By Rochelle Alexander

President Barack Obama our 44th President is the first black to hold this office, which he held for two terms. President Obama was born August 4, 1961, in Hawaii. His father, a black man from Kenya, left the family when he was two after studying at Harvard. He was raised “as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child.” He stated “so what I benefited from is a multiplicity of cultures that all fed me.” His mother, a white woman from Kansas, “to the end of her life (in 1995) would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal,” deeply admired the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. She taught him “To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”

When he was in the 5th grade, his mom was concerned with his education. She sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents. His parents and grandparents were nonbelievers. “I was not raised in a religious household. “ His relationship with his white grandfather was difficult. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

President Obama left Hawaii to attend college. He first enrolled at Occidental College in Los Angeles for his freshman and sophomore years and then Columbia University in New York City. He read deeply and widely about political and international affairs, graduating from Columbia with a political science major in 1983. He spent an additional year in New York as a researcher with Business International Group, a global business consulting firm. He accepted an offer to work as a community organizer in Chicago’s largely poor and black South Side. A biographer, David Mendell notes in his 2007 book Obama:From Promise to Power, the job gave President Obama “his first deep immersion into the African American community he had longed to both understand and belong to.” His main assignment was to launch the church funded Developing Communities Project and in particular to organize residents to pressure Chicago’s City Hall to improve conditions in the poorly maintained housing project. Though he had some success, he concluded that faced with a complex city bureaucracy, “I just can’t get things done here without a law degree. In 1988 he enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he was an excellent student, graduating magna cumulative lauded and winning the election as president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review for the academic year of 1990-91.

In 1995 he wrote the book Dreams from My Father: A Stott of Race and Inheritance. The book was mostly personal memoirs, focusing on his struggle to come to terms with his identity as a black man raised by whites.

While serving his internship at Chicago’s Sidley and Austin Law Firm he met Ms. Michelle Robinson, a South Side native and Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate, who supervised his work. They were married in 1992. Their first daughter, Malia Ann was born in 1998 and their second daughter Natasha (Sasha) was born in 2001.

After directing Illinois Project Vote, a voter registration drive aimed at increasing black turnout in the 1992 election, he accepted the position as an attorney with the civil rights law firm of Miner, Barnhill and Galland. He launched his first campaign for political office in 1996. February 10. 2007 he announced his presidential candidacy. He won the November 2008 election to become our 44th President of the United States. Though President Obama meet much hostility and racism both he and the First Lady have been nothing but classy and inspiring. As First Lady Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high”.