What a blessing to have lived long enough to see Michelle Obama’s time as First Lady. For a black man Barack Obama’s age (who acquired AIDS in the 80s), seeing the first black First Lady has been a dream come true.
If Barack Obama is Jackie Robinson, Michelle Obama is Jackie Kennedy.
Beauty. Grace. Poise. But those things don’t make a great woman. A great woman makes those things work for her. And those things work for Michelle Obama because she’s the deal real. She’s authentic. She’s the best First Lady ever!
Like her husband, Michelle is straight out of central casting, had all the African Americans who ever lived got together at a convention and decided to dream up the first black American president and his First Lady.
We couldn’t have dreamt of a better First Black Couple and our dreams came true.
Of course, President Obama couldn’t have come into power at a worse time, what with the multiple wars, the financial collapse, the housing crisis, the 40-year decline of the middle class, thanks to the gilded oligarchs winning back power from New Deal Democrats by using race as the bait, etc.
That’s one of the reasons Obama was elected. The country was desperate enough (and open minded enough) to put its fate in the hands of a black man!
But that black man could have been the wrong black man for the job of being the first President of United States of America who happens to be black. That black man may not have had a strong black wife who was his equal and who could handle such a tremendous job, that of being the wife and partner of the first black president of the United States of America.
The Obamas could have been sloppy, riddled with personal scandals, surrounded by rumors of affairs and discord.
The Obama kids could’ve been cut-ups, druggies, adolescents out of control.
We’re a few months shy of President Obama’s eight years in the White House. There’s been no scandal. No Whitewater. No Watergate. No parade of women in and out of the White House with only the press in the know. No going to war under false pretenses. No selling arms in exchange for hostages. No alienating the Western world, our allies. No starting any wars. No cum stained dresses. No not taking care of Osama Bin Laden. No albatross that’s going to hang over his administration and distract from his many accomplishments.
Sure, sure, the first black commander-in-chief and his First Lady have their detractors, so did Jackie Robinson. What, you think the minute #42 hit a couple of home runs and stole home plate, all those hateful, ignorant white people came around to seeing Jackie and other blacks as a good thing for baseball?
A library in Long Beach, California, is being renamed for Michelle Obama. That’s only the beginning of a long list of edifices that will bear the names Barack and/or Michelle Obama.
What Mrs. Obama has done for girls — encouraging them to empower themselves and follow their own dreams — will reverberate for generations. So too, will her efforts to get kids to move and think about what they’re eating.
Michelle Obama has become a bigger role model for young black girls then even Oprah Winfrey.
The First Lady’s appearance on the popular television skit carpool karaoke and her moving speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention are just two of the recent examples of her knocking it out of the park like no other First Lady in history.
Someday, future generations will celebrate Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama the way current generations celebrate Jacqueline Kennedy.
They’re going to display in museums what Mrs. Obama wore. They’re going to talk about how she raised her children well and how she was her husband’s equal, but they’re also going to recognize Michelle as a brilliant mind in her own right and possibly a bigger influence than even her husband.
She’s already halfway there.
Randy Boyd author 