Early life and career of Barack Obama

Barack Obama is the current President-elect of the United States. President-elect Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. (1936–1982) (from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Siaya District, Nyanza Province, Kenya Colony, United Kingdom, of Luo ethnicity) and Ann Dunham (1942–1995) (born in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas). On his mother's side he has a half-sister; on his father's side, Obama has two half-sisters and five surviving half-brothers.

Education at a glance

School	Years	Location	Final degree	Notes
Noelani Elementary School	Kindergarten	Honolulu, Hawaii
St. Francis Assisi Catholic	First through third grade	Jakarta, Indonesia
State Elementary School Menteng 01	Fourth grade	Jakarta, Indonesia
Punahou School	Fifth through 12th grade	Honolulu, Hawaii	High school diploma
Occidental College	Freshman and sophomore years	Los Angeles, California		Transferred to Columbia
Columbia College	Junior and senior years	New York, New York	B.A.	Political science major with international relations focus
Harvard Law School	Three-year program	Cambridge, Massachusetts	J.D. magna cum laude	President, Harvard Law Review

Childhood through high school

Obama's birth certificate

Throughout his early years, Obama was known at home and at school as "Barry." Obama's parents met while both were attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student. They separated when he was two years old and later divorced. His father received a Masters degree in Economics from Harvard University, then returned to Kenya, where he became a finance minister before dying in an automobile accident in 1982. Obama attended kindergarten at Noelani Elementary School in the Manoa neighborhood of Honolulu, Hawaii. Obama attended local schools in Jakarta, from ages 6 to 10, where classes were taught in the Indonesian language.

After her divorce, Dunham married Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro who was attending college in Hawaii. When Suharto, a military leader in Soetoro's home country came to power in 1967, all students studying abroad were recalled and the family moved to Indonesia. During his time in Indonesia, he first attended St. Francis Assisi Catholic school for almost three years. When his family moved to a new neighborhood, Menteng, he attended the secular, government-run SDN Menteng 1 school for his fourth year. Obama's stepfather was "not religious", and "never went to prayer services except for big communal events", according to Obama's sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. When Obama was in third grade he wrote an essay saying that he wanted to become president. His teacher later told the Chicago Tribune that she was not sure what country he wanted to become president of but that he said that his reason for becoming president was that he wanted to make everybody happy.

Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents while attending Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from the fifth grade until his graduation in 1979. Obama's mother, Ann, died of ovarian cancer and uterine cancer a few months after the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

File:Barack Obama Sr Jr.jpg

Obama (right) with his father in Hawaii. ca. 1971

In the memoir, Obama describes his experiences growing up in his mother's middle class family. His knowledge about his African father, who returned once for a brief visit in 1971, came mainly through family stories and photographs. Of his early childhood, Obama 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 book describes his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He wrote that he used alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind". Obama has said that it was a seriously misguided mistake. At the Saddleback Civil Presidential Forum Barack Obama identified his high-school drug use as his greatest moral failure. Obama has stated he has not used any illegal drugs since he was a teenager.

Some of his fellow students at Punahou School later told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that Obama was mature for his age as a high school student and that he sometimes attended parties and other events in order to associate with African American college students and military service people. Reflecting later on his formative years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "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."

College and living in New York City

Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years. He then transferred to Columbia College in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. In 1982, Obama's father, Barack Obama, Sr., died in Kenya. Obama graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1983, then worked at Business International Corporation and New York Public Interest Research Group.

Early years as a community organizer in Chicago

After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago where he was hired as a community organizer. "What really inspired me," Obama told Ryan Lizza, a writer for The New Republic in 2007, "was the civil rights movement. And if you asked me who my role model was at that time, it would probably be Bob Moses, the famous SNCC [ Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ] organizer. … Those were the folks I was really inspired by—the John Lewises, the Bob Moseses, the Fannie Lou Hamers, the Ella Bakers."

Before Obama came, the organization was made up of three white men (two of them Jewish), which was only working with Catholic parishes up to that point. Yet the black pastors looked on them with suspicion and sometimes disdain as outsiders. The organization wanted a young black man to help the group ally with black churches in the South Side. He worked for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side. Around this time Obama joined the Trinity United Church of Christ, a predominantly black church on the southeast side.

The job focused on helping poor blacks agitate with the city government to get benefits for their communities such as job banks and asbestos removal. The small organization taught him a style of organizing developed by Saul Alinsky, a radical University of Chicago-trained social scientist. Alinsky's method centers on the idea of "agitation" — encouraging people to get angry enough about the horrible state of their lives in order to get them to take action. Alinsky had described the organizer's role as an effort to "rub raw the sores of discontent." According to Mike Kruglik, a fellow organizer at that time, Obama was the best student he had ever had in his 10 years of training organizers. In 2007, Ryan Lizza, a journalist writing for The New Republic, described Kruglik's assessment of Obama: "He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. […] [H]e could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better."

Obama came to believe that although Alinsky's concentration on self-interest as a motivating factor is a "critical" insight, he told Lizza, "Alinsky understated the degree to which people's hopes and dreams and their ideals and their values were just as important in organizing as people's self-interest."

During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens. Obama was modest about the accomplishment of these years. "[F]or the most part I would say I wasn’t wildly successful," Obama said in a 2007 interview. "The victories that we achieved were extraordinarily modest: you know, getting a job-training site set up or getting an after-school program for young people put in place."

Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute. In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time to Europe for three weeks then Kenya for five weeks where he met many of his Kenyan relatives for the first time.

Harvard Law School

Langdell Hall, home of the Harvard Law School library

Obama moved to Somerville, Massachusetts, and entered Harvard Law School in late 1988 and at the end of his first year was selected as an editor of the law review based on his grades and a writing competition. In his second year he was elected president of the law review, a full-time volunteer position functioning as editor-in-chief and supervising the law review's staff of 80 editors. Obama's election in February 1990 as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review was widely reported and followed by several long, detailed profiles. He got himself elected by convincing a crucial swing bloc of conservatives that he would protect their self-interests if they supported him. Building up that trust was done with the same kind of long listening sessions he had used in the poor neighborhoods of South Side, Chicago. Richard Epstein, who later taught at the University of Chicago Law School when Obama later taught there, said Obama was elected editor "because people on the other side believed he would give them a fair shake."

While in law school he worked as an associate at the law firms of Sidley & Austin in 1989, where he met his wife, Michelle, and where Newton N. Minow was a managing partner. Minow later would introduce Obama to some of Chicago's top business leaders. In the summer of 1990 he worked at Hopkins & Sutter. Also during his law school years, Obama spent eight days in Los Angeles taking a national training course on Alinsky methods of organizing. He graduated with a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991 and returned to Chicago.

Settling down in Chicago

The publicity from his election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations. In an effort to recruit him to their faculty, the University of Chicago Law School provided Obama with a fellowship and an office to work on his book. He originally planned to finish the book in one year, but it took much longer as the book evolved into a personal memoir. In order to work without interruptions, Obama and his wife, Michelle, traveled to Bali where he wrote for several months. The manuscript was finally published as Dreams from My Father in mid-1995.

He married Michelle Robinson in 1992 and settled down with her in Hyde Park, a liberal, integrated, middle-class Chicago neighborhood with a history of electing reform-minded politicians independent of the Daley political machine. The couple's first daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998; their second, Natasha (known as Sasha), in 2001.

One effect of the marriage was to bring Obama closer to other politically influential Chicagoans. One of Michelle's best friends was Jesse Jackson's daughter, Santita, later the godmother of the Obamas' first child. Michelle herself had worked as an aide to Mayor Richard M. Daley. Marty Nesbitt, a young, successful black businessman (who played basketball with Michelle's brother, Craig Robinson), became Obama's best friend and introduced him to other African-American business people. Before the marriage, according to Craig, Obama talked about his political ambitions, even saying that he might run for president someday.

Project Vote

Obama directed Illinois Project Vote from April to October 1992, a voter registration drive, officially nonpartisan, that helped Carol Moseley Braun become the first black woman ever elected to the Senate. He headed up a staff of 10 and 700 volunteers that achieved its goal of 400,000 registered African Americans in the state, leading Crain's Chicago Business to name Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be. Although fundraising was not required for the position when Obama was recruited for the job, he started an active campaign to raise money for the project. According to Sandy Newman, who founded Project Vote, Obama "raised more money than any of our state directors had ever done. He did a great job of enlisting a broad spectrum of organizations and people, including many who did not get along well with one another."

The fundraising brought Obama into contact with the wealthy, liberal elite of Chicago, some of whom became supporters in his future political career. Through one of them he met David Axelrod, who later headed Obama's campaign for president. The fundraising committee was chaired by John Schmidt, a white former chief of staff to Mayor Richard M. Daley, and John W. Rogers Jr., a young black money manager and founder of Ariel Capital Management. Obama also met much of the city's black political leadership, although he didn't always get along with the older politicians, with friction sometimes developing over Obama's reluctance to spend money and his insistence on results. "He really did it, and he let other people take all the credit", Schmidt later said. "The people standing up at the press conferences were Jesse Jackson and Bobby Rush and I don't know who else. Barack was off to the side and only the people who were close to it knew he had done all the work."

Career 1992–1996

Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, as a Lecturer for four years (1992–1996), and as a Senior Lecturer for eight years (1996–2004). During this time he taught courses in due process and equal protection, voting rights, and racism and law. He published no legal scholarship, and turned down tenured positions, but served eight years in the Illinois Senate during his twelve years at the university.

In 1993 Obama joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 12-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, with his law license becoming inactive in 2002. The firm was well-known among influential Chicago liberals and leaders of the black community, and the firm's Judson H. Miner, who met with Obama to recruit him before Obama's 1991 graduation from law school, had been counsel to former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, although the law firm often clashed with the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley. The 29-year-old law student made it clear in his initial interview with Miner that he was more interested in joining the firm to learn about Chicago politics than to practice law. During the four years Obama worked as a full time lawyer at the firm, he was involved in 30 cases and accrued 3,723 billable hours.

Obama was a founding member of the board of directors of Public Allies in 1992, resigning before his wife, Michelle, became the founding executive director of Public Allies Chicago in early 1993. He served on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund Obama's DCP, from 1993–2002, and served on the board of directors of The Joyce Foundation from 1994–2002. Membership on the Joyce and Wood foundation boards, which gave out tens of millions of dollars to various local organizations while Obama was a member, helped Obama get to know and be known by influential liberal groups and cultivate a network of community activists that later supported his political career. Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995–2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995–1999. He also served on the board of directors of the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center.

In 1995, Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, died. In that year Obama also announced his candidacy for a seat in the Illinois state Senate and attended Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March in Washington, DC.

See also

• Family of Barack Obama

External links

• MSNBC slideshow from childhood to party leader
• Family biography of Obama from The Washington Post