Of course all things Obama are very popular with Black Folks right now, so there are lots of Barack related emails forwards going around in African American circles. Here’s an email forward comparing Michelle Obama’s background to other First Ladies.

Subject: “Look at the First Lady’s backgrounds compared to Michelle Obama’”

Michelle Obama

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama was born January 17, 1964 in Chicago, Illinois to Frasier Robinson, who died in 1990), a city water plant employee and Democratic precinct captain, and Marian Robinson, a secretary at Spiegel’s catalog store.

Michelle grew up in the South Shore community area of Chicago. She was raised in a conventional two-parent home where the family convened around the dinner table nightly.

She and her brother, Craig who is 16 months older, skipped the second grade.

Michelle graduated from Whitney Young Magnet High School in 1981and went on to major in sociology and minor in African American studies at Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude with an Artium Baccalaureus in 1985.

She obtained her Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.

Following law school, she was an associate at the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin.

At the firm, she worked on marketing and intellectual property.

She met Barack Obama when they were the only two African Americans at their law firm and she was assigned to mentor him while he was a summer associate.

The couple’s first date was to the Spike Lee movie Do The Right Thing in 1989. The couple married in October 1992, and they have two daughters, Malia Ann (born 1999) and Natasha (known as Sasha) born 2001.

Subsequently, she held public sector positions in the Chicago city government as an Assistant to the Mayor and Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development.

In 1993, she became Executive Director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit organization encouraging young people to work on social issues in nonprofit groups and government agencies.

In 1996, Michelle served as the Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago, where she developed the University’s Community Service Center.

In 2002, she began working for the University of Chicago Hospitals, first as executive director for community affairs and, beginning May, 2005, as Vice President for Community and External Affairs.

She served as a salaried board member of TreeHouse Foods, Inc. a major Wal-Mart supplier with whom she cut ties immediately after her husband made comments critical of Wal-Mart at an AFL-CIO forum in Trenton, New Jersey, on May 14, 2007.

She serves on the board of directors of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Her brother Craig is now Brown University’s men’s basketball coach.

Laura Bush

Laura Lane Welch Bush was born November 4, 1946.

In 1963 Laura was involved in a car accident when she ran a stop sign and crashed into another car, killing a friend and classmate, Michael Dutton Douglas, alleged to have been her boyfriend, who was driving the other car.

Welch earned a Bachelor of Science degree in education in 1968 from Southern Methodist University in Dallas where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta.

After graduating, she became a school teacher at Longfellow Elementary School in Dallas Independent School District until 1969.

She then taught for 3 years at John F. Kennedy Elementary School, a Houston Independent School District school in Houston, until 1972.

She then attained a Master of Science degree in Library Science in 1973 from the University of Texas at Austin.

She was employed as a librarian at the Kashmere Gardens Branch at the Houston Public Library until 1974, when she moved back to Austin.

She was a librarian at an Austin Independent School District school, Dawson Elementary School until 1977.

Laura Welch met George W. Bush in 1977.

In 1981, she gave birth to twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna. The twins graduated from high school in 2000 and from Yale University and the University of Texas at Austin, respectively, in 2004.

Hillary Clinton

Hillary Diane Rodham was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois on October 26, 1947.

Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was a son of Welsh and English immigrants and operated a small but successful business in the textile industry. Her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell, of English, Scottish, French Canadian, and Welsh descent, was a homemaker.

She helped canvass South Side Chicago following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election.

She attended Maine East High School.

For her senior year she was redistricted to Maine South High School.

Hillary became president of the Wellesley Young Republicans. She even volunteered as a Goldwater girl supporting a man who didn’t not support the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Hillary then attended the “Wellesley in Washington ” summer program at the urging of Professor Alan Schechter, who assigned Rodham to intern at the House Republican Conference.

Hillary entered Yale Law School

Rodham was invited by Representative Charles Goodell, a New York Republican, to help Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s late-entry campaign for the Republican nomination.

Rodham attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami .

Hillary threw her support in 1968 behind Democrat Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign.

Hillary rebuked African American Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts , who had criticized “coercive protest.”
Brooke was the first and only African American senator post reconstuction in the senate at that time.

In the summer of 1970, she was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman’s Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale’s Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, researching migrant workers’ problems in housing, sanitation, health and education.

In the late spring of 1971, she began dating Bill Clinton, who was also a law student at Yale.

During Bill Clinton’s study at Yale, Bill Clinton took a job with the McGovern campaign and was assigned to lead McGovern’s effort in Texas .

Rodham followed Bill Clinton to campaign in Texas for unsuccessful 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.

Hillary did not support the women who ran for president in 1972.

On January 23, 1972, Shirley Chisholm became the first major party African American candidate for President of the United States. She won 162 delegates. Other women who ran for President of the United States in 1972 include Linda Jenness and Evelyn Reed
Hillary received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale in 1973,having spent an extra year there in order to be with Bill Clinton.

During 1974 she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington , D.C. , advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal.

Democratic political organizer and consultant Betsey Wright had moved from Texas to Washington the previous year to help guide her career and Wright thought Rodham had the potential to one day become a senator or president.

Hillary passed the Arkansas bar exam.

Hillary failed the District of Columbia bar exam.

Most likely because she did not pass the Washington DC bar exam she took her options to Arkansas instead fo remaining in DC or returning to the Chicagoland area or Massachusetts where she had attended undergrad or Connecticut.

When Bill Clinton graduated from law school in 1973, Bill Clinton returned to Arkansas to teach law at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville .

Hillary followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, rather than staying in Washington where career prospects were best.

In August 1974, Hilllary moved to Fayetteville , Arkansas , and became one of two female faculty members at the University of Arkansas , Fayetteville School of Law,where Bill Clinton also taught.

The couple bought a house in Fayetteville in the summer of 1975 Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton were married on October 11, 1975.

In 1974, Bill Clinton ran for the House of Representatives.

Hillary begins her professional career

In 1976, Bill Clinton was elected Attorney General of Arkansas without opposition in the general election.

In 1976 Hillary did campaign coordination work in Indiana for Jimmy Carter.

Hillary Rodham Clinton joined the venerable Rose Law Firm, a bastion of Arkansan political and economic influence, in February 1977.

Hillary then co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a state-level alliance with the Children’s Defense Fund, in 1977.

In late 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the board of directors of the Legal Services Corporation, and she served in that capacity from 1978 through the end of 1981.

Bill Clinton, at the age of 32, was elected the youngest governor in the country in 1978.

Following the November 1978 election of her husband as Governor of Arkansas, Hillary became First Lady of Arkansas in January 1979, her title for a total of 12 years (1979–1981, 1983–1992).

Bill Clinton appointed her chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee the same year.

In 1979,s Hillary Clinton became a full partner of Rose Law Firm. From 1978 until they entered the White House, she had a higher salary than her husband.

The Rose Law firm, “the ultimate establishment law firm in Arkansas , during the 1970s had clients that included: Tyson Foods and Wal-Mart.

On February 27, 1980, Hillary Clinton gave birth to a daughter, Chelsea, her only child. In November 1980, Bill Clinton was defeated in his bid for re-election.

Hillary Clinton chaired the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee from 1982 to 1992 while being First Lady of Arkansas.

Hillary earned less than all the other partners, due to fewer hours being billed, but still made over $200,000 in her final year there.

Clinton served on the boards of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Legal Services (1988–1992)and the Children’s Defense Fund (as chair, 1986–1992), while being First Lady of Arkansas.

Hillary held positions on the corporate board of directors of TCBY (1985–1992), Wal-Mart Stores (1986–1992)and Lafarge (1990–1992).

TCBY and Wal-Mart were Arkansas-based companies that were also clients of Rose Law.

Hillary Clinton was the first female member on Wal-Mart’s board, added when chairman Sam Walton was pressured to name one.

When Bill Clinton took office as president in January 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton became the First Lady of the United States .

In 1993, the president appointed his wife to head and be the chairwoman of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform.

First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001.

Clinton won the election on November 7, 2000, with 55 percent of the vote to Lazio’s 43 percent. She was sworn in as United States Senator on January 3, 2001. This is her first time in elected office ever.

Barbara Bush

Barbara Pierce Bush was born June 8, 1925. She was the child of Pauline Robinson and Marvin Pierce , who later became president of McCall Corporation, the publisher of the popular women’s magazines Redbook and McCall’s. She was born at Booth Memorial Hospital in Flushing, Queens in New York City, and raised in the suburban town of Rye, New York.

Barbara is related to Franklin Pierce, the 14th president of the United States. She is a direct descendant, great-great-granddaughter, of James Pierce, Jr. who was a fourth cousin of President Pierce.

Barbara attended Rye Country Day School from 1931 to 1937 and later boarding school at Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina from 1940 to 1943.

Her mother was killed in a car accident in September 1949.

She met George Herbert Walker  Bush, a student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, at age 16 during a dance over Christmas vacation.

One and a half years later, the two engaged, just before he went off to World War II as a Navy torpedo bomber pilot.

He named three of his planes after her: Barbara, Barbara II, and Barbara III.

When he returned on leave, she had dropped out of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Two weeks later, on January 6, 1945, they married.

He graduated from Yale University following the end of the war and they soon moved to Midland, Texas where he gave birth to 6 children.

Nancy Reagan

Nancy Davis Reagan (born Anne Frances Robbins) was born on July 6, 1921 at Manhattan’s Sloane Hospital for Women in New York, the only child of car salesman Kenneth Seymour Robbins  and his actress wife, Edith Luckett

Nancy lived for her first 2 years in Flushing, Queens in New York. While her parents divorced soon after her birth, they had already been separated for some time.

As her mother traveled the country to pursue acting jobs, Nancy was raised in Bethesda, Maryland for the next 6years by her aunt Virginia and uncle Audley Gailbraith.

In 1929, her mother married Loyal Davis, a prominent, politically conservative neurosurgeon who moved the family to Chicago.

Loyal Davis formally adopted Nancy in 1935.  After the adoption, her name was legally changed to Nancy Davis (since birth, she had commonly been called Nancy).

She attended the Girls’ Latin School of Chicago and graduated in 1939, and later attended Smith College in Massachusetts, where she majored in English and drama and graduated in 1943.

Following her graduation, Davis held jobs in Chicago as a sales clerk in Marshall Field’s department store and as a nurse’s aide.

With the help of her mother’s colleagues in theatre, including Zasu Pitts, Walter Huston, and Spencer Tracy, she pursued a career as a professional actress.

She first gained a part in Pitts’ 1945 road tour of Ramshackle Inn, then settled in New York City. She landed the role of Si-Tchun, a lady-in-waiting, in the 1946 Broadway musical about the Orient, Lute Song, starring Mary Martin and Yul Brynner, after the show’s producer told her, “You look like you could be Chinese.”

After passing a screen test, she signed a 7-year contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios (MGM) in 1949.

Davis appeared in 11 feature films, usually typecast as a “loyal housewife”, “responsible young mother”, or “the steady woman”. She kept her professional name as Nancy Davis even after marrying.

During her career, she served on the board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild for nearly 10 years.

During her career as an actress, Nancy Davis dated actors in Hollywood and she later called Clark Gable.

On November 15, 1949, she met Ronald Reagan, who was then president of the Screen Actors Guild. Concerned that she would be confused with another actress of the same name who appeared on the Hollywood blacklist, she contacted Reagan to help maintain her employment as a guild actress in Hollywood, and for assistance in having her name removed from the list.

She would get pregnant by Ronald Reagan. They married on March 4, 1952 in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.  The couple’s first child, Patricia Ann Reagan (better known by Patti Davis), was born on October 21, 1952. Their son, Ronald Prescott Reagan, was born 6 years later on May 20, 1958.

Nancy Reagan also became stepmother to Maureen Reagan and Michael Reagan, the children of her husband’s first marriage to Jane Wyman.

Rosalynn Carter

Eleanor Rosalynn Smith Carter, known as Rosalynn, was born August 18, 1927 in Plains, Georgia of Frances Allethea Murray, a dressmaker, and Edgar Smith, an automobile mechanic and farmer. 

Her father died of leukemia when she was 13 and she helped her mother raise her younger siblings as well as assist her dressmaking in order to meet the family’s financial needs. She graduated as valedictorian of Plains High School and then attended Georgia Southwestern College.

Although they had known each other earlier, Rosalynn Smith first dated Jimmy Carter in 1945 while he was at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. On July 7, 1946, they married in Plains.

The couple had 4 children: John William “Jack” born 1947, James Earl “Chip” III born 1950, Donnel Jeffery “Jeff” born 1952, and Amy Lynn born 1967. The first three were born in different parts of the country and away from Georgia, due to her husband’s military duties.

In 1953, after her husband left the Navy, she helped him run the family peanut farming and warehousing business, handling the accounting responsibilities.

Since 1962, the year Jimmy Carter was elected to the Georgia State Senate, Rosalynn has been active in the political arena.

As First Lady of Georgia, Rosalynn was appointed to the Governor’s Commission to Improve Services for the Mentally and Emotionally Handicapped. The Commission presented recommendations to Governor Carter, many of which were approved and then became law. Rosalynn also served as a volunteer at the Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia and for five years was honorary chairperson for the Georgia Special Olympics for Mentally Challenged Children.

During the months she was campaigning across the country, Rosalynn was elected to the board of directors of the National Association of Mental Health and she was honored by the National Organization for Women with an Award of Merit for her vigorous support for the Equal Rights Amendment; and she received the volunteer of the Year Award from the Southwestern Association of Volunteer Services.

She is currently a global human rights activist and co-chair of the Carter Center.

An important project to Mrs. Carter personally is the Rosalynn Carter Institute (RCI) at Georgia Southwestern State University in Americus, Georgia, her alma mater, of which she is Chair. The RCI was established in 1987 and works to address issues related to care giving in America.

Betty Ford

Elizabeth Ann Bloomer Warren Ford was born April 8, 1918 in Chicago as Elizabeth Ann Bloomer of William Stephenson Bloomer, Sr., a traveling salesman for Royal Rubber Co., and his wife, the former Hortense Neahr. After living briefly in Denver, she grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she graduated from Central High School.

After the 1929 stock market crash, when Betty Bloomer was 11, she began modeling clothes and teaching other children dances such as the foxtrot, waltz, and big apple. She studied dance at the Calla Travis Dance Studio, graduating in 1935.

When she was 16 her father, a complete alcoholic, died by carbon monoxide poisoning, reportedly while working on the family car in the his garage, whether it was an accident or suicide remains unknown.

In 1933, after she graduated from high school, she proposed continuing her study of dance in New York, but her mother refused. Instead, Betty attended the Bennington School of Dance in Bennington, Vermont, for two summers, where she studied under Martha Graham and Hanya Holm.

After being accepted by Graham as a student, Betty Bloomer moved to New York City’s borough of Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and worked as a fashion model for the John Robert Powers firm in order to finance her dance studies. She joined Graham’s auxiliary troupe and eventually performed with the company at Carnegie Hall.

Her mother, now remarried to Arthur Meigs Godwin, opposed her daughter’s choice of a career and insisted that she move home, but Bloomer resisted. They finally came to a compromise: she would return home for 6months, and if nothing worked out for her in New York, she would return to Michigan, which she did in 1941. 

She became the fashion coordinator for a local department store. She also organized her own dance group and taught dance at various sites in Grand Rapids, including to children with disabilities.

In 1942, Bloomer married William G. Warren, a furniture salesman, whom she had known since she was twelve. She and her husband, who soon began selling insurance, moved frequently because of his work. At one point they lived in Toledo, Ohio, where she was employed as a demonstrator at Lasalle & Koch, a department store, a job that entailed being a model and saleswoman. They had no children and divorced on September 22, 1947, on the grounds of incompatibility.

On October 15, 1948, Elizabeth Bloomer Warren married Gerald R. Ford Jr., a lawyer and World War II veteran, at Grace Episcopal Church, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Ford was then campaigning for what would be his first of 13 terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

She was open about the benefits of psychiatric treatment, she spoke understandingly about marijuana use and premarital sex.

She supported the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and lobbied state legislatures to ratify the amendment, and took on opponents of the amendment. She was also and activist for the legalization of abortion.

Weeks after Betty Ford became First Lady, she underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer on September 28, 1974.   Her openness about her illness raised the visibility of a disease that Americans had previously been reluctant to talk about.

After her husband’s defeat in the 1976 Presidential election she delivered his historic concession speech. She conceded the election to Jimmy Carter after Jerry lost his voice campaigning.

In 1978, the Ford family staged an intervention and forced her to confront her alcoholism and an addiction to opioid analgesics that had been prescribed in the early 1960s for a pinched nerve. “I liked alcohol,” she wrote in her 1987 memoir. “It made me feel warm. And I loved pills. They took away my tension and my pain”.

She is the founder and former chairwoman of the board of directors of the Betty Ford Center for substance abuse and addiction and a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal.

Betty Ford continues to live in Rancho Mirage, California. At the age of 89, she is the oldest surviving former occupant of the White House.

Pat Nixon

Thelma Catherine Ryan “Pat” Nixon was born March 16, 1912  and died June 22, 1993.

Thelma Catherine Ryan was born in the small mining town of Ely, Nevada.

After her birth, the Ryan family moved near Los Angeles, California, and in 1914, settled on a small truck farm in Artesia (present-day Cerritos).

During this time she worked on the family farm and also at a local bank as a janitor and bookkeeper. Her mother died of cancer in 1924.

Pat, who was 12 at the time, assumed all the household duties for her father, who died in 1929 of silicosis, and two older brothers, William Jr. (1910–1997) and Thomas (1911–1992). She also had a half-sister, Neva Bender (born 1909), and a half-brother, Matthew Bender (born 1907), from her mother’s first marriage

After graduating from Excelsior High School in 1929, Pat Ryan attended Fullerton Junior College. She paid for her education by working odd jobs, including as a driver, a pharmacy manager, and a typist. She also earned money sweeping the floors of a local bank, and from 1930 until 1932, she lived in New York City, working as a secretary and an X-ray technician.

She worked her way through the University of Southern California, where she majored in merchandising.  Ryan held part-time jobs on campus, worked as a sales clerk in Bullock’s-Wilshire department store, taught typing and shorthand at a high school, and supplemented her income by working as an extra in the film industry.

In 1937, Pat Ryan graduated cum laude from USC and accepted a position as a high school teacher in Whittier, California.

While in Whittier, Pat Ryan met a young lawyer fresh out of Duke University, Richard Milhous Nixon.  Eventually they married at the Mission Inn in Riverside, California on June 21, 1940.

While Richard Nixon served in the Navy during World War II, Pat worked as a government economist living in San Francisco.

While fielding ideas for a project as First Lady, Pat Nixon decided to continue what she called “personal diplomacy.”

One of her major initiatives as First Lady was volunteerism, encouraging Americans to address social problems on the local level through volunteering at hospitals, civic organizations, rehabilitation centers, and other outlets; she also was an advocate of the Domestic Services Volunteer Act of 1970.

She suffered two strokes within ten years of returning to California and was later diagnosed with lung cancer. She died in 1993.