Barack Obama, the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois , is the first ever
African-American to become the presumptive presidential nominee
for a U.S. major political party. On June 3, 2008, he gained enough
delegates to be nominated by the Democratic party at its national
convention in August.
Barack Hussein Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza
Province, Kenya. He grew up herding goats with his own father, who
was a domestic servant to the British. Although reared among
Muslims, Obama, Sr., became an atheist at some point.
Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas. Her
father worked on oil rigs during the Depression. After the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, he signed up for service in World War II and
marched across Europe in Patton's army. Dunham's mother went to
work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the
G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and
moved to Hawaii.
Meantime, Barack's father had won a scholarship that allowed him to
leave Kenya pursue his dreams in Hawaii. At the time of his birth,
Obama's parents were students at the East-West Center of the
University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Obama's parents separated when he was two years old and later
divorced. Obama's father went to Harvard to pursue Ph.D. studies
and then returned to Kenya.
His mother married Lolo Soetoro, another East-West Center student
from Indonesia. In 1967, the family moved to Jakarta, where
Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng was born. Obama attended
schools in Jakarta, where classes were taught in the Indonesian
language.
Four years later when Barack (commonly known throughout his early
years as "Barry") was ten, he returned to Hawaii to live with his
maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and later his
mother (who died of ovarian cancer in 1995).
He was enrolled in the fifth grade at the esteemed Punahou
Academy, graduating with honors in 1979. He was only one of three
black students at the school. This is where Obama first became
conscious of racism and what it meant to be an African-American.
In his memoir, Obama described how he struggled to reconcile social
perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He saw his biological father
(who died in a 1982 car accident) only once (in 1971) after his
parents divorced. And he admitted using alcohol, marijuana and
cocaine during his teenage years.
After high school, Obama studied at Occidental College in Los
Angeles for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in
New York, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science.
After working at Business International Corporation (a company that
provided international business information to corporate clients) and
NYPIRG, Obama moved to Chicago in 1985. There, he worked as a
community organizer with low-income residents in Chicago's
Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing
development on the city's South Side.
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, which included an emotional visit to
the graves of his father and paternal grandfather.
Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988. In February 1990,
he was elected the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law
Review. Obama graduated magna cum laude in 1991.
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
His Roots
