Early life

Obama’s birth parents divorced in 1963 when his mother discovered Barack Obama Sr. was already married to a woman living in Kenya.  When Obama was 2 years old his mother married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian geologist. At age 6 his mother and adoptive father took him to Jakarta, Indonesia for 4 years while his mother pursued a Ph.D. in Anthropology requiring fieldwork there.   His mother then abandoned him in Hawaii with his grandparents (Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, who had moved to Hawaii in 1959) so she could return to Indonesia after her divorce. Obama’s grandfather arranged for his friend, the noted Communist writer Frank Marshall Davis, to serve as a mentor and role model for an impressionable African-American youth.

Other siblings of Obama’s include his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng and 7 other children born to his father by 4 different women. For much of his early life, prior to his transfer to Columbia University, he went by his nickname, “Barry.” In the summer of 1988, before attending Harvard Law School (he’d just been accepted), he visited Kogelo, Kenya, to learn more about his father’s family. When his mother died in 1995, he and his sister Maya scattered her ashes over Hawaii’s south shore.

Personal life

Michelle (Robinson) Obama, wife of Barack Obama.

Barack Obama met his future wife, an attorney named Michelle Robinson, herself a recent Harvard Law School graduate, while he was an intern and she was on staff at Sidley Austin LLP, a prestigious corporate law firm.[15] Despite company policy prohibiting relations between staff and interns, the two started dating. The two continued dating long-distance while he finished law school, and on October 18, 1992,[27] were married by Reverend Jeremiah Wright at Trinity United Church.[25] In 1999, their first child was born, Malia, and in 2001, another daughter, Natasha (often called Sasha).[15]

Obama attended Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church from 1984-1988 during his time as a community organizer (See 1985-1988, Community Organizer section). Obama credits Wright with his alleged conversion to Christianity, and had both his daughters, Sasha and Malia, baptized there.

Education

At age 6, Obama attended schools in Indonesia, the first a Catholic School while he was in Kindergarten, and later a public school. The school had mostly Muslim students (since most Indonesians are Muslim). In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes, “In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to my mother that I had made faces during Koranic studies.” Insight magazine first reported Hillary Clinton’s organization had “questions about Obama’s Muslim background: Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?”

In 1971, at age 10, Barack Obama moved to Hawaii, and his grandparents helped him gain entrance to the prestigious Punahou Academy in Honolulu where he began substance abuse and illegal drugs.   He was accepted through a scholarship for disadvantaged minorities while he was in 5th grade.   At this elite high school with 1,200 students he was just 1 of 3 black students, and couldn’t make the starting lineup of the state champion basketball team his senior year. He wrote a poem for the school’s literary magazine, Ka Wai Ola.

In 1979, he began a 2-year stint at Occidental College college in Los Angeles,  and then transferred to Columbia University in New York, which he graduated from in 1983.  During this time he published an anti-military tirade embracing Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s proposal for a nuclear freeze in the campus newspaper and allegedly spoke at an Anti-Apartheid rally, although several prominent student leaders said they did not remember him there. Professor Michael L. Baron was impressed by Obama and wrote him a recommendation for Harvard Law School.   In the winter of 1988 Barack Obama decided to attend Harvard Law School, and left Chicago for Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his 2nd year a power struggle broke out among the dominant white liberals over control of the Harvard Law Review. Obama was elected its first black president as a compromise candidate largely with help of conservatives following a “marathon voting session” in which he finally won on the 19th ballot.   This led to national attention and numerous job offers, which Obama passed up, at age 30, to pursue his political career in Chicago.

Early Employment

1983-1984, Financial Analyst and Writer

In 1984 Obama worked as a writer and financial analyst for Business International Corporation to help pay off some of his student loans. Business International Corporation was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm which aided multinational companies in understanding overseas markets. Obama served as a writer/researcher for a company reference service, Financing Foreign Operations, and wrote for their newsletter, Business International Money Report. His supervisor was Cathy Lazere.

1984-1988, Community Organizer

In 1984, Obama was hired by the New York Public Interest Research Group, a non-profit organization promoting environmental, consumer, and government reforms. He also was paid just under $10,000 annually as a full-time organizer for Harlem’s City College to mobilize student volunteers.

From 1985-88, Obama worked as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago funded with a $25,000 grant by Bill Ayers’ Woods Fund. The New York Times reported he was paid $1,000 a year, with $2,000 extra for a car however stories vary wildly. Jerry Kellman, who hired him, says it was “$10,000 a year and a $2,000 car allowance”. Obama himself gave different numbers; his memoir says $10,000 (as well as the car), in his Wesleyan speech he gave it as “$12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car”, and when he announced his candidacy for president, it was “a group of churches had offered me a job as a community organizer for $13,000 a year”.

Ryan Lizza at The New Republic reported that “Jean Rudd of the Woods Fund…had provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to hire Obama”. Ari Berman reported in The Nation that the “[Woods Fund] gave a $25,000 grant to the Developing Communities Project, which hired Obama”. CBS Channel 2 in Chicago ran a story with a document showing that Obama’s proposed salary in 1987 was $25,000, a number that the Obama campaign confirmed while insisting at the same time his original salary was $13,000.

During this time Obama joined Reverend Wright’s Trinity United Church because in the words of Suzanne Malveaux of CNN, “It was the church to join if you wanted to be one of Chicago’s black movers and shakers.” At the time, community organizing involved close affiliation with churches, which was how Obama met Wright. Obama abandoned the fight against asbestos contamination in the Altgeld Gardens housing project to pursue personal interests and a career by enrollment at Harvard Law School in the winter of 1988.

1988-1996, Law Practice

In 1988 Obama gained work as a Summer Associate at one of the most prestigious corporate law firms in the world, Sidley Austin LLP, owned by Newton Minow, thanks to the recommendation of Minow’s daughter Martha, a professor at Harvard Law School. It was at Minow’s law firm that Obama would meet Michelle Robinson, his future wife. From 1993-96 he practiced civil rights law including suing Citibank to force them into making subprime mortgages to unqualified minority borrowers.  After graduating from Harvard he was hired by Miner, Barnhill, & Galland, a small politically-connected law firm.   It was at Miner, Barnhill, & Galland that he would meet influential real estate developer Tony Rezko.

1991-1992, Project Vote

In 1991 Obama was recruited by Sandy Newman to head the Chicago chapter of Project Vote, and in 1992 was the Executive Director, overseeing a voter registration drive which registered 125,000 black voters and was credited with defeating popular incumbent Democrat Senator Alan Dixon in the primary and electing Carol Mosely Braun as a reprisal for Dixon’s support for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

1995, Nation of Islam

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, prior to the information being scrubbed from its website in mid-April 2008 during the Democratic Presidential Primaries, Obama was one of three prominent organizers of black supremacist group the Nation of Islam’s Million Man March on Washington, D.C.

1992-2004, Lecturer at University of Chicago

Obama taught part-time at the University of Chicago Law School[26] from 1992-2004. Though Obama erroneously describes himself as a “constitutional law professor”, he was actually only a senior lecturer and the class he taught the most times was called “Current Issues in Racism and the Law”.  He was a Lecturer from 1992–96, teaching 3 courses per year, and a senior lecturer from 1996-2004. After Obama was criticized for lying about his job title, the University of Chicago released a statement stating that senior lecturers are considered Law School faculty and regarded as professors but not full-time or tenured. Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time, tenured track position several times during this period but declined each time.

1995, Author

In 1995 Obama published Dreams From My Father about his life and family background.

Personal Awards

2009 Nobel Peace Prize

On October 9, 2009 Barack H. Obama became the third sitting U.S. President to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.  Obama stated that he was “surprised and deeply humbled” to receive the unexpected award, and also said, “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize—men and women who have inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace”. The award was widely criticized given Obama’s then lack of accomplishments.

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