Barack Hussein Obama

Barack Hussein Obama

Barack Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., grew up as a goat herder in rural Kenya, then won a scholarship that enabled him to attend school in the United States and eventually became a senior economist in the Kenyan government. Barack’s mother, S. Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and moved with her family to Texas and Washington, where her father worked as a government auditor. Ann and Barack Sr. met at the University of Hawaii when she enrolled as a student and he as an exchange student. They met in a Russian language class and married just under a year later.In 1961, when Obama was age two, his father received a scholarship to study at Harvard and left Hawaii for Massachusetts. A short time later, in 1964, Ann and Barack Sr. divorced. (Obama would see his father once more; Barack Sr. visited Honolulu in 1971, when his son was age 10.) A year later Ann remarried Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia, with whom she had a second child, Maya, in 1970. For several years, Obama, his mother, half sister, and stepfather lived in Indonesia, where he attended school. His first school, which was government-run and taught mostly Islam, was a short 20-minute walk from home. Later he transferred to the exclusive Catholic-based St Francis School, where he studied Christianity.In 1971 the family returned briefly to Hawaii. Obama’s stepfather, who had been hired by the Indonesian government, then moved the family back to Indonesia, but Obama decided to stay in Hawaii in order to finish high school and to be closer to his grandparents. He lived with them for a time and then with his mother, who returned to Hawaii with him after a time in Indonesia to help him with his high school studies. For a short time, the family of three again lived in Indonesia, and once again Obama chose to remain behind in Hawaii. His mother returned a final time and moved into an apartment in Honolulu, where Obama continued to live. For a short period, the family lived in poverty, relying in part on government food stamps. In 1979 he graduated from Punahou School, a prestigious college preparatory school in Honolulu.

He first attended Occidental College in suburban Los Angeles for two years, where he began to take an interest in political science, then transferred to Columbia University in New York City to study politics; he graduated in 1983 with a B.A. in political science. In his freshman year at Occidental College he gave his first major speech, in which he identified himself as black, although his appearance was clearly mixed. During his college years he experienced great intellectual growth. He led an ascetic life and became deeply absorbed in his schoolwork, reading the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and others. After school he worked briefly for Business International Corp. as a writer and editor, then for three years he worked in Chicago as a community organizer for some of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. In 1988 he enrolled at Harvard University’s law school and was the first African American to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review. At this time he was working as a summer associate for the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin, where he met Michelle Robinson, another lawyer at the firm and a native Chicagoan. The two married in 1992.

After Harvard, Obama moved back to the Chicago area and became active in Democratic Party politics. Organizing Project Vote, a grassroots effort to register African Americans to vote in the November election, he helped tens of thousands of people in Chicago and other cities across Illinois sign up on voting rolls. The effort is credited with having helped Democrat Bill Clinton win the state in a very close presidential race. As a result of Obama’s work and that of others involved, Carol Moseley Braun, a state legislator, became the first African American woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate.After returning from Harvard, Obama wrote his first book, a memoir titled Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which was published in 1995 and is the story of how Obama, then a young man in his late 30s, came to terms with his biracial identity by traveling to Kenya to trace the history of his deceased black father and to visit relatives and friends in the rural villages where his father grew up and in the urban setting of Nairobi, where his father attended college and met his white wife.

While working on Dreams from My Father, Obama worked as an attorney on voting rights and civil rights issues. He also lectured occasionally at the University of Chicago.

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