Message #92754

[Bianca]

by Alex Miller-Mignone
The announcement on January 16, 2007 by Illinois Senator Barack Obama that he had established an exploratory committee preparatory to seeking the Democratic nomination for President in 2008 came as a shock to nobody. After just two years on the national stage, following eight years in the Illinois legislature, Obama’s political rise has been meteoric. When the 45-year-old officially announces his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois on February 10, he will be the USA’s first credible black presidential candidate.

A reach that could encompass the White House seemed extremely unlikely when Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on 4 August 1961. The son of two University of Hawaii students, his father, Barack Obama Sr, was a Kenyan immigrant; his mother, Ann Dunham, hailed from Wichita, Kansas. As Obama described them in his early memoirs, Dreams From My Father, his father “was black as pitch, my mother white as milk.” The mixed marriage didn’t last long. When Obama was two his parents divorced and his father returned to Kenya. Four years later his mother remarried and moved with her son to her new husband’s homeland in Malaysia; four years after that Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. He remained there until graduating high school in 1979.

Obama majored in political science at Columbia University, graduating in 1983. Afterward he worked in Chicago as the director of Developing Communities Project, a non-profit which assisted local churches in establishing job training programs for low income residents. Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1988, and entered the national spotlight in 1990 when he became the first Africa American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He received his Juris Doctor degree magna cum laude in 1991, then returned to Chicago where he worked for a civil rights law firm and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.