Riding While Black

Michelle Obama shares an incident from her older brother's childhood in her memoir, "Becoming Me".

"Craig got a new bike one summer and rode it east to Lake Michigan, to the paved pathway along Rainbow Beach, where you could feel the breeze off the water.

"He'd been promptly picked up by a police officer who accused him of stealing it, unwilling to accept that a young black boy would have come across a new bike in an honest way."

"The officer, an African American man himself, ultimately got a brutal tongue-lashing from my mother, who made him apologize to Craig.

"What had happened, my parents told us, was unjust but also unfortunately common. The color of our skin made us vulnerable. It was a thing we'd always have to navigate."

Equality takes many forms as Craig and Michelle discovered. Let's all work to create a world where all children, all adults are treated with equality without regard to ethnicity, religion, financial background or sexual orientation.