I'll be honest: Although I've long respected Michelle Obama's emphasis on public health and being intentional about inviting people of color to the White House, I never paid much attention to her efforts to do that through gardening. I didn’t give it much more than a skim of an article or a few seconds of pause between changing TV channels. In doing so, I missed something special in her work and that of the women who came before her.
“This garden has taught us that if we have the courage to plant a seed, we never know what might grow,” the former first lady said in video explaining the intention behind a fruit and vegetable garden planned for the Obama Presidential Center.
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The garden, one of a few planned for the center, will mimic a plot Michelle Obama planted during her White House tenure as first lady. It is meant to build on the legacy of the late diplomat and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and it will include a picnic area, garden classroom, and teaching kitchen to educate visitors about how to grow and prepare fruits and vegetables.
“And when it came to picking a name for it, there was a natural fit,” Obama said in video released on May 11. “I am thrilled to announce that this wonderful garden will be named after one of my predecessors, someone who decades before me planted a victory garden on the White House lawn: the one and only Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Historian Allida Black said in the video that thinking of Roosevelt as only a first lady does her a great disservice. “She was an activist, journalist, teacher, diplomat, policymaker,” Black said. “And most importantly of all, she was the architect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the single most important document of the 20th century.”
Anna Roosevelt, the granddaughter of Eleanor Roosevelt, said when her grandmother realized she would become first lady, she was “horrified.”
“She didn’t want to be first lady. She didn’t want to be in the spotlight,” her granddaughter said.
But since she was, she took a different approach to the job, Black said. “Almost immediately after moving into the White House, she starts having her own press conferences with the women members of the press. And then she adopts the power of the pen, not only to say what she thinks, but to capture the voices of the American people about what they think.”
She arranged for Marian Anderson, a Black opera singer who was banned in 1939 from performing at Constitutional Hall in Washington, D.C., to perform at the Lincoln Memorial. It was the “first, live, outdoor, coast-to-coast concert broadcast in the history of American radio,” Black said.
Anna Roosevelt said she sees a similarity in the way her grandmother took to being first lady and how Michelle Obama used the platform. Anna Roosevelt said the women were both “strong partners” with their husbands and that Eleanor Roosevelt would feel right at home in Michelle Obama’s garden.
"And she would hope to see many of the children, the families, from the South and West sides,” Anna Roosevelt said. “She’d hope that this would be a place where they can understand that democracy is not something that’s static. We need to grow it.”