Barack Hussein Obama

 

Obama was born on August 4, 1961,^[3] at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii.^[4][5][6] He is the only president born outside the contiguous 48 states.^[7] He was born to an American mother and a Kenyan father. His mother, Ann Dunham (1942–1995), was born in Wichita, Kansas; she was mostly of English descent.^[8] In July 2012, Ancestry.com found a strong likelihood that Dunham was descended from John Punch, an enslaved African man who lived in the Colony of Virginia during the seventeenth century.^[9][10] Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr. (1934–1982),^[11][12] was a married^[13][14][15] Luo Kenyan from Nyang'oma Kogelo.^[13][16] Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student on a scholarship.^[17][18] The couple married in Wailuku, Hawaii, on February 2, 1961, six months before Obama was born.^[19][20]

In late August 1961, a few weeks after he was born, Barack and his mother moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where they lived for a year. During that time, Barack's father completed his undergraduate degree in economics in Hawaii, graduating in June 1962. He left to attend graduate school on a scholarship at Harvard University, where he earned an M.A. in economics. Obama's parents divorced in March 1964.^[21] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964, where he married for a third time and worked for the Kenyan government as the Senior Economic Analyst in the Ministry of Finance.^[22] He visited his son in Hawaii only once, at Christmas 1971,^[23] before he was killed in an automobile accident in 1982, when Obama was 21 years old.^[24] Recalling his early childhood, Obama said: "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."^[18] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.^[25]

In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro at the University of Hawaii; he was an Indonesian East–West Center graduate student in geography. The couple married on Molokai on March 15, 1965.^[26] After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966. His wife and stepson followed sixteen months later in 1967. The family initially lived in the Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet district of South Jakarta. From 1970, they lived in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng district of Central Jakarta.^[27]

At the age of six, Obama and his mother had moved to Indonesia to join his stepfather. From age six to ten, he attended local Indonesian-language schools: Sekolah Dasar Katolik Santo Fransiskus Asisi (St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Elementary School) for two years and Sekolah Dasar Negeri Menteng 01 (State Elementary School Menteng 01) for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert School homeschooling by his mother.^[29][30] As a result of his four years in Jakarta, he was able to speak Indonesian fluently as a child.^[31][32][33] During his time in Indonesia, Obama's stepfather taught him to be resilient and gave him "a pretty hardheaded assessment of how the world works."^[34]

In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. He attended Punahou School—a private college preparatory school—with the aid of a scholarship from fifth grade until he graduated from high school in 1979.^[35] In his youth, Obama went by the nickname "Barry".^[36] Obama lived with his mother and half-sister, Maya Soetoro, in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii.^[37] Obama chose to stay in Hawaii when his mother and half-sister returned to Indonesia in 1975, so his mother could begin anthropology field work.^[38] His mother spent most of the next two decades in Indonesia, divorcing Lolo in 1980 and earning a PhD degree in 1992, before dying in 1995 in Hawaii following unsuccessful treatment for ovarian and uterine cancer.^[39]

Of his 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."^[40] Obama has also written and talked about using alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."^[41] Obama was also a member of the "choom gang", a self-named group of friends who spent time together and occasionally smoked marijuana.^[42][43]

College and research jobs

After graduating from high school in 1979, Obama moved to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College on a full scholarship. In February 1981, Obama made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to participate in the disinvestment from South Africa in response to that nation's policy of apartheid.^[44] In mid-1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and half-sister Maya, and visited the families of college friends in Pakistan for three weeks.^[44] Later in 1981, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City as a junior, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations^[45] and in English literature^[46] and lived off-campus on West 109th Street.^[47] He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983 and a 3.7 GPA. After graduating, Obama worked for about a year at the Business International Corporation, where he was a financial researcher and writer,^[48][49] then as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group on the City College of New York campus for three months in 1985.^[50][51][52]

Community organizer and Harvard Law School

Two years after graduating from Columbia, Obama moved from New York to Chicago when he was hired as director of the Developing Communities Project, a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale on Chicago's South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.^[51][53] He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.^[54] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.^[55] In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time.^[