Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Shields Robinson, is dead at 86. Her children, children-in-law, and grand-children remembered her in a joint statement. “She had a way of summing up the truths about life in a word or two, maybe a quick phrase that made everyone around her stop and think.”
She had been living with multiple sclerosis since the age of 30.
One of seven children, she grew up on Chicago’s South Side, where she later raised her family. She studied to become a teacher, but actually never graduated college. She worked as a secretary. In 1960 she married Fraser Robinson, who died in 1991, before her daughter Michelle even married Barack Obama. Her family stated that she was always there, very caring and supportive.
“On Election Night in 2008, when the news broke that Barack would soon shoulder the weight of the world, she was there, holding his hand,” the statement says. Later she moved into the White House and she was “the rock” of the family through it all. “Just show me how to work the washing machine and I’m good,” she’d say.
The former first lady always praised both her parents, “We were poor. We lived in a small house, but what they gave us was a feeling of importance, a belief that our voices mattered at a very young age, a sense of understanding, of pushing through, resilience.”
