Biography

Barack Hussein Obama was born August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, the son of Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. Dunham's parents, Stanley and Madelyn Payne Dunham, were Kansans. Ann grew up in Wichita, Kansas, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest, before the family settled in Honolulu. She met Obama Sr. at the University of Hawaii, where both were students. Obama Sr., was born and raised in Kenya, the son of Hussein Onyango Obama and his wife Akumu, members of the Luo tribe.

Obama's parents divorced when he was two years old. His father transferred to Harvard to continue his studies, and eventually returned to Kenya. Ann married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student, and moved with six-year-old Barack to Jakarta. There Ann gave birth to a daughter, Obama's half-sister Maya. At age 10, Obama returned to Hawaii and lived with his grandparents while attending the prestigious Punahou School. Shortly after his return, Obama, Sr., arrived for an extended visit. Though they continued to correspond, this was the only time Obama, Jr,. saw his father. Obama, Sr., died in a car crash in Kenya in 1982.

After graduation from Punahou in 1979, Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years, transferring to Columbia University in New York in 1981, where he received a B.A. in political science in 1983. He worked in New York for two years before moving to Chicago to work as a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project. During this time, he worked with South Side community members to set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in the Altgeld Gardens housing project.

In 1988, after an extended visit to Kenya where he met many of his paternal family members, Obama enrolled at Harvard Law School. While there he was the first African American elected president of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated magna cum laude with a J.D. in 1991, and returned to Chicago, where he worked as director of Project Vote, a voter registration organization, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. His first book, Dreams from My Father, was published in 1995.

Obama married Michelle Robinson in Chicago on October 3, 1992. Daughter Malia was born in 1998, and daughter Sasha in 2001.

Barack Obama served in the Illinois State Senate from 1997 to 2004, resigning after his election to the U.S. Senate, where he served from 2005 to 2009, only the fifth African American ever to hold a U.S. Senate seat. In November 2008, Obama was elected the first African American president of the United States. On October 9, 2009, Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."