One of her kindergarten classmates, Dr. Theodore Ford, described their class this way in a 2012 article in The Chicago Sun-Times: “There were five little white faces and 23 shades of brown faces and one Middle Eastern face, a subtle shade darker than that of the Jewish kid to his right in our class photo.”

The school appears to have had more resources than most. In the sixth grade, Mrs. Obama was selected to participate in its gifted program, which allowed her to take French, and to study biology at the local community college, according to Ms. Mundy’s book. She graduated as its salutatorian.

But it was the creation of Chicago’s first public high school for high achievers — the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School — that really changed the trajectory of Mrs. Obama’s life, by getting her out of her neighborhood and giving her exposure for the first time to an educational environment that was truly diverse.

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“So at 6 a.m. every morning, I had to get on a city bus and ride for an hour, sometimes more, just to get to school,” Mrs. Obama told a group of Washington high school students last year.

One of Mrs. Obama’s close friends and classmates was Santita Jackson, daughter of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “It was a school of high expectations,” Mr. Jackson said in an interview, in which he called Mrs. Obama “an odds-buster and a dream-maker” who “was always driven to aim high.”

Mrs. Obama credits Whitney Young with setting her on a path to Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., her law professor at Harvard, remembers her work with the black law students association there.