Barack Hussein Obama is the president of United States elected in 2008 presidential election and inaugurated on 20th January,
2009. Earlier he was a Democratic Party member of the United States Senate from Illinois. He was born in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Father, Barack Obama (Snr) was from Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham was from Kansas. Both studied at the University of Hawaii and got married in 1960. His father was the first African student in the University of Hawaii. When Obama was 2 years old, his father pursued a doctorate and eventually returned to Kenya. Obama and his mother stayed in Hawaii until he is 06 years old. Then they moved to Jakarta with his Indonesian step father. There he was able to witness the extreme poverty of a developing country.
His mother was very keen on his education where she personally taught him English lessons from a U.S. correspondence course to supplement his Indonesian schooling. And at the age of 10, he was returned to his grand parents in Hawaii to attend a prestigious college-prep academy, the Punahou School. His higher studies were done at Occidental College in California and later in Columbia University in New York City. He graduated in political science in 1983. Then he took up his first job as a director of a community development program targeted the poor neighborhoods in Chicago. With three years experience of such activism, he went to Harvard Law School and graduated magna cum laude in 1991. There he got the opportunity to become the first
African American president (editor in chief) of the Harvard Law Review. Then he returned to Chicago and started practicing civil-rights law on housing, employment discrimination and voting rights litigation. In 1993 he began the career as a senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago. In 1996 he became a Democratic member of the Illinois State Senate and represented the 13th legislative district. There he voiced on stopping racial profiling, medical coverage for uninsured children, death-penalty reforms and as a critic of the U.S.-Iraq War. He first tried to be elected for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1999 and failing which again attempted in 2004. As the keynote speaker in the Democratic Party’s national convention held in Boston in July 2004 he became a national spotlight. There he proclaimed that his African name “Barack” in a tolerant America is no barrier to success. And also he attending the best schools in the land, in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential. Obama won the general election held in November 2004 becoming the only African American member of the U.S. Senate and only the fifth in U.S. history. In 2007 he announced of his candidacy in 2008 presidential election for the Democratic Party’s nomination.