How Barack Obama became the first Black president of the United StatesAn overview of Barack Obama.(more)See all videos for this articleObama’s father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a teenage goatherd in rural , won a scholarship to study in the , and eventually became a senior economist in the Kenyan government. Obama’s mother, , grew up in , , and state before her family settled in . In 1960 she and Barack Sr. met in a class at the and married less than a year later. When Obama was age two, Barack Sr. left to study at ; shortly thereafter, in 1964, Ann and Barack Sr. divorced. (Obama saw his father only one more time, during a brief visit when Obama was 10.) Later Ann remarried, this time to another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro from , with whom she had a second child, Maya. Obama lived for several years in with his half sister, mother, and stepfather. While there, Obama attended both a government-run school where he received some instruction in and a private school where he took part in Christian schooling. He returned to in 1971 and lived in a modest apartment, sometimes with his grandparents and sometimes with his mother (she remained for a time in Indonesia, returned to Hawaii, and then went abroad again—partly to pursue work on a Ph.D.—before divorcing Soetoro in 1980). For a brief period his mother was aided by government food stamps, but the family mostly lived a middle-class existence. In 1979 Obama graduated from Punahou School, an elite college preparatory academy in Honolulu. Obama attended in suburban for two years and then transferred to in , where in 1983 he received a in . Influenced by professors who pushed him to take his studies more seriously, Obama experienced great intellectual growth during college and for a couple of years thereafter. He led a rather ascetic life and read works of and by , , , and others. After serving for a couple of years as a writer and editor for Business International Corp., a research, publishing, and consulting firm in , he took a position in 1985 as a community organizer on ’s largely impoverished Far South Side. He returned to school three years later and graduated magna cum laude in 1991 from ’s law school, where he was the first African American to serve as of the Harvard Law Review. While a summer associate in 1989 at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin, Obama had met Chicago native , a young lawyer at the firm. The two married in 1992., Barack Hussein Obama II[a] (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president., Barack Obama (born August 4, 1961, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.) is the 44th president of the United States (2009–17) and the first African American to hold the office. Before winning the presidency, Obama represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate (2005–08)..