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Michelle Obama
The South Side lawyer who became the most admired woman in America without ever running for office.
The rise
Michelle Robinson grew up in a one-bedroom apartment on Chicago's South Side, the daughter of a city water-plant worker with multiple sclerosis, and went from a magnet high school to Princeton and Harvard Law despite a counsellor's doubts. At the law firm Sidley Austin she mentored a summer associate named Barack Obama, then left corporate law for city government, Public Allies and the University of Chicago hospitals.
What they did
As First Lady she launched Let's Move! against childhood obesity, which helped pass the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, Joining Forces for military families and Let Girls Learn for girls' education abroad. Her memoir Becoming (2018) sold more than 17 million copies, and she left office with a 68 per cent approval rating, above her husband's.
The full picture
She was caricatured in 2008 as an 'angry Black woman' after saying she was proud of her country 'for the first time', and her school-lunch reforms were attacked as nanny-state overreach and partly rolled back. Her refusal to seek office frustrates admirers, and her post-White House ventures have drawn charges of cashing in on a public role.
Why it matters
Obama redefined a ceremonial post as a platform for policy and gave Black girls the image of a First Family that looked like them, an image many still treat as the high-water mark of American possibility.
“When they go low, we go high.”