Barack Obama who is known in full as Barack Hussein Obama II was the third African American to elected since the end of reconstruction (1877). He was born on August 4, 1961, in Hawaii. His parents who met at University of Hawaii were Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. Obama lived with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia ... "I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child." Later on his mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham!
Launching the church-funded Developing Communities Project and, in particular, organising Altgeld Gardens residents to put pressure on Chicago's city hall to improve conditions in the poorly maintained public housing project was Obama's primary organising task. Some of his efforts were successful, but he came to the conclusion that, in the face of a challenging city bureaucracy "I just can't get things done here without a law degree".
Obama entered at Harvard Law School in 1988, where he excelled academically and graduated with honours. In 1990–1991 he was elected president of the esteemed Harvard Law Review. Obama was a leftist, but he won the election by convincing the conservative staffers of the newspaper that he would treat their views properly, which he is largely credited for doing. Obama attracted much media attention as the first African American president in the lengthy history of the legal review and received a contract from Random House to write a book about racial relations.
