Barrack Obama: The Early Years

Barrack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4th 1961 to Barrack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. He is only the fifth African American to ever be elected to the U.S. Senate and currently is the only African American serving in the U.S. Senate. He is among the Democratic Party's leading candidates for nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Born to a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, Obama had a very diverse cultural upbringing. His parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. His father died in a car accident in Kenya when Obama was 21. He spent his entire childhood in the U.S. state of Hawaii except for four years between ages 6-10 which he spent living in Jakarta Indonesia with his mother and his step-father Lolo Soetoro. After his short time in Indonesia he returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents until his graduation in 1979. Obama talks about his diverse childhood in his memoir Dreams From My Father in which he writes: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me-that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk-barely registered in my mind." The main focus of the memoir relates his struggles as a young man trying to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage and his use of alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years in order to cope with the pressures and questions of working out his identity in his mind.

After graduating in 1979, Obama attended Occidental College for two years, after which he transferred to Columbia University. While attending Columbia University he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations, receiving his BA degree in 1983. After which he went to work at Business International Corporation for a year before moving to Chicago to direct a non-profit project assisting local churches to organize job training programs. He continued to direct this project till 1988 when he entered Harvard Law School. While at Harvard he distinguished himself becoming the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, and completed his J.D. degree magna cum lade in 1991.

After leaving Harvard Law School he returned to Chicago and immediately began and directed a voter registration drive in an effort to encourage the citizens of Chicago to registrar to vote. Deeply interested in voting rights, civil rights, and community organizations, he worked as an associate attorney with Miner, Barnhill & Galland from 1993 till 1996 taking on cases in which he primarily represented community organizers, discrimination claims, and voting rights cases. Obama also became a lecturer of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School in 1993 and continued to lecture until his election in 2004 to the U.S. Senate.