Barack Obama Born: Future First Black President

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961, to a Kenyan father who was present for roughly two years of his life and a mother from Wichita, Kansas. He grew up between Hawaii and Indonesia, where his mother's second husband worked, attended Punahou School in Honolulu on scholarship, and spent two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia University in New York. After graduating, he worked as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side for three years, an experience he later described as the most formative of his career. He entered Harvard Law School in 1988 and was elected the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, a distinction that generated national media coverage and a book contract before he had practiced a day of law. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, served in the Illinois State Senate, and won a U.S. Senate seat in 2004 after delivering a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention that made him an overnight political sensation. The 2008 presidential campaign was supposed to belong to Hillary Clinton, who held a commanding lead in every early poll. Obama won the Iowa caucuses, which takes place in a state that is 91 percent white, and the calculation changed. He defeated John McCain in the general election and was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009, at age forty-seven. His father, who had returned to Kenya and died in a car accident in 1982, never saw it.