Born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, Barack Obama is the 44th
and current president of the United States. He was a community
organizer, civil-rights lawyer and teacher before pursuing a political
career. He was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 and to the
U.S. Senate in 2004. He was elected to the U.S. presidency in 2008, and
won re-election in 2012 against Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
Early Life
Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother,
Ann Dunham,
was born on an Army base in Wichita, Kansas, during World War II. After
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dunham's father, Stanley, enlisted
in the military and marched across Europe in
General George Patton's
army. Dunham's mother, Madelyn, went to work on a bomber assembly line.
After the war, the couple studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house
through the Federal Housing Program and, after several moves, ended up
in Hawaii.
Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza
Province, Kenya. Obama Sr. grew up herding goats in Africa and,
eventually earned a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and
pursue his dreams of going to college in Hawaii. While studying at the
University of Hawaii at Manoa, Obama Sr. met fellow student Ann Dunham,
and they married on February 2, 1961. Barack was born six months later.
As
a child, Obama did not have a relationship with his father. When his
son was still an infant, Obama Sr. relocated to Massachusetts to attend
Harvard University and pursue a Ph.D. Obama's parents officially
separated several months later and ultimately divorced in March 1964,
when their son was two. Soon after, Obama Sr. returned to Kenya.
In
1965, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, a University of Hawaii student from
Indonesia. A year later, the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where
Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born in 1970. Several
incidents in Indonesia left Dunham afraid for her son's safety and
education so, at the age of 10, Obama was sent back to Hawaii to live
with his maternal grandparents. His mother and half-sister later joined
them.
Education
While
living with his grandparents, Obama enrolled in the esteemed Punahou
Academy, He excelled in basketball and graduated with academic honors in
1979. As one of only three black students at the school, Obama became
conscious of racism and what it meant to be African-American. He later
described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his
multiracial heritage with his own sense of self: "I noticed that there
was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog. . .and that
Santa was a white man," he wrote. "I went into the bathroom and stood in
front of the mirror with all my senses and limbs seemingly intact,
looking as I had always looked, and wondered if something was wrong with
me."
Obama also struggled with the absence of his father, who he
saw only once more after his parents divorced, when Obama Sr. visited
Hawaii for a short time in 1971. "[My father] had left paradise, and
nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that
single, unassailable fact," he later reflected. "They couldn't describe
what it might have been like had he stayed."
Ten years later, in
1981, tragedy struck Obama Sr. when he lost both of his legs in a
serious car accident. Confined to a wheelchair, he also lost his job. In
1982, Obama Sr. was involved in yet another car accident while
traveling in Nairobi. This time, however, the crash was fatal. Obama Sr.
died on November 24, 1982, when Obama was 21 years old. "At the time of
his death, my father remained a myth to me," Obama later wrote, "both
more and less than a man."
After high school, Obama studied at
Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. He then transferred to
Columbia University in New York City, graduating in 1983 with a degree
in political science. After working in the business sector for two
years, Obama moved to Chicago in 1985. There, he worked on the
impoverished South Side as a community organizer for low-income
residents in the Roseland and the Altgeld Gardens communities.
Law Career
It
was during this time that Obama, who said he "was not raised in a
religious household," joined the Trinity United Church of Christ. He
also visited relatives in Kenya, and paid an emotional visit to the
graves of his biological father and paternal grandfather. "For a long
time I sat between the two graves and wept," Obama wrote. "I saw that my
life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of
abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in
Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean
away."
Returning from Kenya with a sense of renewal, Obama
entered Harvard Law School in 1988. The next year, he joined the Chicago
law firm of Sidley Austin as a summer associate and Michelle Robinson,
a young lawyer assigned to be Obama's adviser. Not long after, the
couple began dating. In February 1990, Obama was elected the first
African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991.
After
law school, Obama returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights
lawyer with the firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He also taught
constitutional law part-time at the University of Chicago Law School
between 1992 and 2004—first as a lecturer and then as a professor—and
helped organize voter registration drives during Bill Clinton's
1992 presidential campaign. On October 3, 1992, he and Michelle were
married. They moved to Kenwood, on Chicago's South Side, and welcomed
two daughters several years later: Malia (born 1998) and Sasha (born
2001).
