Early life and career of Barack Obama

Barack Obama was born on August 4 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (1936–1982) (born in Nyangoma-Kogelo, Bondo District, Nyanza Province, Kenya, of Luo ethnicity) and Ann Dunham (1942 –1995) (born in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas).

Childhood through high school

File:Barack Obama Sr Jr.jpg

Obama (right) with his father in Hawaii.

Throughout his early years, Obama was commonly known at home and 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 Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from Harvard University, then returned to Kenya, where he became a finance minister before dying in an automobile accident in 1982. His mother married another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro's home country of Indonesia in 1967. Obama attended local schools in Jakarta, from ages 6 to 10, where classes were taught in Bahasa, the language of Indonesia. He first attended St. Francis Assisi Catholic school for almost three years, where he received weekly lessons in that Christian faith, although he was registered by his family as a Muslim, his father's stated religion. When his family moved to a new neighborhood, Menteng, he attended the secular, government-run SDN Menteng 1 school for his fourth year, and received similar weekly lessons in Islam and the Qur'an. 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.

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". Some of his fellow students at Punahou 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 early career

Occidental College

After high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. Obama received his Bachelor of Arts in 1983, then worked at Business International Corporation and New York Public Interest Research Group before moving to Chicago to take a job as a community organizer. As the $13,000 a year Director of the Developing Communities Project, a faith-based community-organizing agency on Chicago's far south side, funded by an arm of the Catholic Church and overseen by a coalition of black churches, he worked with the low-income residents of Chicago's Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development to counteract the dislocation and massive unemployment caused by the closing and downsizing of southeast Chicago steel plants. Obama has called this experience "the best education I ever had" and cites it as one of the reasons he would make a good president.

Concluding that community organizing was not effective enough to solve major domestic problems, Obama applied to Harvard Law School, which he entered in 1988. In 1990 Obama was the first black person in the 104-year history of the Harvard Law Review to be elected president of the independent student group responsible for the journal. Obama used his prominence on campus to draw attention to the issue of faculty diversity. He completed his J.D. degree magna cum laude in 1991. The president of the Harvard Law Review usually goes on to serve as a clerk for a judge on the United States court of appeals for a year, and then as a clerk for an associate justice of the Supreme Court. Instead, Obama returned to Chicago to direct a voter registration drive that resulted in voter registration in Chicago's 19 predominantly black wards outnumbering those in the city's 19 predominantly white ethnic wards for the first time in Chicago's history, by 676,000 to 526,000. More than half a million blacks went to the polls in Chicago, and Chicago magazine hailed Obama as "a new political star".

As an associate attorney with Miner Barnhill & Galland (fka Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland) from 1993 to 2003, Obama spent about 70% of the time represented community organizers, discrimination claims, and voting rights cases, with the rest being spent on real estate transactions, filing incorporation papers and defending clients against minor lawsuits. Most of his work involved drawing up briefs, contracts, and other legal documents, generally as a junior associate on legal teams. This included a successful lawsuit by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) that forced the state of Illinois to implement the Motor Voter Act, an appeals brief for a whistleblower who sued Cook County Hospital and the Hektoen Institute for Medical Research for wrongful termination, and a suit that forced the city of Chicago to redraw the ward boundaries that the city council had drawn up following the 1990 census. He also appeared in court to defend a developer against charges it was failing to provide heat to tenants, represented a nonprofit corporation against a lawsuit by a low-income woman who wanted the corporation to pay for baby-sitting, and put in six hours working on taxpayer-supported building rehabilitation loans for Rezmar Corp. owned by Daniel Mahru and political fundraiser Tony Rezko, who has raised a total of over $250,000 for Obama's various political campaigns and is now indicted on charges unrelated to his association with Obama.

Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004. From 1992 to 1996, Obama held the title of Lecturer, and from 1996 to 2004 he was a Senior Lecturer. The University of Chicago Law School has referred to Obama as a professor, and stated in a press release, "Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track."

Obama's relationship to Rashid Khalidi has come under increased interest due to the U.S. Presidential Primary races of 2008. Obama made one of the presentations at a 2003 farewell dinner on the occasion of Khalidi leaving the Los Angeles Area. The dinner was a celebration of the Los Angeles area Palestian community. Obama's remarks alluded to the numerous dinners that he had at the home of the Khalidis.