Barack Obama was born August 4th, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama, Sr., and Ann Dunham. His father, a black man from Kenya and his mother, a white American from Wichita, Kansas, met while attending the University of Hawaii.
They would stay together until a little after Barrack turned two. It was then that Obama Sr. left his family to attend Harvard University. Shortly there after, Barrack’s mother sought a divorce from Obama Sr.
Obama’s father returned to Kenya to work for the government and only saw his son once before dying in an automobile accident in 1982. After the divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro and moved the family to Indonesia in 1967, where Obama would live with his mother until he turned 10 years old.
He then returned to Honolulu to live with his grandparents from the fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979. Obama’s mother returned to Hawaii in 1972 and then back to Indonesia to continue her work.
In 1995, she died of ovarian cancer. Obama has described her last days as one of the most testing times in his life. He said, “Towards the end of her life, my mother worried more about paying her medical bills than getting better.”
After graduating from high school, Obama moved on to Los Angeles where he studied at Occidental College. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. Obama graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1983, and then worked for a year at the Business International Corporation before turning his attention to the New York Public Interest Research Group.
After four more years in New York, Obama finally moved to Chicago where he became the director of Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization in Chicago’s far South Side. In his book “The Audacity Of Hope,” Obama described his work there as “humbling” and one of the best examples of working with the people he had ever had.
His accomplishments during that time included helping set up job training programs, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants’ rights organization. Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.
Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988, and towards the end of his first year became an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In his second year, he was elected to be the president of the Law Review, a position functioning as editor-in-chief and supervising the Law Review’s staff of eighty plus editors.
Obama’s election as the first black president of the Law Review was widely reported and followed by several long, detailed profiles. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.
Obama was then elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as senator from Illinois’ 13th district. Once elected, Obama gained bipartisan support for legislation reforming ethics and health care laws. He sponsored a law increasing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare. In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan’s payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures.
Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, and again in 2002.
On January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee. He sponsored and led unanimous, bipartisan passage of legislation to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they detain. The legislation made Illinois the first state to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations.
In mid-2002, Obama began considering a run for the U.S. Senate. He received over 52% of the vote in the March 2004 primary, emerging 29% ahead of his nearest Democratic rival and would go on to defeat Alan Keys by a landslide.
During his time as a Senator Obama has sponsored 136 bills, two of which have become law, and co-sponsored 619. The bills that he’s sponsored vary greatly, from energy to the war in Iraq.
In July 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts. Obama spoke about wanting to change the U.S. government’s economic and social priorities.
He questioned the Bush administration’s management of the Iraq War and highlighted America’s obligations to its soldiers.
Drawing examples from U.S. history, he was also highly critical of the way both parties had divided the American people. He said, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is only the United States of America.”
Many people saw this as the start of Barack’s presidential aspirations.
Those speculations would turn out to be true, as Barack announced his intention to run for president on February 10, 2007.
