rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_883936c8-1d16-58ed-86c1-1877070c1199.jpg" alt="alt"/> Barack graduated from Harvard with a distinction.
The young Barack’s success at Harvard led to his first book deal, the poignant memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
Obama was offered lucrative corporate contracts, but turned them down to practise civil-rights law back in Chicago. He represented victims of housing and employment discrimination and worked on voting-rights legislation.
Barack and Michelle married on 10 October 1992. Stevie Wonder’s ‘You and I’ was their wedding song. Obama noted, ‘I think it’s fair to say that, had I not been a Stevie Wonder fan, Michelle might not have dated me. We might not have married. The fact that we agreed on Stevie was part of the essence of our courtship.’
Barack was an associate at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland law firm from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.
In 1992, Obama was one of the founding directors of Public Allies – an organisation which advances new leadership to strengthen communities, non-profits and civic participation. He resigned before his wife, Michelle, became the founding executive director of Public Allies Chicago in early 1993.
At the age of 31, Obama was named in the 1993 annual ‘40 under 40’ list published by Crain’s Chicago Business recognising the city’s young leaders, stating he had ‘galvanised Chicago’s political community, as no seasoned politico had before’.
Obama was brought into close contact with the city’s Democratic political elite when Michelle worked for Chicago’s powerful Mayor Richard M. Daley.
From 1994 to 2002, Obama sat on the boards of two foundations who backed social and political reform – the Woods Fund and the Joyce Foundation.
He was also president of the board of the Annenberg Challenge Grant, which distributed some $50 million in grants to public-school-reform efforts.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, Barack directed Illinois’s Project Vote, a voter-registration campaign which registered 150,000 of the state’s 400,000 unregistered African-Americans. This led to Carol Moseley Braun becoming the first African-American woman to claim a seat in the Senate.
Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center.
Obama was made Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School in 1996.
3
Political Obama
On 19 September 1995, 34-year-old Barack Obama announced his Democratic candidacy for the Illinois State Senate seat to an audience of 200 at the lakefront Ramada Inn in Chicago. The Illinois Senate was controlled by Republicans at the time. Springfield is home to the Illinois government.
While Barack was running for the Illinois State Senate seat, one veteran politician suggested Obama change his name, while another told him to put a picture of his light-skinned face on the campaign materials, ‘so people don’t see your name and think you’re some big dark guy’.
Obama’s mother, Ann, died of metastatic uterine cancer on 7 November 1995, aged 52. Barack went to Hawaii to help his half-sister Maya scatter their mother’s ashes over the Pacific. Before she died, Ann completed a 1,000-page thesis on peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia and had been working towards getting parts of it published.
Obama has said his biggest mistake was not being at his mother’s side when she died.
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance was published in 1995 to overwhelmingly positive reviews.
In the March 1996 primary election, Obama won the Democratic nomination for State Senator for the 13th District of Illinois.
On 5 November 1996, Obama was elected State Senator for the 13th District of Illinois, taking 82 per cent of the votes. That same year, President Bill Clinton became the first Democratic President to be awarded a second term in six decades.
Sworn in on 8 January 1997 for a two-year term as State Senator for the 13th District, Obama was made responsible for an area spanning Chicago’s poorer South Side neighbourhoods – from Hyde Park-Kenwood through South Shore and from the lakefront west through Chicago Lawn.
Obama lived in the Renaissance Inn on the edge of downtown Springfield while Michelle stayed back in Chicago. He played basketball at the YMCA in the morning and watched sports on TV, but always spoke to Michelle on the phone for an hour a night.
He took golf lessons and joined the senators’ poker night, to which he brought a six-pack of beer. His fellow-players were all over 50 and white.
Barack strongly wanted to lead black communities away from the unrealistic
