Barrack Obama: The Early Years

Barrack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4th 1961 to Barrack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. He is only the fifth African American to ever be elected to the U.S. Senate and currently is the only African American serving in the U.S. Senate. He is among the Democratic Party's leading candidates for nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Born to a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, Obama had a very diverse cultural upbringing. His parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. His father died in a car accident in Kenya when Obama was 21. He spent his entire childhood in the U.S. state of Hawaii except for four years between ages 6-10 which he spent living in Jakarta Indonesia with his mother and his step-father Lolo Soetoro. After his short time in Indonesia he returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents until his graduation in 1979. Obama talks about his diverse childhood in his memoir Dreams From My Father in which he writes: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me-that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk-barely registered in my mind." The main focus of the memoir relates his struggles as a young man trying to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage and his use of alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years in order to cope with the pressures and questions of working out his identity in his mind.