It put the relatively unknown, young senator in the national spotlight. That July, Obama gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, shooting to national prominence with his eloquent call for unity among “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states. After his original Republican opponent in the general election, Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race, the former presidential candidate Alan Keyes stepped in. He won 52 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, defeating both multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes. Senate seat in 2004 after only one term, Obama decided to run. When Republican Peter Fitzgerald announced that he would vacate his U.S. READ NOW Barack Obama’s Speech At the 2004 Democratic National Convention occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” I’m opposed to dumb wars…I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U. Bush’s push to war with Iraq.ĭuring a rally at Chicago’s Federal Plaza in October 2002, he spoke against a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq: “I am not opposed to all wars. As a state senator, Obama notably went on record as an early opponent of President George W. House of Representatives seat held by the popular four-term incumbent Bobby Rush. Re-elected in 1998 and again in 2002, Obama also ran unsuccessfully in the 2000 Democratic primary for the U. He helped create a state earned-income tax credit that benefited the working poor, promoted subsidies for early childhood education programs and worked with law enforcement officials to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases. Despite tight Republican control during his years in the state senate, Obama was able to build support among both Democrats and Republicans in drafting legislation on ethics and health care reform. In 1996, Obama officially launched his own political career, winning election to the Illinois State Senate as a Democrat from the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park. Obama went on to teach at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2003. He married Michelle Obama at the Trinity United Church of Christ on October 3, 1992.
Obama met his future wife-Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, a fellow Harvard Law School grad-while working as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin. Obama would later call the experience “the best education I ever got, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,” the prestigious institution he entered in 1988. For the next several years, he worked with low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on the city’s largely Black South Side. While at Harvard, he became the first Black editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.īarack Obama, Community Organizer and AttorneyĪfter a two-year stint working in corporate research and at the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago, where he took a job as a community organizer with a church-based group, the Developing Communities Project. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1991. After two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, from which he graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science. He attended the Punahou School, an elite private school where, as he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, he first began to understand the tensions inherent in his mixed racial background.
Barack Obama’s EducationĪt age 10, Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born in Jakarta in 1970. She and her new husband, an Indonesian man named Lolo Soetoro, moved with her young son to Jakarta in the late 1960s, where Ann worked at the U.S. He would see his son only once more before dying in a car accident in 1982. Obama’s parents later separated, and Barack Sr. Barack and Ann’s son, Barack Hussein Obama Jr., was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.ĭid you know? Not only was Obama the first African American president, he was also the first to be born outside the continental United States. Army in World War II before moving his family to Hawaii in 1959. He won a scholarship to study economics at the University of Hawaii, where he met and married Ann Dunham, a white woman from Wichita, Kansas, whose father had worked on oil rigs during the Great Depression and fought with the U.S. Obama’s father, also named Barack Hussein Obama, grew up in a small village in Nyanza Province, Kenya, as a member of the Luo ethnicity.
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