 |
Words by Terry Shropshire Images Courtesy of The Official White House Photostream |
 |
First lady Michelle Obama delivered an electrifying speech to graduates of the WMST High School about overcoming hate and self-doubt to become the next generation of pioneers, barrier breakers and history makers. See how Obama, who also emanated from humble urban origins to procure two Ivy League degrees, inspired the students [who have now entered college] to reach higher than they ever thought possible.
Long before Michelle LaVaughn Robinson would meet her husband and the future president of the United States, Barack Obama, she was already helplessly and madly in love. When she was just a young girl, the woman the nation would come to know as first lady Michelle Obama, became smitten with an inanimate object that held unlimited power: education. In fact, as Obama has repeatedly shared with students, her first love was so dynamic that it took her places so far beyond her wildest dreams that she still gets chills thinking about it. While speaking to a group of Washington, D.C., students, she disclosed that when she was younger, she couldn’t have envisioned even stepping onto the campus of the University of Chicago — even though it was located near her neighborhood. In her young eyes, the mammoth institution was meant for “other” people. Ironically, some years later, her education not only afforded her the opportunity to serve in a leadership capacity at that same university, but it would take her to an even higher plane.
“Nothing in my life’s path would’ve predicted that I would be standing here as the first African American first lady of the United States. There’s nothing in my story that would land me here,” Obama told London schoolgirls, during a recent trip to Europe. “By getting a good education, you can control your own destiny. Please understand this,” Obama added, emphasizing the words, then pausing to allow her plea to settle over the room. “If you want to know why I’m standing here — it’s because of education.”
While one might assume this advice from a mature woman who’s “already made it,” might be lost on a group of youngsters who live for Facebook updates and MTV reality shows, her feedback has been quite the contrary. Obama’s testimonial has nearly become viral amongst the Internet-friendly generation, as they exhibit a new brand of interest in an institution that was previously typecast as the enemy. Struck by Obama’s enthusiasm and candor, they sit erect and wide-eyed, like campers around a campfire, to hear the story of the first lady’s first love.
EDUCATION: THE FORBIDDEN LOVE
“I wasn’t raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of. I was raised on the South Side of Chicago — that’s the real part of Chicago. And I was the product of a working-class community. My father was a city worker. And my mother was a stay-at-home mom … but we were raised with all that we needed, [knowing] that with love, good values, a good education and hard work that there was nothing that we could not do,” Obama once shared, explaining how education became such a priority for her.
That ideology certainly didn’t steer young Michelle wrong, but it wasn’t always accepted. Obama admits that her love of learning often led to her being ridiculed in grade school. Her classmates told her that she and education weren’t right for each other, that people on her side of town couldn’t be seen embracing education the way she did. Michelle’s proper pronunciation of the English language caused her ignorant adversaries to make the foolish accusation that she was “talking white.”
While it’s not hard to imagine that many of the accusations stung little Michelle a bit, she wasn’t deterred. She was in love and not even a crowbar could pry her and education apart. When the first lady visited Anacostia High School in southeast Washington, the most impoverished area in the District, a student asked, “How did you get to where you are now?” Obama answered that her success and status in life was due, in part, to her mastery of the English language.
“I didn’t care [if speaking correctly] was cool because I remember there were kids around my neighborhood who would say, ‘Ooh, you talk funny. You talk like a white girl.’ I heard that growing up my whole life. I was like, ‘I don’t even know what that means but I am still getting my ‘A.’ ”
EMBRACE EDUCATION DESPITE HATERS AND SELF-DOUBT
In May, Obama delivered a riveting address to the graduating class of Washington Mathematics Science Technical Public Charter High School.A few years ago, Newsweek named the school — which is predominantly black — one of the top 100 high schools in the country. Students at WMST are graduating at a rate of 99 percent and attending post-secondary schools including Georgetown, Virginia, Kansas State and Howard University.
A public magnet school graduate herself, the first lady began to cry as she spoke to the students at WMST. She implored the soon-to-be college attendees to drown out the voices of hate and self-doubt.
“For me, the voices came from people who told me, ‘Don’t bother applying to Princeton. Not a school like that.’ They said I would never get in. And then when I got in, they told me that I couldn’t compete against students who would be more prepared. And then when I decided to attend, they told me that I shouldn’t go to school so far away from home because I would have a hard time making friends. I would feel out of place. I wouldn’t make it through. [These were] voices from people sowing seeds of doubt in my head,” she explained. “And now that I look back — despite my confident exterior, because all of you have it and I was confident too — there was a part of me that started believing doubters. There was [a] part of me that began to doubt my own abilities and to ignore my own truth, what I knew to be true about me.”
In the end, Obama said, it really didn’t even matter. Once she gathered the gumption to evict the negativity that was renting space in her head, she rocketed to her new beginning.
WHAT EDUCATION CAN DO
Through her scrupulous and meticulous attentiveness to education, Obama received full scholarships to Princeton University and Harvard Law School — a scholastic feat by any standard. Strong, focused and resilient, the future attorney completed both degrees and returned home to Chicago to further her career at Sidley Austin, a job that would change her life forever. There, she’d meet, hire, train, date, and fall in love with the fiercely ambitious Harvard Law graduate with a “funny name,” Barack Obama, who’d later become her husband and the father of her adorable daughters, Sasha and Malia.
Needless to say, no one from her old Chicago neighborhood or school is criticizing her diction today. As would be plainly laid out for the world to witness, digest and appreciate, education was the single most powerful social engine that Obama used to catapult herself from her humble house on the South Side of Chicago to the most powerful house in the world — the White House.
Historically speaking, young Michelle LaVaughn Robinson’s journey to the White House defies all kinds of logic, percentages, racial conventions and political “wisdom.” As she’s said many times, she wasn’t the product of a political dynasty or aristocratic family that spanned generations. Her maiden name wasn’t Kennedy or Churchill or Roosevelt or Rockefeller or even Bush. She knew no one of power. All Obama knew was education. And that changed everything.
MAKING EDUCATION COOL:
Now, the first lady hopes to ensure that other budding scholars have the same experience with learning. Leveraging her rock-star status to make education cool to millions of people, she put the U.S. Department of Education at the top of her public agenda. “I’m a product of your work,” Obama said in her first advocacy press conference, accompanied by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “Imagine what we can do with millions of dollars more [in] investment in this area. … We can expand opportunities in low-income districts for all students, particularly for students with disabilities.”
Since that statement, Obama has been on the road, sharing her story with the young people whose lives she hopes to impact.
At the May WMST graduation, she offered a vision of success to the graduates, who no doubt felt like she and countless others did just before they set out for the new beginning a good education promises.
Imploring the scholars to succeed despite pervasive stereotypes about blacks and education, she referenced current Supreme Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic to serve in that role. Also a Princeton undergrad, like Michelle Obama, and a Harvard Law grad, like both Obamas, Sotomayor felt like an “alien who landed in a foreign land” during her first year at Princeton, refusing to raise her hand or ask any questions her first semester. Eventually, Obama said, Sotomayor realized that she was ready. “Sotomayor was more than ready, I was more than ready. And President Barack Obama was certainly more than ready,” Obama said. “So to all you graduates, you are more than ready to assume the mantle of leadership and become the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs and legends. So you know what, it’s time to step up. Step up. It’s time. No excuses. No excuses. Your future today is in your own hands. With education, the doors of opportunity are so wide open to you. Nothing is standing in your way.”
