Michelle Obama

In an effort to get to know the new President and his wife, I'm reading the book "michelle" a biography by liza mundy. I am half way through. I am enjoying reading about Chicago from a historical perspective and Michelle Obama's family, her high school and college education at Princeton.

I ran across a good paragraph in the book regarding the discrimination Michelle experienced at Princeton.

"For the most part, her classmates' families had not sent their children to Princeton because they believed in diversity and inclusion. One of her new roommates, Catherine Donnelly, was a white woman from New Orleans whose mother, Alice Brown, had taken a job at a private school so her daughter could go there and increase her chances of getting into a good college. For Catherine, daughter of a single mom, Princeton was a much-worked-for achievement, as it was for Michelle. But when Alice Brown found that her daughter had been assigned to room with a black girl, she spent the night calling alumni friends and everybody she knew on campus, trying to get her daughter's rooming assignment changed.

"Mom just blew a gasket when I described Michelle," Catherine Donnelly, now a lawyer practicing in Palmetto, Georgia, would acknowledge later. "It was my secret shame." Both Donnelly and Brown would later give newspaper interviews, inspired by the candidacy of Barack Obama to engage in a public discussion of race. Brown would experess her contrition and confirm that indeed, the joke had been on her. Here she was trying to protect her daughter from the influence of a young woman who would grow up to be a potential first lady. She said she regretted it."

michelle a biography by liza mundy 2008 simon & schuster new york, ny

I also have the book The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama and I'm going to read that one next.