Michelle Obama says that a new movie chronicling Jackie Robinson's rise through Major League Baseball, including the racial discrimination he endured while breaking the sport's colour barrier in the 1940s, left her and the president "visibly, physically moved" after they saw it over the weekend.
The film, 42, also left the couple wondering "how on earth did [the Robinsons] live through that. How did they do it? How did they endure the taunts and the bigotry for all of that time?" she said on Tuesday.
After several years in the Negro Baseball League, Robinson broke his sport's colour barrier in 1947 to become the first black Major League Baseball player, batting for the Brooklyn Dodgers. His uniform number was 42.
"It was truly powerful for us," she said. "We walked away from that just visibly, physically moved by the movie and the raw emotion we felt afterward."
She said she was also "struck by how far removed that way of life seems today", noting how times have changed despite progress still having to be made in eliminating racial discrimination.
"You can't imagine the baseball league not being integrated.
"That kind of prejudice is simply just not something that can happen in the light of today."
Obama commented at a workshop for a group of high school and college students who saw the movie in the White House theatre.
Some of the students attend a Los Angeles school named for Robinson and others are undergraduate scholars in a programme that bears the baseball great's name.
The students also participated in a question-and-answer session with Robinson's widow, Rachel, and members of the cast and crew, including Chadwick Boseman, who plays Robinson, Harrison Ford, who stars as former Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, and director-screenwriter Brian Helgeland.
President Obama held a separate screening of 42 for the cast and crew on Tuesday evening.
The movie opens in the US on April 12.
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