More about Obama

Here are some biographical facts about the first African-American to hold the nation’s highest office.

Name: Barack Hussain Obama

Age: 47

Birthdate: Aug. 4, 1961

Birthplace: Honolulu, Hawaii

Education: Columbia University; Harvard Law School

Family:   Barack Obama was born to a Kenyan father and a white American mother. His father, Barack Obama Sr., married his mother, Ann Dunham, while studying at the University of Hawaii. The couple separated two years after Obama was born. His father ultimately returned to Kenya, where he became a noted economist. He died in a car accident in 1982.He has seven half brothers and sisters in Kenya from his father’s other marriages, and a half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, from his mother’s second marriage.

Career: After finishing college in 1983, Obama worked for a New York financial consultancy and a consumer organization. He landed a job in Chicago in 1985 as an organizer for Developing Communities Project, a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods.

Three years later, Obama left to go to Harvard Law School, where he became the first black president of the law review. He worked as a summer associate at the Sidley Austin law firm in Chicago, where he met his future wife. After graduation from Harvard in 1991, Obama practiced civil rights law at a small firm in Chicago, then became a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago in 1993.