Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama’s mother and an anchor of the Obama family who moved into the White House and provided stability for her two granddaughters as the young family adjusted to Washington, died Friday. She was 86.
Her death was announced in a statement by Michelle Obama, former President Barack Obama and other members of the family. Hannah Hankins, a spokesperson for Barack Obama, said Robinson died Friday in Chicago, the city where she was born, but did not give a cause of death. Hankins said that funeral services were being arranged.
Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Robinson was known as a loving, down-to-earth matriarch who became an emotional ballast for her daughter and granddaughters, Malia and Sasha, but also for Barack Obama, who had rocketed to political superstardom and whose family, at times, had to scramble to keep up.
When Barack Obama became the first Black man to win the presidency in November 2008, he sat and watched the returns alongside his mother-in-law. Their hands were clutched together as they watched their family’s future change alongside the course of American history.
But Robinson stayed much the same. “Just show me how to work the washing machine and I’m good,” she said after moving to the White House, the Obamas said in their statement Friday.
According to the family statement— which was signed by Michelle and Barack Obama as well as Michelle’s brother Craig Robinson and his wife, Kelly, along with the couples’ children— Robinson was never fully comfortable with the trappings of the White House, and much preferred to take her dinner on a TV tray in her third-floor suite in the White House residence. (“The only guest she made a point of asking to meet was the pope,” the family said.) Robinson’s survivors include Michelle and Barack Obama, Craig and Kelly Robinson, and six grandchildren. Her husband, Fraser Robinson III, died in 1991.
Robinson’s move to Washington, in January 2009, was said at first to be temporary to help her daughter and granddaughters adjust. At the time, she was hesitant to commit to a life in a new city, inside an isolating bubble, but even as she resisted, she revealed some of the resolve, and the wry sense of humor— that she had worked to instill in her children.
“In the end, in the end, I’ll do whatever,” she told reporters at the time. “I might fuss a little, but I’ll be there.”
Indeed, in the end, Robinson resided in that suite for most of the eight years Obama was in office. While in Washington, she continued many of the duties she had started during the first Obama presidential campaign, which included enforcing bedtimes for her granddaughters, running their baths and making sure they got to school on time. She eventually adjusted, attending events at the Kennedy Center, hosting friends from Chicago and, only occasionally, hiring a babysitter to help watch the girls.
“We needed her,” the family said. “The girls needed her. And she ended up being our rock through it all.”
To her daughter, Robinson had long been a model for stability and support. In her memoir, “Becoming,” Michelle Obama wrote that she had wanted to be both a career woman— her idol in that department was Mary Tyler Moore’s ambitious, eponymous TV character— and a “perfect” mother, like her own had been.
“I had so much— an education, a healthy sense of self, a deep arsenal of ambition,” the former first lady wrote. “And I was wise enough to credit my mother, in particular, with instilling it in me.”
Marian Lois Shields Robinson was born July 29, 1937, in Chicago. Her father, Purnell Shields, had moved to Chicago in the 1920s from Alabama to escape the Jim Crow South, and her mother, Rebecca Jumper, was a nursing aide. As a young woman, “she fell quickly and madly in love with Fraser Robinson, another South Sider with a boxer’s strength and jazz lover’s cool,” the family said. The Robinsons were married in 1960. Craig Robinson was born in 1962, and Michelle followed in 1964.
The Robinsons raised their two children in a second-floor apartment on the South Side’s Euclid Avenue, where they interacted with a rotating cast of extended family members, including a great-aunt who taught piano and lived in the first-floor apartment. Michelle Obama said her mother and her other family members, including her protective older brother, shielded her from much of the tumult and civil rights protests that roiled Chicago and much of the nation in the late 1960s. Instead, the future first lady grew up peacefully, listening to the clinking of piano keys rising from the floor below.
Robinson, her family said, “volunteered for the PTA and taught her children to read at an early age, sitting together as they sounded out words on a page, giving them the strength and confidence to walk to school, and out into the world— all on their own.”
When young Michelle was in elementary school, Robinson quietly asked for her daughter to be moved into a gifted third-grade class, a small work of advocacy that Michelle Obama later said helped change the course of her life.
As the Robinson children grew into adults, they said, she offered her full support, whether Craig Robinson “decided to leave a lucrative finance job to pursue his dream of coaching basketball,” or “when Michelle married a guy crazy enough to go into politics.”