Marian Robinson Passed Away!

Michelle Obama announced her mother's passing.

Former first lady Michelle Obama and former president Barack Obama announced the passing of Marian Shields Robinson, the president's mother-in-law.

Mrs. Robinson been with the Obamas throughout his term. She was a caretaker at the White House. She was a guiding force for Malia and Sasha, the Obamas daughters.

On election night 2008, as Barack Obama sat nervously in a Chicago hotel suite and awaited news on whether he would become the country’s first Black president, his mother-in-law was by his side.

“Are you ready for this, Grandma?” Obama asked Marian Shields Robinson, who years earlier had doubted that he and her daughter, Michelle, would last.

Six months, tops, she had predicted.

“Never one to overemote, my mom just gave him a sideways look and shrugged, causing them both to smile,” Michelle Obama wrote in her memoir, “Becoming.” “Later, though, she’d describe to me how overcome she’d felt right then, struck just as I’d been by his vulnerability. America had come to see Barack as self-assured and powerful, but my mother also recognized the gravity of the passage, the loneliness of the job ahead.”

She continued: “The next time I looked over, I saw that she and Barack were holding hands.”

Barack and Michelle wanted Mrs. Robinson to join them on their journey.

The union of Barack and Michelle Obama, the 20-something lawyers who met one summer while working at a Chicago law firm, endured and made history. In her own way, Mrs. Robinson would, too.

She died peacefully on Friday, the former first lady and her brother, Craig Robinson, and their families announced in a statement.

“There was and will be only one Marian Robinson,” they said. “In our sadness, we are lifted up by the extraordinary gift of her life. And we will spend the rest of ours trying to live up to her example.”

Besides being the mother of the nation’s first Black first lady, Mrs. Robinson was also unusual for being one of the few in-laws who lived at the White House with the president and his immediate family.

Until January 2009, Mrs. Robinson had lived her entire life in Chicago. She was a widow and in her early 70s when Obama was elected in 2008 and resisted the idea of starting over in Washington. President Obama said the family suggested she try Washington for three months before deciding. The first lady enlisted her brother to help persuade their mother to move.

Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson, former Oregon State coach mourn their mother's passing.

Marian was born in Chicago in 1937, the fourth of seven children—five girls, followed by two boys—born to Purnell Nathaniel Shields, a house painter and carpenter, and his wife Rebecca Jumper, a licensed practical nurse. Her parents later separated. Both parents had multi-racial ancestry. Her mother's grandfather, Dolphus T. Shields (c. 1860–1950), was a descendant of slavery, with his mother a slave and his white father the heir of the slaveowner; he had moved from rural Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama, where he established his own carpentry and tool sharpening business. His descendants would eventually move to Chicago during the Great Migration.

Shields married Fraser Robinson III on October 27, 1960, in Chicago. They had two children together, Craig Malcolm and Michelle LaVaughn, named after Fraser's mother. Fraser died from multiple sclerosis in 1991.

Robinson worked as a secretary for mail-order retailer Spiegel, the University of Chicago, and a bank. In the late 1960s, Shields lived with her family in a rented second floor apartment of a brick bungalow the South Side of Chicago that belonged to her aunt Robbie and her husband Terry. This is where she raised her two children, Michelle and Craig, and continued to live until she eventually moved to the White House with the Obamas. Michelle Obama, in her book Becoming, describes her mother's strong attachment to her Chicago home and her commitment to raising her children as a stay at home mother. Shields resumed work as an executive assistant at a bank when her daughter Michelle started high school.

Michelle described her mother as forthright and honest, and spoke of her implacability and her silent support as a child and beyond. Shields used to take her daughter Michelle to the library long before she started school and used to sit beside her as she learned to read and write. Usually the kind of mother who expected her children to settle their own disputes, Shields was quick to see real distress and stepped in to help when needed. For example, when Michelle was in second grade and was distressed because of being devalued by a teacher, Shields advocated for her and was instrumental in getting her daughter better learning opportunities at school. Shields encouraged her children to communicate with her about all subjects by being available when needed and giving practical advice. She entertained Michelle's school friends when they visited and enabled her to make her own choices in important matters.