Biography on barack obama parents names

Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Hawaii. His parents, who met as students at the University of Hawaii, were Ann Dunham, a white American from Kansas, and Barack Obama Sr., a black Kenyan studying in the United States. Obama's father left the family when Obama was two and, after further studies at Harvard University, returned to Kenya, where he died in an automobile accident nineteen years later. After his parents divorced, Obama's mother married another foreign student at the University of Hawaii, Lolo Soetoro of Indonesia. From age six through ten, Obama lived with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia, where he attended Catholic and Muslim schools. “I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child,” Obama later recalled. “And so what I benefited from is a multiplicity of cultures that all fed me.”

Concerned for his education, Obama’s mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, and to attend Hawaii’s prestigious Punahou School from fifth grade through graduation from high school. While Obama was in school, his mother divorced Soetoro, returned to Hawaii to study cultural anthropology at the university, and then went back to Indonesia to do field research. Living with his grandparents, Obama was a good but not outstanding student at Punahou. He played varsity basketball and, as he later admitted, “dabbled in drugs and alcohol,” including marijuana and cocaine. As for religion, Obama later wrote, because his parents and grandparents were nonbelievers, “I was not raised in a religious household.”

Obama's mother, who “to the end of her life [in 1995] would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal,” deeply admired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and taught her son, he later wrote, that “To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burden

Kenyan economist; father of Barack Obama (1934–1982)

Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (; born Baraka Obama, 18 June 1934 – 24 November 1982) was a Kenyan senior governmental economist and the father of Barack Obama, the 44thpresident of the United States. He is a central figure of his son's memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995). Obama married in 1954 and had two children with his first wife, Kezia. He was selected for a special program to attend college in the United States and studied at the University of Hawaii where he met Stanley Ann Dunham, whom he married in 1961 following the conception of his son, Barack. Obama and Dunham divorced three years later. Obama then went to Harvard University for graduate school, where he earned an M.A. in economics, and returned to Kenya in 1964. He saw his son Barack once more, when his son was about 10.

In late 1964, Obama Sr. married Ruth Beatrice Baker, a Jewish-American woman he had met in Massachusetts. They had two sons together before separating in 1971 and divorcing in 1973. Obama first worked for an oil company, before beginning work as an economist with the Kenyan Ministry of Transport. He was promoted to senior economic analyst in the Ministry of Finance. He was among a cadre of young Kenyan men who had been educated in the West in a program supported by Tom Mboya. Obama Sr. had conflicts with Kenyan presidentJomo Kenyatta, which adversely affected his career. He was fired and blacklisted in Kenya, finding it nearly impossible to get a job. Obama Sr. was involved in three serious car accidents during his final years; he died as a result of the last one in 1982.

Early life

Barack Obama Sr. was born in 1934 in Rachuonyo District on the shores of Lake Victoria just outside Kendu Bay, Kenya, at the time a colony and protectorate of the British Empire. He was raised in the village of Nyang'

• Former president Barack Obama has written extensively about his parents and family, and continues to tell their story in his new memoir A Promised Land.
• His father, Barack Obama Sr., was a successful Kenyan economist, while his mother Ann Dunham was an accomplished American anthropologist.
• Here's what we know about the pair, including how they met while studying at the University of Hawaii in 1960.

"I am the son of a Black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas," former president Barack Obama famously said in a 2008 campaign speech in Philadelphia. Obama wasn't the first president (nor the last) to have a parent born outside of the United States, but his status as the first bi-racial president and an unconventional childhood—which began in Honolulu, Hawaii, and included time in Seattle, and Indonesia—made his upbringing the subject of much attention.

Per NPR, which excerpted A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother by Janny Scott, his mom, Stanley Ann Dunham (who went by Ann) and dad, Barack Obama Sr. met in 1960, and had their son in 1961. Though the two were not together for long, their lives remained intertwined as each went on to successful careers in the worlds of academia and international development.

As far back as a 2006 interview with Oprah, Obama spoke openly about his diverse family, joking about how different they looked from one another—and his wife, Michelle Obama's, reaction to his diverse crew.

"Michelle will tell you that when we get together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, it's like a little mini-United Nations," he said. "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher. We've got it all."

The lives (and travels) of Obama's parents have been central to his public life, dating back to the racist and unfounded "birtherism" movement that alleged, without ev

Personal

Barack Hussein Obama II was born August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to parents Barack H. Obama, Sr., and Stanley Ann Dunham. His parents divorced when he was 2 years old and he was raised by his mother, Ann, and maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham. His motherlater married Lolo Soetoro, and his sister Maya was born in 1970. (He also has several siblings on his father’s side.)

Obama moved with his family to Indonesia in 1967, where he attended local Indonesian schools and received additional lessons via U.S. correspondence courses under his mother’s direction.

He returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents in 1971 and attended Punahou School, from which he graduated in 1979. Obama first attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, before transferring to Columbia University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1983.

After graduation, Obama briefly worked as an analyst at Business International Corporation in New York City, before changing his career direction toward community service organizing. He relocated to Chicago, Illinois, in 1985 when he accepted a job with the Developing Communities Project. Eventually rising to the role of Director, Obama worked with low-income communities on Chicago’s South Side, often collaborating with local religious organizations and civic groups.

After three years of community organizing, Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School. After completing his first year, he worked as a summer associate at Chicago corporate law firm of Sidley & Austin, where his mentor was Michelle Robinson, his future wife.

Obama was elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, prior to graduating magna cum laude in 1991. He returned to Chicago in 1992 and served as the Illinois Executive Director of PROJECT VOTE!. In 1993, he was hired as an associate at the firm of Davis Miner Barnhill & Gallard, where he largely worked on voting