Barack Obama Biography

Fast Facts

• Parents met while both attended the University of Hawaii
• His father was the first African student to attend the university
• Parents separated when he was 2, as his father moved to Boston to attend graduate school at Harvard; they divorced in 1964
• He would see his father only once more in his life, in 1971
• Mother remarried in 1967, to an Indonesian student studying at the University of Hawaii; the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, later that year
• In 1971, his mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents amid concerns for the quality of her son's education
• After graduating from Columbia, he worked in New York before moving to Chicago to become the director of the Developing Communities Project; helped establish numerous programs to benefit the South Side's underprivileged families
• In 1988, he left Chicago and entered Harvard Law School, where he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review
• He graduated magna cum laude in 1991
• Met his future wife, Michelle, when he worked at a Chicago law firm in June of 1989 and she was his mentor
• Served as a law-school professor at the University of Chicago from 1992 until 2004, when he was elected to the U
• S
• Senate
• Elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996
• Gained national prominence in 2004 thanks to his stirring performance as the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention
• Announced his presidential candidacy on February 10, 2007
• Became the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination after Hillary Rodham Clinton suspended her campaign in June 2008
• Became the first black U
• S
• president following his victory in the 2008 election, in which he defeated John McCain by a 365-to-173 electoral-vote margin
• In 2009, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to promote international diplomacy
• He became only the third sitting president to win the award, along with Theodore Roosevelt (1906) and Woodrow Wilson (1919)
• Defeated Mitt Romney in 2012 to secure a second term as president