Barack Obama - U.S. President, Lawyer, U.S. Senator
Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, and the first
African American to serve in the office. First elected to the presidency in 2008,
he won a second term in 2012
Synopsis
Born in Honolulu in 1961, Barack Obama went on to become President of
the Harvard Law Review and a U.S. senator representing Illinois. In 2008, he
was elected President of the United States, becoming the first African-American
commander-in-chief. He served two terms as the 44 president of the United
States.
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."
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