Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961,[3] at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii.[4][5][6][7] He is the only president born outside the contiguous 48 states.[8] He was born to an 18-year-old American mother and a 27-year-old Kenyan father. His mother, Ann Dunham (1942–1995), was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was of English, Welsh, German, Swiss, and Irish descent. In 2007 it was discovered her great-great-grandfather Falmouth Kearney emigrated from the village of Moneygall, Ireland to the U.S. in 1850.[9] In July 2012, Ancestry.com found a strong likelihood that Dunham was descended from John Punch, an ensled African man who lived in the Colony of Virginia during the seventeenth century.[10][11][12] Obama has described the ancestors of his grandparents as Scotch-Irish mostly.[13] Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr. (1934–1982),[14] was a married[15][16][17] Luo Kenyan from Nyang'oma Kogelo.[15][18] His last name, Obama, was derived from his Luo descent.[19] Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on a scholarship.[20][21] The couple married in Wailuku, Hawaii, on February 2, 1961, six months before Obama was born.[22][23]
In late August 1961, a few weeks after he was born, Barack and his mother moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where they lived for a year. During that time, Barack's father completed his undergraduate degree in economics in Hawaii, graduating in June 1962. He left to attend graduate school on a scholarship at Harvard University, where he earned a Master of Arts in economics. Obama's parents divorced in March 1964.[24] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964, where he married for a third time and worked for the Kenyan government as the senior economic analyst in the Ministry of Finance.[25][page needed] He visited his son in Hawaii only once, at Christmas 1971,[26] before he was killed in an automobile accident in 1982, when Obama was 21 years old.[27] Recalling his early childhood, Obama said: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."[21] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.[28]
In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro at the University of Hawaiʻi; he was an Indonesian East–West Center graduate student in geography. The couple married on Molokai on March 15, 1965.[29] After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966. His wife and stepson followed sixteen months later in 1967. The family initially lived in the Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet district of South Jakarta. From 1970, they lived in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng district of Central Jakarta.[30]
Education Obama's Indonesian school record in St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Elementary School. Obama was enrolled as "Barry Soetoro" (no. 1), and was wrongly recorded as an Indonesian citizen (no. 3) and a Muslim (no. 4).[31]When he was six years old, Obama and his mother had moved to Indonesia to join his stepfather. From age six to ten, he was registered in school as "Barry"[31] and attended local Indonesian-language schools: Sekolah Dasar Katolik Santo Fransiskus Asisi (St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Elementary School) for two years and Sekolah Dasar Negeri Menteng 01 (State Elementary School Menteng 01) for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert School homeschooling by his mother.[32][33] As a result of his four years in Jakarta, he was able to speak Indonesian fluently as a child.[34] During his time in Indonesia, Obama's stepfather taught him to be resilient and ge him "a pretty hardheaded assessment of how the world works".[35]
In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. He attended Punahou School—a private college preparatory school—with the aid of a scholarship from fifth grade until he graduated from high school in 1979.[36] In high school, Obama continued to use the nickname "Barry" which he kept until making a visit to Kenya in 1980.[37] Obama lived with his mother and half-sister, Maya Soetoro, in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii.[38] Obama chose to stay in Hawaii when his mother and half-sister returned to Indonesia in 1975, so his mother could begin anthropology field work.[39] His mother spent most of the next two decades in Indonesia, divorcing Lolo Soetoro in 1980 and earning a PhD degree in 1992, before dying in 1995 in Hawaii following unsuccessful treatment for ovarian and uterine cancer.[40]
Of his years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered — to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect — became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."[41] Obama has also written and talked about using alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind".[42] Obama was also a member of the "Choom Gang" (the slang term for smoking marijuana), a self-named group of friends who spent time together and smoked marijuana.[43][44]
College and research jobs
After graduating from high school in 1979, Obama moved to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College on a full scholarship. In February 1981, Obama made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to participate in the disinvestment from South Africa in response to that nation's policy of apartheid.[45] In mid-1981, Obama treled to Indonesia to visit his mother and half-sister Maya and visited the families of college friends in Pakistan for three weeks.[45] Later in 1981, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City as a junior, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations[46] and in English literature[47] and lived off-campus on West 109th Street.[48] He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983 and a 3.7 GPA. After graduating, Obama worked for about a year at the Business International Corporation, where he was a financial researcher and writer,[49][50] then as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group on the City College of New York campus for three months in 1985.[51][52][53]
Community organizer and Harvard Law School
Two years after graduating from Columbia, Obama moved from New York to Chicago when he was hired as director of the Developing Communities Project, a faith-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale on Chicago's South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.[52][54] He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.[55] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.[56] In mid-1988, he treled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time.[57][58]
Quick facts External videos ...External videos Derrick Bell threatens to lee Harvard, April 24, 1990, 11:34, Boston TV Digital Archive[59] Student Barack Obama introduces Professor Derrick Bell starting at 6:25.CloseDespite being offered a full scholarship to Northwestern University School of Law, Obama enrolled at Harvard Law School in the fall of 1988, living in nearby Somerville, Massachusetts.[60] He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year,[61] president of the journal in his second year,[55][62] and research assistant to the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe while at Harvard.[63] During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.[64] Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention[55][62] and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations,[65] which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.[65] Obama graduated from Harvard Law in 1991 with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude.[66][61]
University of Chicago Law School
In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book.[65][67] He then taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, first as a lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and then as a senior lecturer from 1996 to 2004.[68]
From April to October 1992, Obama directed Illinois's Project Vote, a voter registration campaign with ten staffers and seven hundred volunteer registrars; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African Americans in the state, leading Crain's Chicago Business to name Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be.[69]
Family and personal life Main article: Family of Barack ObamaIn a 2006 interview, Obama highlighted the diversity of his extended family: "It's like a little mini-United Nations," he said. "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher."[70] Obama has a half-sister with whom he was raised (Maya Soetoro-Ng) and seven other half-siblings from his Kenyan father's family, six of them living.[71] Obama's mother was survived by her Kansas-born mother, Madelyn Dunham,[72] until her death on November 2, 2008,[73] two days before his election to the presidency. Obama also has roots in Ireland; he met with his Irish cousins in Moneygall in May 2011.[74] In Dreams from My Father, Obama ties his mother's family history to possible Native American ancestors and distant relatives of Jefferson Dis, President of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. He also shares distant ancestors in common with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, among others.[75][76][77]
Obama lived with anthropologist Sheila Miyoshi Jager while he was a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s.[78] He proposed to her twice, but both Jager and her parents turned him down.[78][79] The relationship was not made public until May 2017, several months after his presidency had ended.[79]
Obama poses in the Green Room of the White House with wife Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia, September 2009In June 1989, Obama met Michelle Robinson when he was employed at Sidley Austin.[80] Robinson was assigned for three months as Obama's adviser at the firm, and she joined him at several group social functions but declined his initial requests to date.[81] They began dating later that summer, became engaged in 1991, and were married on October 3, 1992.[82] After suffering a miscarriage, Michelle underwent in vitro fertilization to conceive their children.[83] The couple's first daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998,[84] followed by a second daughter, Natasha ("Sasha"), in 2001.[85] The Obama daughters attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. When they moved to Washington, D.C., in January 2009, the girls started at the Sidwell Friends School.[86] The Obamas had two Portuguese Water Dogs; the first, a male named Bo, was a gift from Senator Ted Kennedy.[87] In 2013, Bo was joined by Sunny, a female.[88] Bo died of cancer on May 8, 2021.[89]
Obama is a supporter of the Chicago White Sox, and he threw out the first pitch at the 2005 ALCS when he was still a senator.[90] In 2009, he threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the All-Star Game while wearing a White Sox jacket.[91] He is also primarily a Chicago Bears football fan in the NFL, but in his childhood and adolescence was a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers and rooted for them ahead of their victory in Super Bowl XLIII 12 days after he took office as president.[92] In 2011, Obama invited the 1985 Chicago Bears to the White House; the team had not visited the White House after their Super Bowl win in 1986 due to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.[93] He plays basketball, a sport he participated in as a member of his high school's varsity team,[94] and he is left-handed.[95]
In 2005, the Obama family applied the proceeds of a book deal and moved from a Hyde Park, Chicago condominium to a $1.6 million house (equivalent to $2.6 million in 2024) in neighboring Kenwood, Chicago.[96] The purchase of an adjacent lot—and sale of part of it to Obama by the wife of developer, campaign donor and friend Tony Rezko—attracted media attention because of Rezko's subsequent indictment and conviction on political corruption charges that were unrelated to Obama.[97]
In December 2007, Money Magazine estimated Obama's net worth at $1.3 million (equivalent to $2 million in 2024).[98] Their 2009 tax return showed a household income of $5.5 million—up from about $4.2 million in 2007 and $1.6 million in 2005—mostly from sales of his books.[99][100] On his 2010 income of $1.7 million, he ge 14 percent to non-profit organizations, including $131,000 to Fisher House Foundation, a charity assisting wounded veterans' families, allowing them to reside near where the veteran is receiving medical treatments.[101][102] Per his 2012 financial disclosure, Obama may be worth as much as $10 million.[103]
Religious viewsObama is a Protestant Christian whose religious views developed in his adult life.[104] He wrote in The Audacity of Hope that he "was not raised in a religious household." He described his mother, raised by non-religious parents, as being detached from religion, yet "in many ways the most spiritually awakened person ... I he ever known", and "a lonely witness for secular humanism." He described his father as a "confirmed atheist" by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as "a man who saw religion as not particularly useful." Obama explained how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand "the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change."[105]
The Obamas worship at African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., January 2013In January 2008, Obama told Christianity Today: "I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and he eternal life."[106] On September 27, 2010, Obama released a statement commenting on his religious views, saying:
I'm a Christian by choice. My family didn't—frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. And my mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn't raise me in the church. So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead—being my brothers' and sisters' keeper, treating others as they would treat me.[107][108]
Obama met Trinity United Church of Christ pastor Jeremiah Wright in October 1987 and became a member of Trinity in 1992.[109] During Obama's first presidential campaign in May 2008, he resigned from Trinity after some of Wright's statements were criticized.[110] Since moving to Washington, D.C., in 2009, the Obama family has attended several Protestant churches, including Shiloh Baptist Church and St. John's Episcopal Church, as well as Evergreen Chapel at Camp Did, but the members of the family do not attend church on a regular basis.[111][112][113]
In 2016, Obama said that he gets inspiration from a few items that remind him "of all the different people I've met along the way", adding: "I carry these around all the time. I'm not that superstitious, so it's not like I think I necessarily he to he them on me at all times." The items, "a whole bowl full", include rosary beads given to him by Pope Francis, a figurine of the Hindu deity Hanuman, a Coptic cross from Ethiopia, a small Buddha statue given by a monk, and a metal poker chip that used to be the lucky charm of a motorcyclist in Iowa.[114][115]