“Many of you probably grew up like I did — in a community that wasn’t rich, not even middle class..” “In these kind of strong African American communities, we went to neighborhood schools around the corner. So many of us had to walk to and from school every day, rain or shine. I know you’ve told that story. (Laughter.) And in Chicago, where I was raised, we did it in the dead of winter. (Laughter.) No shoes on our feet — it was hard, but we walked! (Applause.)”
Hardly humble: Michelle’s childhood home in Chicago
“Michelle was from a middle-class family,” confirmed one of her long-time friends, Angela Acree.
“She came from a regular family. They had a nice home. It wasn’t a mansion, but it was just fine. It was a decent neighbourhood.”
No one could pretend they were rich and it is true that her father, Frasier Robinson, spent some time as a maintenance worker for Chicago’s Department of Water Management.
However, he was a good deal more than the labourer that many seem to imagine.
Indeed, according to family friends, Michelle’s father was a volunteer organiser for the city’s Democratic Party, a by-word for machine politics in America, and his loyalty was rewarded with a well-paid engineering job at Chicago’s water plant. Even before overtime, he earned $42,686 - 25 per cent more than High School teachers at the time.
“The dead of winter, with no shoes.” I heard her and she was joking, that is why they laughed. It was just like my mother telling me how poor things were when she was a girl. Going to Europe during the depression, then coming back and having to eat oatmeal for a month until her first teachers pay check came in. I wanted to laught, but I didn’t. Mom didn’t have much sense of humor about herself.