Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II was born on 4th August, 1961, at Honolulu, United States was the 44th president of the US between 2009 and 2017. He was the first Afro -American to hold the office of the President of the United States of America. Before his presidential term, Obama was the representative of Illinois in the U.S. Senate between 2005and 2008. In 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.

Obama was born to Barack Obama (Sr) who was a senior economist in the Kenyan government and S. Ann Dunham who grew up in Kansas, Texas, and Washington state before her family settled in Honolulu. In 1964, Ann and Barack Sr. divorced and Obama went with his mother Ann Dunham. Later Obama’s mother remarried, Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia, with whom she had a second child, Maya. Obama lived for several years in Jakarta with his mother, half-sister and stepfather. In 1971, Obama returned to Hawaii and lived in a modest apartment, with his grandparents and sometimes with his mother. Obama graduated from Punahou School, an elite college preparatory academy in Honolulu in the year 1979. Obama received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1983 from Columbia University. After working for a couple of years, he returned to school three years later and graduated magna cum laude in 1991 from Harvard University’s law school. He was the first Afro-American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. In 1992, Obama met Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer and married her. After completing his law degree, Obama moved to Chicago and became an active member of the Democratic Party. He organized a campaign to register Afro-Americans in to the voting rolls which helped Bill Clinton to win Illinois to capture the presidency in 1992. This campaign also helped Carol Moseley Braun to become the first Afro-American woman to get elected into the U.S. Senate. During this period, Obama published his first book – “The memoir, Dreams from My Father” in 1995 - the story of Obama’s search for his biracial identity by tracing the lives of his deceased father and his root family in Kenya.

After campaigning for nearly two years, Americans elected Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States on November 4th, 2008. Obama was the country’s first Afro-American president who was elected for a second consecutive time in the year 2012. Obama overpowered Republican opponent Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. During his second term in the office, Obama advocated for gun control after the shooting incident in Sandy Hook Elementary School, took several steps to fight climate change in the international level. Obama left the president’s office in 2017 with high approval ratings both within the US and among foreign advisories. Presently he is residing at Washington D.C. and active in politics, campaigning for candidates in various American elections, including in Biden's successful presidential bid in the 2020 presidential election. Other than politics, Obama has published three books: Dreams from My Father, The Audacity of Hope and A Promised Land in 1995, 2006 and 2020 respectively.