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“I’m absolutely confident that if all of you decide to take up this cause, that if you have made a determination that you are tired of the America that has been because you imagine the America that is laid out before us; and if you’re willing to put your shoulder to the wheel of history at this moment, that amazing things can happen.”
— Austin, TX, February 23, 2007
Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961 to Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas and Barack Obama Sr. of Kenya, who met while attending the University of Hawaii. His parents separated when Barack was two years old and later divorced.
His mother later married Lolo Soetora, an Indonesian student at the University of Hawaii, and moved to his homeland of Jakarta, Indonesia where Barack attended local schools from the ages of 6–10. He then returned to the U.S. to live in Hawaii with his maternal grandparents. He saw his natural father only once, during a one–month visit, before he died in a car accident when Barack was 21 years–old. His mother died of cancer shortly after his book, Dreams From My Father, was published in 1995.
Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983, majoring in political science with an emphasis in international relations. He worked for a year for Business International Corporation, a newsletter publisher, then became a community organizer for a non–profit consortium of churches on the south side of Chicago. He negotiated job training programs, organized residents of a low–income housing project to advocate for improved living conditions and better City services. With a thirst to continue to make a difference, he enrolled at Harvard Law School and was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated in 1991 magna cum laude.
On his return to Chicago he ran a voter registration campaign that registered over 150,000 voters. Shortly thereafter, he joined a public–interest law firm in Chicago to practice civil rights law, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a senior lecturer for over ten years.
Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 and served two terms. He rose to national attention with his famed keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and that same year was elected to the U.S. Senate with a landslide 70% vote.
He and his wife, Michelle, were married in 1992 and have two daughters — Malia (8) and Sasha (5).
A more complete biography is available in Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia) and in his memoir, Dreams From My Father. (Obama received the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for the audio version of that book.)