target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_883936c8-1d16-58ed-86c1-1877070c1199.jpg" alt="alt"/> Barack was one of three black students at Punahou School, which is where he first became aware of racism and what it meant to be an African-American.
The Punahou basketball coach once upbraided the team for losing to ‘a bunch of niggers’.
As a teenager, Obama used alcohol, marijuana and cocaine to ‘push questions of who I was out of my mind’.
Obama once wrote, ‘The opportunity that Hawaii offered – to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect – became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear.’
Obama’s mother returned to Indonesia in 1975, when Barack was just 14, to do anthropological fieldwork for her PhD.
Obama graduated from high school in 1979.
UNIVERSITY AND EARLY CAREER
Obama won a scholarship to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles, one of the oldest liberal arts colleges on the West Coast. He had been accepted into several good colleges, but chose Occidental mainly because he’d met a girl from Brentwood while she was vacationing in Hawaii.
Obama helped the JV Tigers basketball team at Occidental to an undefeated season.
Barack also gave a brief but well-received speech to kick off an anti-apartheid demonstration.
Joking about a Mexican cleaning woman’s distress at the mess he and his friends had left after a party, Obama was jolted back to reality by a fellow black student: ‘You think that’s funny?’ she asked. ‘That could have been my grandmother, you know. She had to clean up after people for most of her life.’
At the end of his sophomore year, Obama transferred to Columbia University in New York. He majored in political science, specialising in international relations.
He told his relatives he wanted to be called Barack and not Barry.
While at Columbia, Barack became involved with the Black Student Organization and anti-apartheid activities.
Barack’s mother filed for divorce from Lolo in 1980.
Barack’s father remained sporadically in touch. He was in several alcohol-related car accidents in Kenya, one of which resulted in the loss of both legs, and he died in a car crash in Nairobi in 1982 at just 46 years old.
Barack’s mother went to Kenya after Obama Sr died. She met his first wife, Kezia, and they became the best of friends. Stanley Ann also received her master’s degree from the University of Hawaii in 1983.
Barack graduated from Columbia in 1983, with a double major in English literature and political science, and a determination to ‘organise black folks. At the grass roots.’
His first job out of college was as a financial writer at Business International, a research service in New York.
Obama joined a public interest group in New York, campaigning for upgrades to the city’s subway system.
In 1985, Chicago elected its first black Mayor, Harold Washington. Inspired by this, Obama moved there at the age of 24. He became director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organisation on Chicago’s far South Side. Between 1985 and 1988, the staff at DCP grew from one to thirteen and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000. Obama helped establish a job training programme, a tutoring programme for would-be college students and a tenants’ rights organisation, while he was also working as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organising institute.
Obama was baptised at the Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988, and toyed with becoming a preacher, a journalist or a novelist. Eventually, he decided to pursue a career in law and he gained a place at Harvard Law School in 1988.
Obama travelled to Kenya before starting at Harvard. He visited his relatives in the Nyanza province, and cried as he sat between the graves of his father and grandfather. Barack realised the struggles his father had faced, and it gave him a sense that the work he was doing, and would go on to do, was directly connected to his Kenyan family and their struggles.
He funded himself through Harvard using student loans and by working. One summer, Barack worked for Sidley Austin, an elite Chicago legal firm where he met his future wife Michelle, an attorney at the firm who was assigned as his adviser.
At 28 years old, Obama was elected president of The Harvard Law Review, making him the first black president in the legal journal’s 104-year history.
Barack had to persuade Michelle for a month before she went on a date with him.
On their first date, Michelle and Obama went to the Art Institute, strolled down Michigan Avenue and caught Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing. ‘It was fantastic,’ Michelle said. ‘He was definitely putting on the charm … It worked. He swept me off my feet.’
We clicked right away … by the end of that date it was over … I was sold,’ Michelle said.
