On October 3, 1992, at Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side, a thirty-one-year-old Barack Obama woke up that morning with a genuinely terrible head cold, sneezed his way through getting dressed in his classic black tuxedo, and somehow managed to show up at the altar anyway with the focused determination of a man who understood that there were some appointments in life you simply did not reschedule regardless of how you felt.
More than three hundred friends, colleagues, cousins, cousins of cousins, and cousins of cousins who had children filled the pews of that South Side church until the entire building was, as Barack later wrote in his memoir, crammed happily in ways that left no room for anything but the kind of joy that only arrives when a community has been waiting for something and it finally shows up.
Michelle had known from the beginning that a Chicago wedding meant no trimming the guest list, because her roots on the South Side went too deep and ran too wide, and she had not wanted it any other way.
She wore an off-the-shoulder long-sleeved gown that was understated and elegant in the particular way that things are elegant when they do not need to announce themselves, and she carried a floral bouquet down an aisle toward the most consequential cold-afflicted man she had ever met.
Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who had known Barack through his years as a community organizer in Chicago, performed the ceremony.
Before the White House, there was a crowded church, a cold, and a promise that changed everything. Read the full story - Click Here:
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