Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician who served as the 44th President of the United States from 2009 to 2017. He is the first African American to have served as president, as well as the first born outside the contiguous United States

He assumed office as the United States president on January 20, 2009.

Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. He attended Harvard Law School from 1988 to 1991.

He was born on August 4, 1961 at Kapi’ Olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States to Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr.

Ann Dunham was born in Wichita, Kansas while his father, Barrack Obama Sr. was a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Kenya.

Obama’s parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship. The couple married in Wailaku on Maui on February 2, 1961 and separated when Obama’s mother moved with their newborn son to Seattle, Washington for one year.

Obama sr. completed his undergraduate economics degree in Hawaii in June 1962, then left to attend graduate school at Haward University on a scholarship.

Obama’s parents divorced in March 1964. Obama sr. returned to Kenya in 1964 where he remarried; he visited Barack in Hawaii only once in 1971. He died in an automobile accident in 1982.

Obama’s mother remarried on March 15, 1965 to a graduate student of the University of Hawaii.

Obama’s siblings are Malik Abongo Obama, Maya Soetro-Ng.

He is married to Michelle Obama and they have two children; Natasha Obama and Malia Ann Obama.

From ages of six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian Language Schools: St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School for two years and Besuki Public School for one and a half years.

In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents and with the aid of scholarship attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.

Obama lived with his mother and sister in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii. Obama chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents for high school at Punahou when his mother returned to Indonesia in 1975 to work. His mother spent most of the next two decades in Indonesia, divorcing her husband in 1980 and earning a PhD in 1992, before dying in 1995 in Hawaii following treatment for ovarian cancer and uterine cancer.

He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.

He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, running successfully for the United States House of Representatives in 2000.

He began his presidential campaign in 2007 and in 2008, after a close primary campaign against Hilary Rodham Clinton; he won sufficient delegates in the Democratic Party primaries. He then defeated Republican nominee John McCain in the general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.

He was reelected president in November 2012, defeating Republican nominee Mitt Romney, and was sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2013.

In one of his books Obama talked about using alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to push questions of who he was out of his mind. He was also a member of the “Choom gang” a self-named group of friends that spent time together and occasionally smoked marijuana.

Obama tried to quit smoking several times, sometimes using nicotine replacement therapy, and, in early 2010, Michelle Obama said that he had successfully quit smoking.

After High School, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Oriental College. In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to divest from South Africa in response to its policy of apartheid.

He later transferred to Columbia College in late 1981 in New York where he majored in political science with specialty in International Relations and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983.

He worked for a year at the Business International Corporation, then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.

He was hired in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman; and Riverdale on Chicago’s South-side. He worked as a community organizer worked as consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.

In mid- 1988, he traveled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and for five weeks in Kenya; where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time. He returned to Kenya in 1992 with his fiancée Michelle and his half-sister Auma. He returned to Kenya in August 2006 to visit his father’s birth place, a village near Kisumu in rural western Kenya

In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year, and president of the journal in second year.

He worked as an associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a J.D Magna cum Laude from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.

Obama’s election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations, which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as “Dreams from my Father”.

He taught at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years- as a lecturer from 1992 to 1996 and senior lecturer from 1996 to 2004- teaching constitutional law.

Also in 1993, he joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 13-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004. His law license became inactive in 2007.

From 1994 to 2002, Obama served on the boards of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the developing communities’ project; and the Joyce Foundation. He served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board from 1995 to 1999.

Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, once elected he gained bipartisan support for legislation that reformed ethics and health care laws.

Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, defeating Republican Yesse Yehundah in the general election, and was reelected again in 2002.

In 2000, he lost Democratic primary race for Illinois’s 1st Congressional district in the U.S House of Representatives to four-term incumbent Bobby Rush by margin of two to one.

Obama was sworn in as a senator on January 3, 2005 becoming the only senate member of the congressional Black Caucus.

On February 10, 2007 Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States in front of the old state capitol building in Springfield, Illinois.

On November 4, Obama won the presidency with 365 electoral votes to 173 received by McCain. Obama won 52.9% of the popular vote to McCain’s supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park.

On November 6, 2012 Obama won 332 electoral votes, exceeding the 270 required for him to be reelected as president. With more than 51% of the popular vote.

Obama is a Christian whose religious views developed in his adult life.

Obama’s Financial Worth

In December 2007, Money estimated the Obama family's net worth at $1.3 million. Their 2009 tax return showed a household income of $5.5 million—up from about $4.2 million in 2007 and $1.6 million in 2005—mostly from sales of his books. On his 2010 income of $1.7 million, he gave 14% to non-profit organizations, including $131,000 to Fisher House Foundation, a charity assisting wounded veterans' families, allowing them to reside near where the veteran is receiving medical treatments. As per his 2012 financial disclosure, Obama may be worth as much as $10 million.

Achievements

From April to October 1992, Obama directed Illinois’s Project Vote, a Voter registration campaign with ten staffers and seven hundred volunteer registrars; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African Americans in the state, leading Crain’s Chicago Business to name Obama to its 1993 List of “40 under Forty” Powers to be.

Quote by Obama

"The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."

Award

2009 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

Reference: Wikipedia

Category: Important People in the World

Barack Obama

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