Barack Obama: First Black President of the United States

Early Life and Education

Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was a teenage goatherd in rural Kenya who won a scholarship to study in the United States. His mother, Ann Dunham, was a white American from Kansas. Obama's parents met and married while they were students at the University of Hawaii. They divorced when Obama was two years old, and his mother remarried an Indonesian man. Obama spent most of his childhood in Jakarta, Indonesia, with his mother and stepfather.

Political Career

Obama returned to the United States in 1979 to attend Columbia University in New York City. He graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science. After graduating from Columbia, Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1990, he graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating from law school, Obama returned to Chicago and worked as a civil rights attorney and law professor. In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate, where he served from 1997 to 2004. In 2004, he was elected to the United States Senate, where he served from 2005 to 2008. In 2008, Obama was elected President of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the office. He was re-elected in 2012.