Born: August 4, 1961 ( Honolulu, Hawaii)
Parents: Barack Obama. Sr., From Kenya & Ann Dunham, From Kansas (Parents Deceased)
Meaning Of The Name, Barack: One Who Is Blessed
Height: 6' 1" (1.87m)
Marital Status: Married
Wife’s Name: Michelle Obama
Date of Marriage: October 18, 1992
Children: Malia Ann Obama, Born 1999; Natasa Obama (Known As Sasha), Born 2001
Religion: Christian, United Church Of Christ
Hometown: Chicago, Illinois
Education:
- Graduated: Columbia University (1983) - Major: Political Science
- J.D. Law Degree From Harvard (1991) . Magna Cum Laude
- Attended: Occidental College
Career: U.S. Senator from Illinois Sworn In January 4, 2005
Government Committees:
- Health, Education, Labor And Pensions Committee
- Foreign Relations Committee
- Veterans Affairs Committee
- 2005 And 2006: Served On The Environment & Public Works Committee
Latest Major Accomplishment:
- Becomes Democratic Nominee For President of The United States, June 3, 2008
- Elected The 44th President Of The United States Of America, November 4, 2008
Zodiac Sign: Leo
Automobile: Ford Escape Hybrid, Chrysler 300C
Hobbies: Poker & Basketball
Books:
- Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)
- The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006)
- It Takes a Nation: How Strangers Became Family in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina (2006)
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Early Life
Barack Obama, Jr., known as "Barry" throughout his early years, was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. His parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. After her divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro's home country of Indonesia in 1967, where Obama attended local schools in Jakarta from ages 6 to 10. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade until his graduation in 1979.
Excels at Harvard Law School
Obama graduated from Punahou and went on to Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he decided to get serious about his studies. Midway through, he transferred to the prestigious Columbia University in New York City. He also began to explore his African roots and not long after his father's death traveled to meet his relatives in Kenya for the first time. After he earned his undergraduate degree in political science, he became a community organizer in Harlem—but quickly realized he could not afford to live in the city with a job that paid so little. Instead, he moved to Chicago to work for a church-based social-services organization there. The group was active on the city's South Side, one of America's most impoverished urban communities.
Feeling it was time to move on, Obama applied to and was accepted at Harvard Law School, one of the top three law schools in the United States. In 1990, he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review journal. He was the first African American to serve in the post. He received his J.D. in 1991 -- graduating Magna Cum Laude. Obama declined the job offers from top Manhattan law firms, with their starting salaries that neared the $100,000-a-year range, in order to return to Chicago and work for a small firm that specialized in civil-rights law. This was an especially unglamorous and modest-paying field of law, for it involved defending the poor and the marginalized members of society in housing and employment discrimination cases.
Obama also had another reason for returning to Chicago: During his Harvard Law School years, he took a job as a summer associate at a Chicago firm, and the attorney assigned to mentor him was Harvard Law graduate, Michelle Robinson. The two began dating and were married in 1992. Robinson came from a working-class Black family and grew up on the South Side; her brother had excelled at basketball and went to Princeton University, and she followed him there for her undergraduate degree. Obama also considered Chicago a place from which he could launch a political career, and he became active in a number of projects in addition to his legal cases at work and another job he held teaching classes at the University of Chicago Law School. He worked on a local voter-registration drive, for example, that registered thousands of black voters in Chicago; the effort was said to have helped Bill Clinton (1946–) win the state in his successful bid for the White House in 1992.
Best-Selling Author
Obama's time at the Law Review had netted him an offer to write a book. The result was Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,
published by Times Books in 1995. The work merited some brief but
mostly complimentary reviews in the press. In 2006 he wrote two more books -- The Audacity Of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream and It Takes A Nation: How Strangers Become Family in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina. Dreams From My Father became a #1 New York Times Bestseller and The Audacity of Hope was a NYTbestseller and Grammy-Award winner for Best Spoken Word-Album In 2008.
Obama worked as a community organizer, university lecturer and civil rights attorney, before running for public office and serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. After an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House Of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for U.S. Senate in 2003.
The following year, while still an Illinois state legislator, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with 70% of the vote. As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, he co-sponsored bipartisan legislation for controlling conventional weapons and for promoting greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In the current 110th Congress, he has sponsored legislation on lobbying and electorial fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel.
Barack Obama won his bid for the Senate by a large margin, taking 70 percent of the Illinois vote, thus becoming one of the youngest members of the U.S. Senate when he was sworn into office in January 2005.
Obama Carries On A Legacy Of Black Political Involvement
Barack Obama became the fifth African American senator in U.S. history in 2005. He was only the third elected since the end of the Reconstruction, the period immediately following the end of the American Civil War (1861–65; a war between the Union [the North], who were opposed to slavery, and the Confederacy [the South], who were in favor of slavery). During the Reconstruction Era, federal troops occupied the defeated Southern states and, along with transplanted government officials, one of their duties was to make sure that newly freed slaves were allowed to vote fairly and freely in elections.
Before 1913 and the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, members of the U.S. Senate were not directly elected by voters in most states, however. Instead they were elected by legislators in the state assemblies, or appointed by the governor. Still, because of the Reconstruction Era reforms, many blacks were elected to the state legislatures that sent senators to Washington. In 1870, the Mississippi state legislature made Hiram Rhoades Revels (1827–1901) the state's newest senator and the first black ever to serve in the U.S. Senate. Revels was a free-born black from North Carolina and a distinguished minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church who had raised two black regiments that fought on the Union side during the Civil War. He served in the Senate for one year.
In 1875, Mississippi lawmakers sent Blanche K. Bruce (1841–1898) to the U.S. Senate. A former slave from Virginia, Bruce was a teacher and founder of the first school for blacks in the state of Missouri. After the end of the Civil War, he headed south to take part in the Reconstruction Era. He won election to local office as a Republican, and in 1875 lawmakers sent him to the U.S. Senate. He was the first Black senator to serve a full six-year term. In 1881, he was appointed a U.S. Treasury official, and his signature was the first from an African American to appear on U.S. currency.
Nearly a hundred years passed before another African American was elected to the Senate, and this came by statewide vote. Edward William Brooke III (1919–), a Republican from Massachusetts, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1966 and served two terms. In 1992 another Illinois Democrat, Carol Moseley Braun (1947–), became the first African American woman to serve in the U.S. Senate.
On June 3, 2008, with 2,118 delegates in hand, Barack Obama became the out-right Democratic Nominee for the office of President of the United States. He becomes the first Black American to be the presidential nominee of a major American political party.On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama became the FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN ELECTED TO THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. With more than 300 electorial votes, he defeated Republican rival, John McCain, in a political race that forever changed American History.
On January 20, 2009, President-Elect, Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as America's 44th President.
