeburg, S.C., in 2007 to woo black support for her husband’s candidacy. She did it in Nashville during the 2012 reelection campaign, and in Topeka, Kan., in 2014 to mark the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education . And she did it at other historically black universities, including Bowie State, Jackson State and North Carolina A&T.

Together, the talks reflected a lifetime of thinking about the shifting landscape of racism, the advances and the setbacks. At Tuskegee, she spoke of slights and hurdles while suggesting strategies — tested by her own experience, as always — to block out the noise and navigate a path forward.

“Here’s the thing: The road ahead is not going to be easy,” she told the graduates in an address that tracked the history of the Tuskegee Airmen, a storied black flying squadron in World War II. “It never is, especially for folks like you and me. Because while we’ve come so far, the truth is that those age-old problems are stubborn and they haven’t fully gone away. So there will be times, just like for those Airmen, when you feel like folks look right past you or they see just a fraction of who you are.”

“Too many folks feel frustrated and invisible,” Obama said. She cited worries about being pulled over “for absolutely no reason,” or being overlooked for a job “because of the way your name sounds,” or sending children to schools “that may no longer be separate, but are far from equal.” Above all, she said, there is the “realization that no matter how far you rise in life, how hard you work to be a good person, a good parent, a good citizen, for some folks, it will never be enough.”

The Obamas were not immune, despite their efforts, their achievements, their conduct. For years, Donald Trump sowed doubts about Barack Obama’s birth and citizenship, while talk show host Rush Limbaugh told his millions of followers that Michelle suffered from “uppity-ism” and called her “Michelle My Butt.” Foes likened her to a character from Planet of the Apes, a Star Wars Wookiee and a gorilla, a racist slur with a particularly long and ugly history. They challenged her patriotism and even questioned her gender.

But no matter how grim the outlook and how significant the structural challenges, Obama said at Tuskegee, despair and anger are “not an excuse to just throw up our hands and give up.” Instead, she proposed the measured, practical, traditional responses that had worked for her. Study, organize, band together, be a mentor, help a cousin fill out a financial aid form and “vote, vote, vote.”

“You have got everything you need to do this. You’ve got it in you,” she said in her best I-believe-in-you tone. “Most of all, you’ve got yourselves and all of the heart, grit and smarts that got you to this day.”

It was never Obama’s style to summon people to the barricades. She drew criticism from some African American intellectuals and activists for perpetuating a bootstraps narrative that said black people must be twice as good to do just as well as whites. Painter recognized the critique but saw Obama’s message differently.

“She also says you can figure it out. That’s a crucial part,” Painter said. “Her commentary to black kids is, ‘You can do it. It’s not just lecturing and shaking her finger in their faces, but an encouragement. It’s pragmatic, but the way she phrases it, it is full of empathy and I think there is still a lack of empathy in the way the United States speaks to black people.”

The response to Obama’s remarks provided proof aplenty. Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham saw “a litany of victimization.” Media comment boards filled with talk of a “tirade” and an “America-hater” and an “angry woman who has no appreciation for the many gifts our country has bestowed on her.” Someone wrote, “Can she or her husband ever just be Americans? Why do they always have to focus on their skin color? Repulsive.”

But also, “Michelle for President!” — something that Obama, whose favorability ratings routinely topped 60 percent, has said will never happen. “No. Nope. Not going to do it,” she said earlier this year.

Michelle Obama was dismayed by the rise of Donald Trump. She perceived danger in the candidacy of an unstudied Republican who lied with abandon and routinely mocked and disparaged rivals, critics and entire swathes of the American populace, all the while vowing to wreck much of what the Obama administration spent eight years building.

“This is not normal. This is not politics as usual,” Obama declared at an October rally in New Hampshire after a tape surfaced of Trump boasting about grabbing women by the genitals. A growing number of women said they had been accosted. “I know it’s a campaign, but this isn’t about politics. It’s about human decency. It’s about right and wrong.”

Obama said repeatedly during the campaign that Trump was dangerous, undeserving and lacking “any idea what this job takes.” In Philadelphia, she pointedly recalled Trump’s leadership of the birther movement, referring to the “hurtful, deceitful questions deliberately designed to undermine” her husband’s presidency.

The attacks on Trump were the strongest, sharpest words Obama uttered in public during the White House years. Whatever her anger or dismay, she never said she was surprised, for these were the regressive forces that she had seen in action her entire life.

On a weekday morning, with not many people watching, Obama delivered her take on the political moment. To a rapt church audience — men and women, white and black — she said in a tone more suited to a seminar than a rally, “My fear is that we don’t know what truth looks like anymore.” She spoke of her hard-won understanding of the world, drawing on her Chicago life, where persistence and good intentions came with no guarantees.

Politicians had become expert at turning doubt into fear, she said, as life got “harder, progressively harder, for regular people.”

“We’re still a nation that’s a little too mean,” Obama said. “I wish mean worked, because we’re good at it. Our tone is bad and we’ve grown to believe that, somehow, mean talk is tough talk . . . and we reward it. Not just in politics, but we reward it in every sliver of our culture. We look on people who are tough and say, ‘That’s what we need.’ ”

Obama spoke those words in South Carolina in January 2008. As Trump makes his way to Washington with his gilded pitchfork, her assessment rings true for more than 62 million Americans who supported him and millions more who didn’t care enough to vote. She is leaving the White House with work unfinished and fresh troubles brewing. She was right that day at Mary’s Center, in her first weeks on the job, when she offered a verdict that applied as much to the nation as to herself. There are no miracles, no magic dust.

What Obama offered was something else. To audiences great and small, she presented conviction, savvy, a dose of inspiration and a certain faith that the battles were worth waging and the effort would pay off in the end.

Peter Slevin, a former Post national correspondent, is the author of “ Michelle Obama: A Life .”

This story is part of a virtual museum of President Barack Obama’s presidency. In five parts — The First Black President , Commander in Chief , Obama’s America , Obama and the World and The First Family — we explore the triumphs and travails of his historic tenure.

• A hopeful moment on race
• A soliloquy in Philadelphia
• The beer summit
• The other trailblazers
• On a bridge in Selma
• In his own words
• The backlash
• A new aesthetic
• Kids on Obama
• Crime, justice and race
• Obama in Africa
• The Obama electorate
• Your Obama presidency

Barack Obama’s watershed 2008 election and the presidency that followed profoundly altered the aesthetics of American democracy, transforming the Founding Fathers’ narrow vision of politics and citizenship into something more expansive and more elegant. The American presidency suddenly looked very different, and for a moment America felt different, too.

The Obama victory helped fulfill one of the great ambitions of the civil rights struggle by showcasing the ability of extraordinarily talented black Americans to lead and excel in all facets of American life. First lady Michelle Obama, and daughters Sasha and Malia, extended this reimagining of black American life by providing a conspicuous vision of a healthy, loving and thriving African American family that defies still-prevalent racist stereotypes.

But some interpreted Obama’s triumph as much more.

The victory was heralded as the arrival of a “post-racial” America, one in which the nation’s original sin of racial slavery and post-Reconstruction Jim Crow discrimination had finally been absolved by the election of a black man as commander in chief. For a while, the nation basked in a racially harmonious afterglow.

A black president would influence generations of young children to embrace a new vision of American citizenship. The “Obama Coalition” of African American, white, Latino, Asian American and Native American voters had helped usher in an era in which institutional racism and pervasive inequality would fade as Americans embraced the nation’s multicultural promise.

Seven years later, such profound optimism seems misplaced. Almost immediately, the Obama presidency unleashed racial furies that have only multiplied over time. From the tea party’s racially tinged attacks on the president’s policy agenda to the “birther” movement’s more overtly racist fantasies asserting that Obama was not even an American citizen, the national racial climate grew more, and not less, fraught.

If racial conflict, in the form of birthers, tea partyers and gnawing resentments, implicitly shadowed Obama’s first term, it erupted into open warfare during much of his second. The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in the Shelby v. Holder case gutted Voting Rights Act enforcement, throwing into question the signal achievement of the civil rights movement’s heroic period.

Beginning with the 2012 shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, the nation reopened an intense debate on the continued horror of institutional racism evidenced by a string of high-profile deaths of black men, women, boys and girls at the hands of law enforcement.

The organized demonstrations, protests and outrage of a new generation of civil rights activists turned the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter into the clarion call for a new social justice movement. Black Lives Matter activists have forcefully argued that the U.S. criminal justice system represents a gateway to racial oppression, one marked by a drug war that disproportionately targets, punishes and warehouses young men and women of color. In her bestselling book “ The New Jim Crow ,” legal scholar Michelle Alexander argued that mass incarceration represents a racial caste system that echoes the pervasive, structural inequality of a system of racial apartheid that persists.

Obama’s first-term caution on race matters was punctured by his controversial remarks that police “acted stupidly” in the mistaken identity arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University’s prominent African American studies professor, in 2009. Four years later he entered the breach once more by proclaiming that if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

In the aftermath of racial unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, and a racially motivated massacre in Charleston, S.C., Obama went further. In 2015, Obama found his voice in a series of stirring speeches in Selma, Ala., and Charleston, where he acknowledged America’s long and continuous history of racial injustice.

Policy-wise Obama has launched a private philanthropic effort, My Brother’s Keeper, designed to assist low-income black boys, and became the first president to visit a federal prison in a call for prison reform that foreshadowed the administration’s efforts to release federal inmates facing long sentences on relatively minor drug charges.

Despite these efforts, many of Obama’s African American supporters have expressed profound disappointment over the president’s refusal to forcefully pursue racial and economic justice policies for his most loyal political constituency.

From this perspective, the Obama presidency has played out as a cruel joke on members of the African American community who, despite providing indispensable votes, critical support and unstinting loyalty, find themselves largely shut out from the nation’s post-Great Recession economic recovery. Blacks have, critics suggested, traded away substantive policy demands for the largely symbolic psychological and emotional victory of having a black president and first family in the White House for eight years.

Others find that assessment harsh, noting that Obama’s most impressive policy achievements have received scant promotion from the White House or acknowledgment in the mainstream media.

History will decide the full measure of the importance, success, failures and shortcomings of the Obama presidency. With regard to race, Obama’s historical significance is ensured; only his impact and legacy are up for debate. In retrospect, the burden of transforming America’s tortured racial history in two four-year presidential terms proved impossible, even as its promise helped to catapult Obama to the nation’s highest office.

Obama’s presidency elides important aspects of the civil rights struggle, especially the teachings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. King, for a time, served as the racial justice consciousness for two presidents — John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Many who hoped Obama might be able to serve both roles — as president and racial justice advocate — have been disappointed. Yet there is a revelatory clarity in that disappointment, proving that Obama is not King or Frederick Douglass, but Abraham Lincoln, Kennedy and Johnson. Even a black president, perhaps especially a black president, could not untangle racism’s Gordian knot on the body politic. Yet in acknowledging the limitations of Obama’s presidency on healing racial divisions and the shortcomings of his policies in uplifting black America, we may reach a newfound political maturity that recognizes that no one person — no matter how powerful — can single-handedly rectify structures of inequality constructed over centuries.

Peniel Joseph is professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

Being number one means nothing until there’s a number two.

If i had a son, he would look like trayvon., some young americans have known only one president in their lifetime..

• On war and leadership
• The parade of generals
• A tour of duty
• One enemy after another
• Words of war and peace
• The last convoy
• The rise of ISIS
• Weighing intervention
• An army of drones
• Struggle after service
• Fear at home
• Your fight, your stories

Has he failed to understand the nature of war or shown the virtues of patience to win the long game?

We won some good fights and we lost the war., no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy..

• Eight turbulent years
• Economic brinksmanship
• The price of Obamacare
• A new state of unions
• Shots fired
• A cultural shift
• ‘Healing the planet’
• Making presidential comedy
• A mark in the wilderness
• American reactions
• Your America

Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.

What is it like to be the last black president.

• Determined restraint
• For Muslims, unanswered prayers
• Open hand, clenched fist
• Talking to Tehran
• Closer now – and cigars!
• Standing in the world
• Friends, adversaries
• A pivot to Asia
• Air Force One miles
• Your worldview
• The new modern family
• White House, black women
• The first lady’s last stand
• It’s an Obama thing
• In the cultural mix
• White House parents
• The most popular of them all?
• The O’Bidens
• The first dogs

The Obama family has really uplifted the image of the black family from the moment we saw them.

He does not walk. he strolls with a black man’s head-up posture..

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What President Obama’s executive actions mean for President Trump

• Terence Samuel, project editor
• Allison Michaels, project manager, digital editor
• Shannon Croom, multiplatform editor
• Courtney Rukan, multiplatform editor
• Emily Chow, graphics assignment editor
• Seth Blanchard
• Emily Yount
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• James Steinberg, illustrator (The First Black President)
• Brian Stauffer, illustrator (Commander in Chief)
• Thandiwe Tshabalala, illustrator (Obama’s America)
• Jasu Hu, illustrator (Obama and the World)
• Erin K. Robinson, illustrator (The First Family)
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• Peniel Joseph
• Wesley Lowery
• David Maraniss
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• Krissah Thompson
• Neely Tucker
• William Wan
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• Darla Cameron
• Scott Clement
• Emily Guskin
• Stephanie Stamm
• Aaron Steckelberg
• Elise Viebeck

‘Becoming,’ by Michelle Obama: A pioneering and important work by Allyson Hobbs

Reading Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming,” feels like catching up with an old friend over a lazy afternoon. Parts of her story are familiar, but still, you lean in, eager to hear them again. Other parts are new and come as a surprise. Sometimes her story makes you laugh out loud and shake your head with a gentle knowingness. Some parts are painful to hear. You wince and wish that you could have protected her from an unkind world.

Obama has sworn to tell her readers everything, and she delivers on that promise. From the silly to the surreal, from the momentous to the mundane, from the tragic to the transformative, she tells it all. As she shares her story, you are struck that every word is honest, brave and real.

“Becoming” explains how Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, “girl of the South Side,” came to be. It is a story that is as much about becoming as it is about belonging.

Obama invites us into the upstairs apartment of the red brick bungalow to experience the camaraderie and closeness that she shared with her parents, Marian and Fraser, and her older brother, Craig. She details her drive, her pursuit of achievement, her desire to check the right boxes and to prove that she was, in fact, “Princeton material,” despite the wrongheaded assessment of her high school college counselor. She would wrestle with the stubborn question — Am I good enough? — that lodged itself in her mind for years to come.

As first lady, Obama shattered the mold. Americans had never seen a life like Obama’s. She did not fit the dominant cultural frame that has been mounted around African American women.

“Becoming” shatters the mold, too. Not only because Obama writes in her signature tell-it-like-it-is style, but because she steeps her story in the richness and complexity of African American history that seldom reaches national audiences.

She is the descendant of enslaved people, a grandchild of the Great Migration, and the product of the storied black community on Chicago’s South Side. She is an observer of segregated housing, restrictive covenants and the exodus of white families to Chicago’s northern and western suburbs. She bears witness to the dashed dreams of her great uncle and grandfather who wished for greater educational and employment opportunities at a time when few if any existed for black men.

Through humor and poignant storytelling, Obama captures the joys of growing up in the neighborhood that writers have called “the capital of black America”: the sound of jazz blasting from her grandfather’s house around the corner, the barbecues where countless cousins gathered, and the feeling that, as Obama writes, “everyone was kin.”

There is a universality in the themes that “Becoming” addresses that many readers will recognize and appreciate, but at its heart, this is a story about the complexity of black women’s lives told firsthand by a black woman. This is a pioneering and important work that helps fill a gap in the literature on African American women’s lives.

“Becoming,” by Michelle Obama.

Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama is a lawyer, writer, and the wife of former U.S. President Barack Obama. Prior to her role as first lady, she was a lawyer, Chicago city administrator, and community outreach worker.

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1964-present

Latest News: Michelle Obama Wins Second Grammy Award

Talk about a talented former first family!

Michelle Obama, 60, was not in attendance in Los Angeles, where the award was announced during the Grammys pre-show on Sunday afternoon. She previously won in the same category for the audio version of her 2018 memoir Becoming .

Barack previously received two Grammys for Best Spoken Word Album for Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream .

Quick Facts

Career in law and public service, marriage to barack obama and daughters, campaigning for her husband, causes and accomplishments as first lady, notable speeches, obama foundation, books and podcasts, partnership with netflix, who is michelle obama.

Michelle Obama is a lawyer, writer, and philanthropist who was the first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. She was the first Black woman to hold this position. Michelle is the wife of America’s 44 th president, Barack Obama . As first lady, Obama focused her attention on social issues such as poverty, healthy living, and education. She won a Grammy Award for her 2018 memoir, Becoming , which discusses the experiences that shaped her, from her childhood in Chicago to her years living in the White House.

FULL NAME: Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama BORN: January 17, 1964 BIRTHPLACE: Chicago, Illinois SPOUSE: Barack Obama (1992-present) CHILDREN: Malia and Sasha ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago. Her father, Fraser Robinson, was a city-pump operator and a Democratic precinct captain. Her mother, Marian, was a secretary at Spiegel’s catalog store but later stayed home to raise Michelle and her older brother, Craig. At 21 months apart in age, Craig and Michelle were often mistaken for twins .

The Robinson family lived in a small bungalow on Chicago’s South Side. Michelle and Craig shared quarters, sleeping in the living room with a sheet serving as a makeshift room divider. They were a close-knit family, typically sharing meals, reading, and playing games together. She later said of her childhood: “I had a very stable, conventional upbringing, and that felt very safe to me.”

Raised with an emphasis on education, both Michelle and her brother learned to read at home by age 4. Both skipped the second grade. By the sixth grade, Michelle was taking classes in her school’s gifted program, where she learned French and completed accelerated courses in biology. Michelle went on to attend Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, the city’s first magnet high school for gifted children, where, among other activities, she served as the student government treasurer. She graduated in 1981 as class salutatorian.

Following in her older brother’s footsteps, Michelle applied for Princeton University. Some teachers tried to dissuade her from applying, telling her she would never get accepted: “Some of my teachers straight up told me that I was setting my sights too high.” Nevertheless, she was accepted, and ultimately graduated cum laude in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Michelle went on to study law at Harvard Law School, where she took part in demonstrations calling for the enrollment and hiring of more minority students and professors. She was awarded her juris doctor in 1988.

After graduating law school in 1988, Michelle worked as an associate in the Chicago branch of the firm Sidley Austin. Her focus was marketing and intellectual property. In 1991, she left corporate law to pursue a career in public service, working as an assistant to Mayor Richard Daley and then as the assistant commissioner of planning and development for the City of Chicago. In 1993, Michelle became executive director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a nonprofit leadership-training program that helps young adults develop skills for future careers in the public sector.

In 1996, Michelle joined the University of Chicago as associate dean of student services, developing the school’s first community-service program. Beginning in 2002, she worked for the University of Chicago Hospitals as executive director of community relations and external affairs. In May 2005, Michelle was appointed vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she continued to work part-time until shortly before her husband’s inauguration as president. She also served as a board member for the prestigious Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Michelle met Barack Obama in 1989 at the Chicago firm Sidley Austin. He was a summer intern, and Michelle was assigned to him as an adviser. They were among the few Black people working at the firm at the time. Initially, Michelle refused to date Barack, believing that their work relationship would make the romance improper. She eventually relented, however, and the couple soon fell in love.

Barack described their early relationship as an “opposites attract” situation because he had a different background and a more adventurous personality than Michelle. After two years of dating, Barack proposed, and the two married on October 3, 1992.

The couple has two daughters: Malia , born in 1998, and Sasha , born in 2001. Both Michelle and Barack have stated that their personal priority is their children. The Obamas tried to make their daughters’ world as “normal” as possible while living in the White House, with set times for studying, going to bed and getting up. “My first priority will always be to make sure that our girls are healthy and grounded,” Michelle has said . “Then I want to help other families get the support they need, not just to survive, but to thrive.”

Obama had long known her husband might pursue a political career and said in as early as 1996: “I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.” She opposed Barack’s decision to run for the U.S. House of Representatives but nevertheless campaigned for him during his unsuccessful primary campaign in 2000. She first caught the eye of a national audience while at her husband’s side when he delivered a high-profile speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Barack was elected as U.S. Senator from Illinois that November.

As her husband’s political role pushed the family into the spotlight, Michelle was publicly recognized for her no-nonsense campaign style as well as her sense of fashion. In May 2006, she was featured in Essence magazine as one of “25 of the World’s Most Inspiring Women.” In September 2007, Michelle was included in 02138 magazine as number 58 in “The Harvard 100,” a yearly list of the school’s most influential alumni. She also twice appeared on the cover of Vogue and made the Vanity Fair best-dressed list two years in a row as well as People magazine’s 2008 best-dressed list.

Michelle had reservations about Barack’s decision to run for president, too; she worried about how it would affect their daughters. Those concerns proved unfounded, as Michelle said they “could care less” about the campaign. In 2007, Michelle scaled back her own professional work to attend to family and campaign obligations during Barack’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination. When they were out on the trail, they would leave their daughters with Michelle’s mother, Marian. Barack won the nomination and later defeated Republican challenger John McCain in the general election to become the 44 th president of the United States . He was inaugurated on January 20, 2009.

When her husband sought reelection in 2012, facing a challenging race against Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney , Michelle diligently campaigned on his behalf. By this time, she had a more established public image and was widely popular. Politico described her as “the most popular member of the Obama administration” and an invaluable asset when it comes to raising money and delivering speeches. She traveled the country, giving talks and making public appearances. On November 6, 2012, Barack was re-elected for a second term.

As first lady of the United States, Michelle focused her attention on issues such as the support of military families, helping working women balance career and family, and encouraging national service. During the first year of the Obama presidency, Michelle and Barack volunteered at homeless shelters and soup kitchens in the Washington, D.C. area. Michelle also made appearances at public schools, stressing the importance of education and volunteer work.

Ever conscious of her family’s diet and health, Michelle supported the organic-food movement, instructing the White House kitchens to prepare organic food for guests and her family. In March 2009, Michelle worked with 23 fifth graders from a Washington, D.C. school to plant an 1,100-square-foot vegetable garden and install beehives on the South Lawn of the White House. The garden expanded its footprint throughout the Obama administration, and Michelle continued to host events with schoolchildren there. She also put reducing childhood obesity near the top of her agenda.

Michelle remained committed to health and wellness causes throughout her time as first lady. In 2012, she announced a new fitness program for kids as part of her Let’s Move initiative. Along with the U.S. Olympic team and other sports organizations, she worked to get young people to try out a new sport or activity. She also released a book as part of her mission to promote healthy eating called American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America (2012), which included her own experience creating a vegetable garden as well as the work of community gardens elsewhere.

Throughout her career, Obama has given a number of powerful speeches. In September 2012, she delivered a noteworthy speech at the Democratic National Convention. “Every day, the people I meet inspire me, every day they make me proud, every day they remind me how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on earth,” she said. “Serving as your first lady is an honor and a privilege.” Obama won both public and critical praise for her narrative, called a “shining moment” by The Washington Post .

In July 2016, Michelle campaigned in support of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention. When Clinton was named the Democratic presidential nominee, she became the first woman in the country’s history to win a major political party’s presidential nomination. On the first night of the convention, Michelle spoke in support of Clinton, who had previously run against Barack during the 2008 primaries, and Clinton’s vision of a progressive America.

“I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, Black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn,” she said. “And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.” During the same speech, Michelle alluded to the behavior of Clinton’s Republican challenger Donald Trump , saying her party would not stoop to his level, with the famous phrase : “Our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”

On January 13, 2017, Michelle made her final speech as first lady at the White House, saying “being your first lady has been the greatest honor of my life, and I hope I’ve made you proud.” In an emotional moment, she addressed young Americans:

“I want our young people to know that they matter, that they belong. So don’t be afraid. You hear me, young people? Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered. Empower yourself with a good education. Then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise. Lead by example with hope; never fear.”

In 2014, Barack and Michelle established the Obama Foundation that is overseeing the creation of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s South Side. The nonprofit also runs numerous programs aligned with its mission “to inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world.” Michelle is particularly involved with the foundation’s Girls Opportunity Alliance, which supports education for girls around the world.

On November 13, 2018, Michelle published her critically acclaimed memoir, Becoming . Describing the “deeply personal experience” of writing the book, she tweeted : “I talk about my roots and how a girl from the South Side found her voice. I hope my journey inspires readers to find the courage to become whoever they aspire to be.” In just 15 days, it became the best-selling book in the United States for the year 2018 and also became a bestseller in several other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, South Korea, and South Africa. In 2020, Michelle won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for the audiobook version of Becoming .

Michelle published a second book in 2022 called The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times . In it, Michelle shared the contents of what she described as her “personal toolbox,” including attitudes, habits, and practices used to overcome feelings of fear, helplessness, and uncertainty. In particular, it addressed the “low-grade form” of depression that gripped the nation during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Michelle premiered a podcast in 2020 called The Michelle Obama Podcast . Podcast critic Nicholas Quah of Vulture said it explored similar themes as the former first lady’s memoir Becoming , calling it entertaining and writing that he was “deeply moved and taken by its comforts, so parched am I for any modicum of moral leadership in the public sphere.” In March 2023, Michelle launched Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast , to accompany her book The Light We Carry .

In February 2024, the audiobook version of The Light We Carry earned Obama her second Grammy Award .

In May 2018, Michelle and Barack announced that they signed a multi-year deal to produce TV series and films for Netflix through their company, Higher Ground Productions. “Barack and I have always believed in the power of storytelling to inspire us, to make us think differently about the world around us,” the former First Lady said in a statement .

Their first joint effort resulted in Netflix’s release of American Factory (2019), a documentary about the 2015 launch of a Chinese-owned automotive glass factory in Dayton, Ohio, and the clash of differing cultures and business interests. A hit with critics, American Factory earned an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in February 2020. Michelle was an executive producer and presenter on the Netflix children’s cooking series Waffles + Mochi . Additionally , Netflix and Higher Ground Productions partnered on the documentary Becoming (2020), based upon Michelle’s memoir of the same name.

• Every day, the people I meet inspire me. Every day, they make me proud. Every day, they remind me how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on Earth. Serving as your first lady is an honor and a privilege.
• When I hear about negative and false attacks, I really don’t invest any energy in them, because I know who I am.
• Our motto is, when they go low, we go high.
• One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.
• I have the privilege of working on the issues that I choose and the issues that I feel most passionate about.
• These are the moments that define us—not the day you get the promotion, not the day you win teacher of the year, but the times that force you to claw and scratch and fight just to get through the day; the moments when you get knocked down and you’re wondering whether it’s even worth it to get back up. Those are the times when you’ve got to ask yourself, “Who am I going to be?”
• That’s what’s always made this country great—embracing the diversity of experience and opinion that surrounds us everywhere we go.
• The only difference between me and every other woman that I know is that my challenges are publicized, and I’m doing this juggling in front of cameras.
• We should always have three friends in our lives: one who walks ahead who we look up to and we follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journeys; and then, one who we reach back for and we bring along after we’ve cleared the way.
• People told me, ‘You can do it all. Just stay the course, get your education, and you can raise a child, stay thin, be in shape, love your man, look good, and raise healthy children.’ That was a lie.
• Exercise is really important to me—it’s therapeutic. So if I’m ever feeling tense or stressed or like I’m about to have a meltdown, I’ll put on my iPod and head to the gym or out on a bike ride along Lake Michigan with the girls.
• It would be hard for me to edit myself and still be me.
• We learned about dignity and decency—that how hard you work matters more than how much you make... that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself.
• As women, we must stand up for ourselves. As women, we must stand up for each other. As women, we must stand up for justice for all.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us !

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

Colin McEvoy joined the Biography.com staff in 2023, and before that had spent 16 years as a journalist, writer, and communications professional. He is the author of two true crime books: Love Me or Else and Fatal Jealousy . He is also an avid film buff, reader, and lover of great stories.

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What Can We Learn From Michelle Obama

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Leaders Are Learners

The Problem With Confidence

What Can We Learn From Michelle Obama?

As part of my ‘Leaders Are Learners’ series, I aim to inspire and challenge leaders to learn from others – both what to do and what not to do.

The leader I would like to highlight this week is Michelle Obama . I have started following her in the last few years after reading her autobiography Becoming. And it is great to see leadership textbooks mentioning her.

Her story is very inspiring, and she displays a variety of the key leadership traits that make leaders effective.

While you might be aware of her as the former First Lady of the USA, Michelle Obama is so much more than that.

How Michelle Obama represents the six key leadership traits (Northouse, 2020)

Determination.

…is one of the key leadership traits of great leaders, and Obama certainly possessed it.

She grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a modest neighbourhood where success was not handed on a silver platter. Her parents always wanted more for Michelle and her brother, which lead her to study hard.

Even though she was told she ‘wasn’t Princeton material’ she got accepted to study there and ended up graduating as a lawyer from Harvard Law School.

…is another key leadership trait. While Obama lacked in confidence to start with, as she got more experience as a lawyer, she grew more confident and realised corporate law wasn’t her final destination.

INTEGRITY & INTELLIGENCE

She was passionate about helping young people, and she showed INTEGRITY by taking a massive pay cut to do so. She worked at City Hall, was the executive of different programs that supported young people, and developed the first community service program for the University of Chicago.

Obama is also highly INTELLIGENT . After she had her daughters, she started a new job where she brought her baby to the interview – as a mother AND a professional.

Although she was not up for leaving her career behind when Barack ran for president, Michelle committed herself to her husband on the one hand. Yet, she also committed to taking the opportunity as the First Lady to make an impact on a larger scale.

She emphasized the support of military families and working mothers, and her goal was to end childhood obesity.

CHARISMA & SOCIABILITY

During the election campaign, Michelle played a crucial role. Her CHARISMA and SOCIABILITY got her the favour of many Americans. But these traits alone would not be enough. Obama portrayed integrity and confidence, which enable the people around her to be confident in themselves. Obama’s high levels of empathy* also contributed to her sociability and let people believe they were seen.

(* Empathy is not a trait but a skill that can be learned.)

Having looked at Michelle Obama’s leadership traits, we can conclude that she has displayed them well in her leadership. I can highly recommend reading (or listening to) her book and watch her Netflix documentary. There is a lot we can learn from Michelle Obama.

Hopefully, this encourages you to become the leader you want to be.

If you want to want to become a more effective leader, feel free to  contact  me or  book your free intro session here.

Happy Thursday,

P. S. You can find specific blog posts about the highlighted leadership traits.

Désirée Crawford

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Michelle Obama’s embodied authentic leadership: Leading by lifestyle

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According to the U.S. White House, Michelle Obama is described as lawyer, writer and mother. She has also been active in different leadership roles throughout her life, from being associate dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago, where she introduced a community service program, to launching the Let’s Move campaign against childhood obesity as…

Sep 18, 2019

According to the U.S. White House, Michelle Obama is described as lawyer, writer and mother. She has also been active in different leadership roles throughout her life, from being associate dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago, where she introduced a community service program, to launching the Let’s Move campaign against childhood obesity as first lady.

In her speech at the 2016 Democratic Convention, which climaxed with a standing ovation, the first lady talked about wanting a leader who gives people hope. Despite this particular concept not being applicable to every  situation communication specialists are confronted with , there are things to learn from the poised woman in regards to effective leadership.

Having achieved pop culture status Mrs Obama’s behaviours and approaches can be analysed to enable a better understanding of the qualities leaders should aspire to themselves:

1. Lead by example to reach goals

Don’t simply hold grand speeches, act upon them.  Focusing on results, according to data by McKinsey, is an important leadership quality that can motivate employees to work with high work ethic. Just as Michelle Obama lives the healthy lifestyle she promotes,  communication specialists and leaders need to prioritise  leading by example.

2. Be personable and allow people to identify with you

A leader who is relatable and amicable for employees will be more effective at fostering productive relationships, trust and feedback, a report by Forbes says. People can identify with the challenges Mrs Obama, coming from a south Chicago family, overcame to reach her goals by working hard to become a lawyer. By inspiring young people to pursue the completion of their education post high school and aim higher, the first lady adds a personable touch.

3. Keep your integrity, remain authentic and be supportive

Research by McKinsey suggests that effective leadership is found in being supportive, a trait Michelle Obama has continuously portrayed. Further added to this by Harvard Business Review is the idea that empowering employees to recognise the involvement of both employees and employers alike, and encouraging self-organising will achieve higher satisfaction and productivity.

4. Be confident in promoting growth

Praising growth, hard work and confidence when talking about the leader she envisions, the first lady incorporates what Harvard Business Review data highlights: that encouraging personal and professional growth can not only boost morale, but improve  overall team performance .

Having the responsibility to lead can be a daunting endeavour, yet adapting four simple qualities Michelle Obama has portrayed aptly can make a big difference in the realm of effective leadership.

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After Her Sister Wed at 11, a Girl Began Fighting Child Marriage at 13

Memory Banda’s battle, which she has been waging since she was a teenager in a village in Malawi, started with a poignant question: “Why should this be happening to girls so young?”

By Rabson Kondowe

Reporting from Ntcheu, Malawi

When they were children, Memory Banda and her younger sister were inseparable, just a year apart in age and often mistaken for twins. They shared not only clothes and shoes, but also many of the same dreams and aspirations.

Then, one afternoon in 2009, that close relationship shattered when Ms. Banda’s sister, at age 11, was forced to wed a man in his 30s who had impregnated her.

“She became a different person then,” Ms. Banda recalled. “We never played together anymore because she was now ‘older’ than me. I felt like I lost my best friend.”

Her sister’s pregnancy and forced marriage happened soon after her return from a so-called initiation camp.

In parts of rural Malawi, parents and guardians often send their daughters to these camps when they reach puberty, which Memory’s younger sister hit before she did. The girls stay at the camps for weeks at a time where they learn about motherhood and sex — or, more specifically, how to sexually please a man.

After her sister’s marriage, it dawned on Memory that she would be next, along with many of her peers in the village.

Strong feelings of resistance, she said, began stirring within her.

“I had so many questions,” she said, “like, ‘Why should this be happening to girls so young in the name of carrying on tradition?’”

It was a moment of awakening for the self-described “fierce child rights activist,” who, now 27, helped in a campaign that, in 2015, led Malawi to outlaw child marriage.

Despite the passage of the law against child marriage, enforcement has been weak, and it is still common for girls here to marry young. In Malawi, 37.7 percent of girls are married before the age of 18 and 7 percent are married before turning 15, according to a 2021 report from the country’s National Statistical Office.

The drivers of child marriage are multifaceted; poverty and cultural practices — including the longstanding tradition of initiation camps — are important components of the problem. When girls return from the camps, many drop out of school and quickly fall into the trap of early marriage.

In the past, almost every girl in certain rural areas of the country went to initiation camps, said Eunice M’biya, a lecturer in social history at the University of Malawi. “But this trend is slowly shifting in favor of formal education,” Ms. M’biya said.

Ms. Banda’s own grassroots activism began in 2010, when she was just 13, in her small village of Chitera in the district of Chiradzulu, in Malawi’s south.

Despite initial resistance from older women in her village, she rallied other girls in Chitera and became a leader in the local movement of girls saying no to the camps.

Her activism gained momentum when she crossed paths with the Girls Empowerment Network , a Malawi-based nonprofit that was lobbying lawmakers to address the issue of child marriage. It was also training girls in the Chiradzulu District to become advocates and urge their village chiefs to take a stance by enacting local ordinances to protect adolescent girls from early marriage and harmful sexual initiation practices.

Ms. Banda teamed up with the nonprofit on the “I will marry when I want” campaign, calling for the legal marriage age to be increased to 18 from 15. Other rights activists, parliamentarians, and religious and civil society leaders joined the ultimately successful battle.

Today, the Malawi Constitution defines any person below age 18 as a child.

Ms. Banda’s role in the push against the practice earned her a Young Activist award from the United Nations in 2019.

“Our campaign was very impactful because we brought together girls who told their stories through lived experience,” Ms. Banda said. “From there, a lot of people just wanted to be part of the movement and change things after hearing the depressing stories from the girls.”

Habiba Osman, a lawyer and prominent gender-rights advocate who has known Ms. Banda since she was 13, describes her as a trailblazer. “She played a very crucial role in mobilizing girls in her community, because she knew that girls her age needed to be in school,” she said. “What I like about Memory is that years later, after the enactment of the law, she’s still campaigning for the effective implementation of it.”

In 2019, with the support of the Freedom Fund, an international nonprofit dedicated to ending modern slavery, Ms. Banda founded Foundation for Girls Leadership to promote children’s rights and teach leadership skills to girls.

“I want children to understand about their rights while they are still young,” Ms. Banda said. “If we want to shape a better future, this is a group to target.”

Though her nonprofit is still in its infancy, it has already managed to help over 500 girls faced with child marriages to avoid that fate and stay in school or enroll again.

Last year she shared what she has been doing with Michelle Obama, Melinda French Gates and Amal Clooney during their visit to Malawi as part of the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s efforts to end child marriage.

“I’ve watched these three inspiring women from a world apart and just to be in their presence and talk to them was such a huge moment in my life,” Ms. Banda said. “I never thought I’d one day meet Michelle Obama.”

Ms. Banda was born in 1997 in Chitera. Her father died when she was 3, leaving her mother to raise two infant girls on her own.

Ms. Banda did well in school, knowing from an early age, she said, that learning was crucial for her future.

“My sister’s experience fueled the burning desire I had for education,” she said. “Whenever I was not in the first position in my class, I had to make sure that I had to be No. 1 in the next school term.”

Outspoken in class, her willingness to ask questions and express herself proved essential when her time came to go to the initiation camp. She refused.

“I simply said no because I knew what I wanted in life, and that was getting an education,” she said.

The women in Chitera labeled her as stubborn and disrespectful of their cultural values. She said she often heard comments like: “Look at you, you’re all grown up. Your little sister has a baby, what about you?” Ms. Banda recalled. “That was what I was dealing with every day. It was not easy.”

She found support from her teacher at primary school and from people at the Girls Empowerment Network. They helped convince her mother and aunts that she needed to be allowed to make her own decision.

“I was lucky,” Ms. Banda said. “I believe if the Girls Empowerment Network had come earlier in my community, things would have turned out different for my sister, as for my cousins, friends and many girls.”

Ms. Banda stayed in school, earning an undergraduate degree in development studies. She recently completed her master’s degree in project management.

She now works in Ntcheu, Malawi, with Save the Children International while running her own children’s rights nonprofit in Lilongwe. Malawi’s capital.

As much as she has accomplished, Ms. Banda is aware there is much left to do.

“Some of the girls that we have managed to pull out of early marriage, ended up getting back into those marriages because of poverty,” Ms. Banda said. “They have no financial support, and their parents cannot take care of them when they return home.”

She noted that child marriage is a multidimensional problem that requires a multidimensional solution of scholarships, economic opportunities, child protection structures at the community level and “changing the way families and communities view the problems,” she said.

Ms. Banda is currently lobbying Malawi’s Ministry of Gender to set up a “girls fund” to help provide economic opportunities to those most vulnerable to a childhood marriage.

For her sister, the first, forced marriage didn’t last. While now remarried to a man she chose as an adult, her childhood trauma disrupted her education and ended her ambitions of becoming a teacher.

Ms. Banda’s next move is to set up a vocational school for girls through her nonprofit, aimed at providing job skills to those like her sister unable to go beyond secondary school.

“All I want is for girls to live in an equal and safe society,” she said. “Is that too much to ask?”