Brief biography of barack obama
The climax of Barack Obama’s memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” occurs in rural Kenya when the author sits between the graves of his father and his grandfather and weeps.
Biography of barack obama president: Kobena Eyi Acquah (born ) is a Ghanaian lawyer and poet. [1] His debut collection, The Man Who Died (), won the British Airways Commonwealth Prize for Poetry. [2] The dramatized performance of his Music for a Dream Dance "remains one of the most memorable events in the recent history of the poetic scene in Ghana". [3].
Obama, then in his late twenties, hardly knew his father and never met his grandfather, but in the course of writing the book he had learned their stories in devastating detail. Both were proud, ambitious men who travelled far from the Luo-speaking villages where they grew up—indeed, Obama’s grandmother still has her son’s Harvard diploma hanging in her house nearby.
Their respective struggles in the world ended painfully, in bitter loneliness. Beside their graves, Obama, a middle-class American, both mourns and, for the first time, understands his African forebears.
People in Illinois seem largely unaware of Obama’s long, annealing trip into their midst, although they often remark on his unusual calm.
Now forty-two and a state senator, Obama emerged, in March, from a raucous primary as the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate. In a seven-person field, he received a remarkable fifty-three per cent of the vote—he even won the “collar” counties around Chicago, communities that supposedly would never support a black candidate.
And everyone recalls that, as the votes were being tallied at his headquarters on Election Night, he seemed to be the least agitated person in the place.
Obama’s Republican opponent in November will be Jack Ryan, a wealthy political neophyte. The seat they are competing for is now held by a Republican, Peter Fitzgerald, who is retiring.
An Obama victory thus would move the Senate Democrats, at present outnumbered fifty-one to forty-eight, one seat closer to a majority. It also would make Obama only the third African-American to serve in the Senate since Reconstruction.
On a raw, rainy late-April day in Springfield, the state capital, Obama, who represents a district on Chicago’s South Side, ducked out of the statehouse for a meeting with labor leaders from southern Illinois at an A.F.L.-C.I.O.
building down the street. “This is a kiss-and-make-up session,” he told me as we entered a ground-floor conference room—the state A.F.L.-C.I.O. had supported one of his opponents in the Democratic primary. Twenty-five white males, in windbreakers and golf shirts, sat around the room.
Kobena eyi acquah biography of barack obama Barack Obama undoubtedly possesses one of the most complicated — and fascinating — backgrounds of any former president of the United States. And yet, in hindsight, his political ascent makes almost perfect sense. Because his presidency ended so recently, and due to his young age, it could be three decades or more before the definitive biography of Obama is written. To wrap up this six-year journey through the best biographies of the presidents I read three books on Barack H. Unfortunately, the degree of satisfaction a reader achieves by patiently navigating its ten chapters is inadequate compensation for the persistently tedious experience.They represented the building trades—the painters’ union, the carpenters.
Obama, lanky and dapper in a dark suit, his shoulders almost strangely relaxed, seemed to know most of the men there. He broke the ice with a joke at the expense of Ed Smith, a huge, tough-looking delegate from Cairo. Obama had met Smith’s mother on a recent downstate swing and had discovered that “she’s the one who really calls the shots there.” Smith laughed, and the other delegates said they wanted her phone number.
Then Obama gave a short, blunt, pro-labor speech. The men eyed him carefully. Heads began nodding slowly, jaws set, as he drove his points home: “two hundred thousand jobs lost in Illinois under Bush; overtime rights under threat for eight million workers nationally; the right to organize being eroded.” Then he said, “I need your help,” and took questions.
The questions were terse, specific, well informed.
They dealt with federal highway funding, non-union companies coming in from out of state on big contracts, the implications of the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement. Obama listened closely, and his answers were fluent and dauntingly knowledgeable, but he kept his language colloquial. “It’s not enough just to vote right,” he said.
“You gotta advocate. You gotta reframe the debate, use informal power. A lot of these bills coming up now are lose-lose for Democrats.”
“That’s right,” somebody said.
“I have a reputation as this abstract guy talking about civil rights,” Obama went on. “But anybody who knows my state legislative district knows I fight for our share of resources.
And I will fight for Illinois highway dollars.”
He mostly told the union men what they wanted to hear.
Then he said, “There’s nobody in this room who doesn’t believe in free trade,” which provoked a small recoil. These men were ardent protectionists. A little later, he said, with conviction, “I want India and China to succeed”—a sentiment not much heard in the outsourcing-battered heartland. He went on, however, to criticize Washington and Wall Street for not looking after American workers.
Later, I asked him if he wasn’t waving a red flag in front of labor by talking about free trade.
“Look, those guys are all wearing Nike shoes and buying Pioneer stereos,” he said. “They don’t want the borders closed. They just don’t want their communities destroyed.”
Back at the statehouse, Obama, who is chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee, rushed from meeting to floor vote to committee room.
Everybody seemed to want a word with him. Terry Link, the senate majority whip, complained about Obama’s successes in a long-running poker game. “I’m putting his kids through college,” Link said.
Kobena eyi acquah biography of barack obama full
We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. Barack Obama was the 44 th president of the United States and the first Black commander-in-chief. He served two terms, from until The son of parents from Kenya and Kansas, Obama was born and raised in Hawaii. After serving on the Illinois State Senate, he was elected a U.Kirk Dillard, a leading Republican senator from the Chicago suburbs, looked chagrined when I asked him about Obama. “I knew from the day he walked into this chamber that he was destined for great things,” he said. “In Republican circles, we’ve always feared that Barack would become a rock star of American politics.” Still, Dillard was gracious. “Obama is an extraordinary man,” he said.
“His intellect, his charisma. He’s to the left of me on gun control, abortion.
But he can really work with Republicans.” Dillard and Obama have co-sponsored many bills. Though Dillard was unwilling to concede the general election to Obama, he described Illinois as “a major player in recognizing African-Americans. We are proudly the state that produced Abraham Lincoln.”
Obama was actually born in Hawaii. His father, also named Barack Obama, was a foreign student there.
His mother, Ann, was white, and only eighteen when she married his father. She and her parents, originally from Kansas, had moved to Honolulu. When her husband left for Harvard, she and their toddler stayed behind—there was no money in his scholarship for them to go East—and the father ultimately returned alone to Kenya, where he worked as a government economist.
Barack’s mother’s second marriage, to an Indonesian oil manager, occasioned a move to Jakarta, when Barack was six. He lived there for four years, and in his book he writes about his time in Indonesia as simultaneously lush and a harrowing exposure to tropical poverty—more harrowing, perhaps, for his mother than for the little boy who barely remembered any other life.
Then Barack returned to Hawaii, where he was brought up largely by his grandparents. The family lived in a small apartment—Barack’s grandfather was a furniture salesman and, later, an unsuccessful insurance agent; his grandmother worked in a bank—but Barack managed to get into Punahou School, Hawaii’s top prep academy.
Kobena eyi acquah biography of barack obama president The website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work. Barack Obama served as the 44th President of the United States. His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others. When Barack Obama was elected president in , he became the first African American to hold the office. The framers of the Constitution always hoped that our leadership would not be limited to Americans of wealth or family connections.His mother always said that he got his brains from his father, and he was raised on tales of his father’s brilliance. The great man wrote to them regularly, but, though he travelled around the world on official business for Kenya, he visited only once, when Barack was ten.
He was a black child, by American lights, but his mother and his grandparents—the only family he knew—were “white folks,” and his confusion was acute.
In “Dreams from My Father,” Obama describes how, as a teen-ager, he tried marijuana and cocaine. (“I guess you’d have to say I wasn’t a politician when I wrote the book,” he told me. “I wanted to show how and why some kids, maybe especially young black men, flirt with danger and self-destruction.”) He went to Columbia University, and liked New York, but he found the city’s racial tension inescapable.
It “flowed freely,” he wrote in his memoir—“not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well, where, no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between niggers and kikes. It was as if all middle ground had collapsed.”
Fired with political idealism, he decided to become a community organizer.
He wrote to organizations all over the United States, and finally got one reply, from Chicago. He moved there, going to work for a tiny, church-based group that was trying to help residents of poor South Side neighborhoods cope with a wave of plant closings. It was a humbling, exhausting, and only rarely edifying job; Obama stuck with it for three years.
“Chicago” is the longest section of his memoir, and in many ways the bleakest, for it tunnels deep into the bedrock of inner-city despair and inadequate politics and black selfdestruction. It is also an unsentimental celebration of the city, which has a rich lode of brash, bluesy charm, of course, but also was a place for a serious, talented, too cosmopolitan young African-American to sink some roots.
There is a lovely scene describing a black barbershop in Hyde Park that Obama wandered into soon after arriving in the city. He still gets his hair cut there, twenty years later.
Obama left organizing to attend Harvard Law School, and in he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Abner Mikva, a five-term congressman from Illinois who was at that time Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C.
circuit, tried to recruit Obama as a clerk, a position considered a stepping stone to clerking on the Supreme Court, but Obama turned him down.
Biography of barack obama early life 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. Did you know? Not only was Obama the first African American president, he was also the first to be born outside the continental United States. Obama was born in Hawaii in He would see his son only once more before dying in a car accident in“He could have gone to the most opulent of law firms,” David Axelrod, a longtime friend who is now Obama’s media adviser, said. “After Harvard, Obama could have done anything he wanted.” What he wanted was to practice civil-rights law in Chicago, and he did, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination and working on voting-rights legislation for a small public-interest firm.
He also began teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, although he declined to pursue a tenure-track post, hoping to save time for politics. And when he got the chance to run for the state senate in his district, which included both Hyde Park—the home of the university—and some of the poorest ghettos on the South Side, he jumped at it.
"People are whupped,” Obama told me.
“I’m whupped. My wife is whupped. Unless it’s your job to be curious, who really has the time to sit and ask questions and explore issues?”
He didn’t look whupped. Still loose and alert after a long day, Obama was sipping iced tea in a busy, Caribbean-themed restaurant in a small shopping center in Hyde Park. But he had already spent sixteen months running for the Senate—and seven years as a state senator—and he could ruefully sympathize with the political apathy of the average beleaguered citizen.
Tonight, he had turned his cell phone off and dismissed his aides; he just wanted to get home for the bedtimes of his daughters, who are two and five. His wife, Michelle, is also a lawyer, and their daily lives are the familiar three-ring American family circus—even without the steroidal additive of Barack’s political career. Yet Barack had been reluctant to take even a semester off from teaching while campaigning, partly because he needs the income.
To survive this campaign financially, the Obamas will take out a second mortgage on their apartment.
“Teaching keeps you sharp,” Obama said. “The great thing about teaching constitutional law”—his subject—“is that all the tough questions land in your lap: abortion, gay rights, affirmative action. And you need to be able to argue both sides.
I have to be able to argue the other side as well as Scalia does. I think that’s good for one’s politics.”
Every few minutes, our conversation was interrupted by passersby congratulating Obama on his primary victory. The people who stopped to shake his hand were black and white, old and young, professors and car mechanics.
Some Obama obviously knew. Others seemed to be strangers. He was affable with everyone, smiling warmly, but in exchanges that lasted more than a few seconds it was possible to see him slipping subtly into the idiom of his interlocutor—the blushing, polysyllabic grad student, the hefty black church-pillar lady, the hip-hop autoshop guy.
Black activists sometimes say that African-American kids need to become “bi-dialectic”—to speak both black English and standard English—to succeed. Obama, the biracial kid from Hawaii, speaks a full range of American vernaculars.
After each interruption, he would resume. Americans aren’t simply too tired to think about politics, he said; they’re being deliberately turned off.
“If you make political discourse sufficiently negative, more people will become cynical and stop paying attention. That leaves more space for special interests to pursue their agendas, and that’s how we end up with drug companies making drug policy, energy companies making energy policy, and multinationals making trade policy.”