Biographic - Sunday November 2, 2008 Comic Strip Licensing and Permissions

Transcript

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, his mother was a student at the University of Hawaii, which is where she met his father, a scholarship student student from Kenya. His father left to study at Harvard, when Barack was 2 and later returned to Kenya. The two were briefly reunited just once, for a month in 1971. His father was killed in a car crash in 1982. Following the divorce, his mother remarried, and Barack spent three years in Indonesia in the late 1960s. At the age of 10, he returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents. After graduating from High school in 1979, Barack spent two years studying at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to New York's Columbia University, from where he graduated with a B.A. in 1983. Two years later, he opted to put law school on hold, and moved to Chicago, to become a community organizer in poor areas blighted with crime and high unemployment . He entered Harvard Law School in 1988, becoming the first African-American editor of The Harvard Law review. After earning his degree, he returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law. He married Michelle Robinson in 1992. The same year his mother succombed to cancer. Barack and Michelle have two daughters. Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, where he served until 2004, when he became only the third african-american since the reconstruction to be elected to the U.S. senate. That same year, he was catapulted into the media spotlight when he delivered the keynote address to the democratic national convention. The acclaimed author of two best-selling books, he accepted his party's 2008 presidential nomination before a crowd of 84,000 supporters in Denver, Colorado.

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