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A Biography
Joann F.
Price
greenwood biographies
greenwood press
Westport, Connecticut • London
iii
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Price, Joann F.
Barack Obama : a biography / Joann F. Price.
p. cm. — (Greenwood biographies, ISSN –)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: –0–––6 (alk.
paper) 1. Obama, Barack.
2. Presidential candidates—United States—Biography. 3. African
American legislators—United States—Biography. 4. Legislators—
United States—Biography. 5. United States. Congress. Senate—
Biography. 6. United States—Politics and government—–
7. Illinois—Politics and government—– I. Title.
EO23P75
—dc22
[B]
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
© by Joann F.
Price
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:
ISBN: –0–––6
ISSN: –
First published in
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z–).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
iv
Contents
Series Foreword ix
Introduction xi
Timeline: Events Significant to the Life of Barack Obama xiii
Chapter 1 Family History 1
Chapter 2 Formative Years in Hawaii and Indonesia 17
Chapter 3 College and Community Activism in Chicago 29
Chapter 4 A Trip to Kenya and Harvard Law School 41
Chapter 5 Teaching Constitutional Law, Marriage,
Family, and Illinois State Politics 51
Chapter 6 The Senator from the State of Illinois 65
Chapter 7 Best-selling Author, Michelle Obama, and
Another Trip to Africa 77
Chapter 8 Obamamania, an Exploratory Committee,
and the Announcement 85
Chapter 9 The Campaign for the Presidency 97
Chapter 10 The Campaign Continues
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Photo essay follows page 64
vii
Series Foreword
In response to high school and public library needs, Greenwood devel-
oped this distinguished series of full-length biographies specifically for
student use.
Prepared by field experts and professionals, these engaging
biographies are tailored for high school students who need challenging yet
accessible biographies. Ideal for secondary school assignments, the length,
format, and subject areas are designed to meet educators’ requirements
and students’ interests.
Greenwood offers an extensive selection of biographies spanning all
curriculum-related subject areas including social studies, the sciences,
literature and the arts, history and politics, as well as popular culture,
covering public figures and famous personalities from all time periods and
backgrounds, both historic and contemporary, who have made an impact
on American and/or world culture.
Greenwood biographies were chosen
based on comprehensive feedback from librarians and educators. Con-
sideration was given to both curriculum relevance and inherent interest.
The result is an intriguing mix of the well known and the unexpected, the
saints and sinners from long-ago history and contemporary pop culture.
Readers will find a wide array of subject choices from fascinating crime
figures like Al Capone to inspiring pioneers like Margaret Mead, from
the greatest minds of our time like Stephen Hawking to the most amazing
success stories of our day like J.
K. Rowling.
While the emphasis is on fact, not glorification, the books are meant
to be fun to read. Each volume provides in-depth information about the
subject’s life from birth through childhood, the teen years, and adulthood.
ix
SERIES FO REWO RD
A thorough account relates family background and education, traces
personal and professional influences, and explores struggles, accomplish-
ments, and contributions.
A timeline highlights the most significant life
events against a historical perspective. Bibliographies supplement the ref-
erence value of each volume.
Introduction
In no other country on earth is my story even possible.
—Barack Obama, July 27,
On July 27, , Illinois State Senator Barack Obama delivered the key-
note speech at the Democratic National Convention.
He said, “Tonight is
a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is
pretty unlikely.” When he finished his speech, the audience that listened
with rapt attention excitedly waved their arms, hats, and signs, thrilled
with what they had just heard. Afterward, those watching on television
said that they had stood and cheered, many admitting they danced.
Some
wondered what had just happened. For many Democrats, the speech was
electrifying and inspiring; for them, it was a joyful time. And those from
the other side of the political aisle who watched and listened had to agree:
this fresh face, this politico, unknown to nearly everyone in the coun-
try outside of his home state of Illinois, had just delivered a remarkable
speech.
Many asked, who is this man and where did he come from? They
asked why he was selected to deliver such an important speech at the
Democratic National Convention at a time described by many as a very
contentious time in U.S. politics.
In the speech that evening—a speech that he wrote himself and de-
livered without the use of a teleprompter—Barack Obama introduced
himself by first describing his father, born and raised in a small village in
Kenya, and his paternal grandfather, a cook and domestic servant who,
he said, had big dreams for his son.
He told the immense crowd that his
father, through hard work and perseverance, earned a scholarship to study
xi
xii Introduction
in a magical place called America, which to his Kenyan countrymen was a
place of freedom and opportunity. Barack told the excited crowd that July
evening that his maternal grandfather worked on oil rigs and farms dur-
ing the Depression and, just after Pearl Harbor, joined the army, and that
his grandmother, while raising their baby, worked on a bomber assembly
line during the war.
He described how his grandparents moved west from
Kansas, seeking opportunities, ultimately moving to Hawaii. They too,
he said, had big dreams for their daughter. He said his parents met while
studying at the University of Hawaii and that they shared not only an im-
probable love, but also an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.
Barack said that this country’s pride is based on a simple premise, summed
up in the Declaration of Independence, as “the true genius of America, a
faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles.”
The speech that evening undeniably catapulted this state senator from
Illinois onto the national political scene.
If Americans hadn’t heard of
him before, they certainly knew about him now.
Barack Obama says that his story could take place only in America. He
often adds that, like his parents and grandparents, anyone can achieve
success through hard work and scholarship. His story is filled with good
fortune, hard work, and a very good education.
It is also a story of diver-
sity of heritage that he is proud of—that is, after he came to understand
and accept it.
In the United States, many political leaders throughout history have
come from powerful families. For Barack Obama, this is far from the truth.
His upbringing was in humble circumstances, and, while he doesn’t fit
any typical political mold, he is already considered by many to be one of
the most dynamic figures in U.S.
politics. His oratory skills, direct style,
and ability to communicate are often compared with those of Abraham
Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy.
Barack Obama is truly a rising political star in the United States. With
an African first name that means “blessed,” his name is often mispro-
nounced and sometimes ridiculed.
However seemingly blessed, he states
that he is meant to serve and to lead, and perhaps someday be president
of the United States.
Timeline: Events
Significant to the
Life of Barack Obama
President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation
Proclamation. Barack often associates himself with Presi-
dent Lincoln.
When he announced his candidacy for the
election, he spoke in front of the Old State Capitol
Building in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln famously
declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Barack’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, is
born in Kenya.
August 18—The 19th Amendment to the U.S.
Constitu-
tion is ratified, giving women the right to vote.
January 15—Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is born.
Barack’s father, Barack Obama Sr., is born in Kenya.
– During World War II, Barack’s paternal grandfather, Hus-
sein Onyango Obama, serves as a cook to a British captain.
Stanley “Gramps” Dunham, Barack’s maternal grandfa-
ther, and Madelyn “Toots” Dunham elope just prior to
the attacks at Pearl Harbor on December 7, Stanley
enlists in the army soon after the attacks, and Madelyn
works on a bomber plane assembly line.
Barack’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (known as Ann),
is born in , while her father, Stanley, is posted at an
army base.
August 19—President William Clinton is born.
October 26—Senator Hillary Clinton is born.
June 10—Senator John Edwards is born.
xiii
xiv B arack
Timeline
O bama
Barack’s grandparents, Stanley “Gramps” and Madelyn
“Toots” Dunham, and their daughter, Stanley Ann Dun-
ham, Barack’s mother, move to Hawaii.
Ann Dunham, after being accepted by the University of
Chicago, decides to enroll at the University of Hawaii.
She is 18 years old.
Barack Obama Sr.
leaves Kenya to attend the University of
Hawaii at the age of
Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. meet as students at
the University of Hawaii. They are soon married.
September 26—The first Nixon-Kennedy debate is tele-
vised.
May 4—Civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders
ride interstate busses into the segregated South; they are
subsequently arrested for trespassing and unlawful assem-
bly and are met with fire bombs and riots.
Many suffer at
the hands of racists.
August 4—Barack Hussein Obama is born in Hawaii.
Barack Obama Sr. accepts a scholarship to attend Harvard
University. Ann and Barack stay in Hawaii.
Barack Obama Sr. leaves the United States to return to
Kenya. He and Ann Dunham Obama are divorced.
August 28—Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
delivers his
“I have a dream” speech in Washington, DC.
November 22—President John F. Kennedy is assassinated.
January 17—Michelle Robinson (Obama) is born.
July 2—President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into
law.
October 14—Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wins the
Nobel Peace Prize for his work promoting human rights.
March 7—In what later is known as Bloody Sunday, state
and local police attack civil rights marchers with clubs
and tear gas in Selma, Alabama.
March 21—Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
leads a civil
rights march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Al
abama.
July 28—President Johnson commits 50, more troops
to the conflict in Vietnam, taking the U. S. force to a total
of ,
August 6—President Johnson signs legislation to enact the
Voting Rights Act.
Timeline xv
Ann Dunham Obama marries Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian
student attending the University of Hawaii.
Lolo leaves
Hawaii for Indonesia; Ann makes plans for her and Barack
to follow.
Barack leaves Hawaii to move to Jakarta, Indonesia, with
his mother and his stepfather. Barack’s half sister Maya is
born in Indonesia.
April 4—Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated.
June 6—Senator Robert F.
Kennedy is assassinated.
August 28—Antiwar protestors demonstrate at the Demo-
cratic convention in Chicago.
November 16—An estimated , people gather in
Washington, D.C., to protest the Vietnam War.1
June 22—President Richard Nixon signs an extension of
the Voting Rights Act that lowers the voting age to
Known as the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, it is
ratified on July 1,
Barack leaves Indonesia to live with his grandparents in
Hawaii.
Ann and Barack’s half sister Maya stay in Indone-
sia. He is 10 years old.
Fall—As a fifth grader, Barack attends the prestigious prep
school Punahou Academy.
Barack Obama Sr., recuperating from a serious car acci-
dent, visits Barack in Hawaii. Barack was two when his
father left Hawaii for Harvard Law School.
Barack’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama,
dies in Kenya.
Barack graduates from Punahou Academy.
After being
accepted by several schools, he enrolls in Occidental Col-
lege in Los Angeles.
Having always been called Barry by friends and family, he
is now called Barack, which means “blessed” in Arabic.
As a sophomore, Barack gets involved with a South Afri-
can divestment campaign on campus and gives his first
speech at a rally.
August—Barack, now 20 years old, transfers from Occi-
dental College to Columbia University in New York
City.
Barack receives a call from Nairobi, Kenya.
It is his Aunt
Jane, whom he has never met, telling him that his father
has been killed in a car accident. Barack is 21 years old.
xvi Timeline
Barack graduates from Columbia University. He takes a job
in New York as a research assistant at a consulting firm.
President Ronald Reagan signs a policy directive designed
to combat international terrorism.
This gives the United
States the power to launch preventive and retaliatory
strikes against foreign terrorists.2
Barack accepts a position as a community organizer and
moves to Chicago. During his three years on the job, his
half sister Auma visits him and he learns about his father
and the family in Kenya.
February—Barack is accepted by Harvard Law School.
Prior to attending classes in the fall, he makes his first trip
to Kenya.
Fall—At 27 years of age, Barack begins law school.
Summer—Barack returns to Chicago as an intern at a law
firm.
He meets Michelle Robinson, his future wife, who is
assigned as his mentor. She graduated from Harvard Law
School in
During his second year of law school, Barack is elected
president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. He is the
first African American to be elected to the position in the
Review’s year history.
Barack graduates magna cum laude from Harvard Law
School.
After being heavily recruited by law firms across the
nation, he returns to Chicago to practice civil rights law.
Barack and Michelle Robinson are married. Barack and
Michelle visited Kenya prior to their marriage to meet
Barack’s family. They move to Hyde Park, a suburb on Chi-
cago’s South Side.
Barack’s grandfather Stanley Dunham dies prior to Barack
and Michelle’s marriage.
Barack becomes the director of Illinois Project Vote, help-
ing to register nearly 50, voters.
William Jefferson Clinton is elected president of the
United States.
Barack goes to work at a public interest law firm to work on
civil rights, employment discrimination, fair housing, and
voting rights.
Barack is named in Crain’s magazine’s list of “40 under 40”
outstanding young leaders in the city of Chicago.
Barack joins the faculty of University of Chicago Law
School as a senior lecturer, teaching constitutional law.
Timeline xvii
Michelle Obama joins the Chicago Office of Public Allies,
a program that assists young people to find employment in
public service.
February 26—A bomb explodes in the World Trade Cen-
ter in New York.
Barack publishes his first book, Dreams from My Father.
Barack is elected to the Illinois State Senate as a Democrat
representing the Illinois 13th legislative district.
January—State Senator Barack Obama arrives in Spring-
field, Illinois, to serve his constituency from the South
Side of Chicago.
Barack and Michelle’s first daughter, Malia, is born.
Barack enters the race for the U.S.
House of Represen-
tatives against the four-term incumbent Bobby Rush. He
loses by a two-to-one margin.
George W. Bush is elected president.
Barack and Michelle’s second daughter, Sasha, is born.
September 11—Often referred to as 9/11, al Qaeda
launches a series of coordinated suicide attacks in New
York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania.
Midyear—Barack announces to his friends his decision to
run for the U.S.
Senate.
Fall—A majority of Americans are convinced that Sad-
dam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and is per-
sonally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
October—The Senate votes to give President George W.
Bush the power to go to war in Iraq.
October 2—Barack speaks to a crowd of antiwar activists,
stating his opposition to the war.
March 16—Barack wins the primary election for the U.S.
Senate with 53 percent of the vote.
He would face Repub-
lican Alan Keyes in the general election.
July 27—Barack delivers the keynote speech at the Demo-
cratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts.
The speech lasts approximately 15 minutes.
With a margin of victory of 70 percent over Alan Keyes’s
27 percent, Barack is elected to the U.S. Senate.
He is the
only African American in the U.S. Senate and the fifth
African American in U.S. history.
December—Barack signs a contract for three more
books, including a children’s book to be written with
Michelle.
xviii Timeline
January 4—Barack is sworn in as a member of the th
Congress of the United States.
Shortly after his swearing in as the junior senator from Illi-
nois, Barack and his team begin making plans for a day
trip to Africa.
Upon his return from Africa, plans begin in earnest about
a run for the presidency in the election.
Barack is one of two freshmen senators on the powerful
Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
August—Barack travels to Russia with Republican Sena-
tor Richard Lugar and others to inspect nuclear and bio-
logical weapons sites.
He then cosponsors a bill that will
reduce the stockpiles of these types of weapons.
August—Hurricane Katrina devastates the southern
coastal regions of the United States. Barack speaks out
about poverty issues and the government’s handling of the
devastation.
During his first two years as a senator, Barack travels
around the world, studying nuclear proliferation, AIDS,
and violence in the Middle East.
Speculation continues
about whether he is considering a presidential run.
Barack publishes his second book, The Audacity of Hope:
Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.
October 22—Barack appears on the NBC television show
Meet the Press, where he tells commentator Tim Russert
that it is fair to say he is thinking about running for presi-
dent in
October 23—Barack appears on the cover of Time maga-
zine in an article entitled “Why Barack Obama Could Be
the Next President.”
November—After the Democrats take control of Con-
gress in the general election, discussions about Barack’s
presidential bid take on more urgency, with Michelle
Obama’s opinion the key to the decision on whether he
will run.
December—Michelle determines she is on board with her
husband running for president.
December—Barack visits New Hampshire, an early presi-
dential primary state, and tells an audience that the media
describe as “rock-star size” that America is ready to turn a
page and a new generation is prepared to lead.
Timeline xix
January—Barack tells U.S.
News & World Report that he
believes there is a great hunger for change in America.
January—Barack takes another step in a presidential bid
by posting a message on his Web site and sending an e-mail
message to his Web site subscribers that he is forming a
presidential exploratory committee. He tells his supporters
and subscribers that the decision to run for the presidency
is a profound one and that he wants to be sure whatever
decision he makes is right for him, his family, and the
country.
January—Barack says he will tell his friends, neighbors,
and Americans by February 10 what his plans are regard-
ing running for president.
February 10—On a frigid day in Springfield, Illinois, in
front of a crowd estimated to be at least 10, people,
Barack announces that he is running for president of the
United States.
March—A USA Today/Gallup Poll finds that 1 in 10 say they
wouldn’t vote for a woman or Hispanic, and 1 in 20 say they
wouldn’t vote for a black, Jewish, or Catholic candidate.3
March—Barack announces his campaign has raised more
than , donations totaling at least $25 million;
$ million is generated through Internet donations.4
March—Barack speaks at the Brown Chapel AME church
in Selma, Alabama, on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
He tells the assembly that the event in , when state
and local police attacked civil rights marchers with
clubs and tear gas, enabled his parents, a mixed-race cou-
ple, to marry.
April—Many in the media cast Barack as a candidate who
has refused money from Washington lobbyists and who
uses the Internet to garner support and contributions.
April—Barack announces the Five Initiatives: bringing
the Iraq war to an end, modernizing the military, stop-
ping the spread of weapons of mass destruction, rebuilding
alliances and partnerships, and investing in our common
humanity.
May—Barack is placed under Secret Service protection,
the earliest ever for a U.S.
presidential candidate.
May—Barack is selected by Time magazine as one of the
world’s most influential people.
xx Timeline
July—A Newsweek magazine poll finds that race is no lon-
ger the barrier it once was in electing a president. A clear
majority, 59 percent, say that the country is ready to elect
an African American president, up from 37 percent at the
start of the decade.5
December—A report by the Pew Research Center finds
that “fewer people are making judgments about candidates
based solely, or even mostly, on race itself.”6
Barack is consistently considered to be a front-runner
in national and state polls, along with Senator Hillary
Clinton and Senator John Edwards.
January 3—Barack’s first test comes at the Iowa caucus.
He sails to victory with 38 percent of the state delegate
vote in a contest that features a record turnout of at least
, The win gives his presidential campaign an early
and extremely important boost.7
January 8—In the first presidential primary for the
election, New Hampshire’s, the second test for his candi-
dacy, with polls suggesting an enormous victory, Barack
takes second place behind Senator Hillary Clinton, with
36 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 39 percent.8
January 15—Michigan holds its primary, but the votes do
not count as the Democratic National Party stripped the
state of its delegates for violating Party rules by holding the
primary too early.
Barack had withdrawn his name from
the ballot; Hillary’s name remained, but no delegates are
awarded.
January 19—The campaigns move to Nevada for the
state’s caucus. More than , vote, compared to the
9, that voted in Hillary wins the contest with
51 percent of the vote to Barack’s 45 percent
January 25—South Carolina holds its primary.
Voters
come out in droves to hear Barack’s message. Barack wins
55 percent of the vote, doubling Hillary’s share
January 29—Florida holds its primary. As in the Michi-
gan primary the votes do not count and the Democratic
National Party strips the delegates for violating Party rules.
Both Barack and Hillary had agreed not to campaign in
the state, however Hillary had held fund-raising events
there.
No delegates are awarded.
February 5—Known as Super Tuesday, 22 states hold
either a primary or a caucus. In all, there are more than
Timeline xxi
2, delegates at stake including the delegate-rich states
of California with , Illinois with , and New York
with When all the votes are counted, Barack wins
13 individual states, including his home state of Illinois;
Hillary wins 8 states, including her adopted home state of
New York.
The popular vote from Super Tuesday makes it
a very close race. Clinton wins 7,, popular votes,
or percent; Obama wins 7,, popular votes, or
percent
February 9—The states of Nebraska, Washington, Loui-
siana, and the Virgin Islands hold contests where excite-
ment is high and the turnout is record-breaking.
With a
total of delegates at stake, Barack wins all four states.
February 10—Maine holds its caucus with 34 delegates at
stake. Barack wins 59 percent of the vote; Hillary wins 40
percent
February 12—Known as the Potomac Primaries, Wash-
ington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia hold their primaries
for a total of delegates.
Barack sweeps all three states
winning 75 percent of the vote to Hillary’s 24 percent in
Washington, D.C.; in Maryland, Barack wins 60 percent
to Hillary’s 37 percent; and in Virginia, Barack wins 64
percent to Hillary’s 35 percent
February 19—The campaigns move to Wisconsin for a pri-
mary with delegates at stake, and to Hawaii with 20
delegates.
To no one’s surprise, Barack carries Hawaii with
76 percent of the vote. In Wisconsin, Barack wins 58 per-
cent to Hillary’s 41 percent
March 4—Another Tuesday rich with delegates: Texas,
Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island hold contests. Hillary is
favored to win in Texas with delegates and Ohio with
delegates.
When all votes are counted, Barack wins
Vermont by 30 points, and Hillary wins the other three
states
March 8—With 18 total delegates, Wyoming holds its pri-
mary. Barack wins 61 percent to Hillary’s 38 percent
March 11—Mississippi holds its primary with 40 delegates
at stake. Barack wins 61 percent to Hillary’s 37 percent
Both campaigns prepare for the next primary, in Pennsyl-
vania on April 22, , where they will vie for del-
egates.
The primary calendar includes contests in Guam
on May 3, Indiana and North Carolina on May 6, West
xxii Timeline
Virginia on May 13, Kentucky and Oregon on May 20,
Puerto Rico on June 1, and Montana and South Dakota on
June 3,
March 18—At the National Constitution Center in Phila-
delphia, Pennsylvania, Barack speaks for nearly 40 minutes
about race and racial rhetoric.
Afterwards, many compare
it to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Notes
1. Leonard Spinrad and Thelma Spinrad, On This Day in History (Paramus,
NJ: Prentice Hall, ),
2. Ibid., –
3. Susan Page, “ Race Has the Face of a Changing America,” USA
Today, March 12,
4. Jeremy Pelofsky, “Sen.
Obama Nears Clinton in Campaign Money Race,”
Reuters, April 4,
5. “Black and White,” Newsweek, July 8,
6. Gary Younge, “The Obama Effect,” The Nation, December 31,
7. Greg Giroux, “Obama and Huckabee Score Upsets in Iowa,” CQ Today,
January 4,
8. Michael Duffy, “Obama Moves On, Without a Bounce,” Time, January 9,
9.
Robin Toner, “High Enthusiasm Propels Democrats,” New York Times, Jan-
uary 29, , A
“Election Guide ,” New York Times, February 13, , http://poli
Bob Benenson and Marie Horrigan, “Obama Wins Convincingly in South
Carolina as Rivals Look Ahead,” CQ Today Online, January 27, http://
Patrick Healy, “Obama and Clinton Brace for Long Run,” New York Times,
February 7, , A
“Election Guide ,” New York Times, February 13, , http://poli
Ibid.
“Election Guide ,” New York Times, March 18, , http://politics.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Chapter 1
Family History
What’s interesting is how deeply American I feel, considering this
exotic background.
Some of it is the Midwestern roots of my grand
parents, my mother, and the values that they reflect. But some of it is
also a deep abiding sense that what is quintessentially American, is all
these different threads coming together to make a single quilt. And I
feel very much like I’m one of those threads that belong in this quilt,
that I’m a product of all these different forces, black, white, Asian, His
panic, Native American.
That, somehow, all this amalgam is part of
who I am, and that’s part of the reason I love this country so much.1
Hussein Onyango Obama, Barack
Obama’s Paternal Grandfather;
Akuma Obama, Barack Obama’s
Paternal Grandmother; Granny,
Hussein Onyango Obama’s Third Wife
In , before moving to Boston to attend Harvard Law School, Barack
made an important trip to Kenya.
He felt he needed a break from his two
and a half years as a community organizer in Chicago; and, as he later
answered his half brother Bernard when asked why he had finally come
home, he said that he wasn’t sure why, but something had told him it was
time. What he found in Africa was more than just a simple connection
to family.
Rather, it was a pilgrimage for this young man who grew up
conflicted by his mixed race and by his father’s absence that came so early
in his life.
B arack O bama
After traveling through Europe for three weeks, intending to see places
he’d always heard about but had never seen, he realized he’d made a mis
take in touring there first.
Europe wasn’t a part of his heritage, and he felt
he was living as if he were someone else, lending an incompleteness to
his own history. He also thought spending time in Europe before his trip
to Africa might be an attempt to delay coming to terms with his father.
When Barack was two, his father returned to Africa, leaving him and his
mother in Hawaii.
He hadn’t seen his father since he was 10 years old.
With some relief at leaving Europe, and with more than a little ner
vousness at the prospect of facing a family history he knew very little
about, he flew from London to Nairobi, Kenya. Landing at the Kenyatta
International Airport, his sister and aunt warmly greeted him and wel
comed him home.
His Aunt Zeituni told his half sister Auma, “You take
good care of Barry now. Make sure he doesn’t get lost again.” Barack was
confused by this greeting, and Auma explained that this was a common
expression referring to someone who hasn’t been seen for a while or to
someone who has left and not been seen again; they’ve been lost, she said,
even if people know where they are.2 For Barack, known as Barry to his
family and friends until later in his life, a pilgrimage had begun.
While in Kenya, Barack met members of his African family.
He met
his half sisters, half brothers, aunts, and cousins; he learned about his
father and grandfather and what it meant to be an Obama—as many
throughout Kenya remembered Barack Sr. and Hussein Obama, Barack’s
grandfather. To know more about his grandfather Hussein, Barack and
his aunts, sister, and brothers boarded a train to visit Granny, the third
wife of Hussein Obama.
The train, originally built by the British begin
ning in , was part of a mile rail line from the city of Mombasa
on the Indian Ocean to the eastern shores of Lake Victoria. This trip was
an important part of Barack’s pilgrimage in Africa, because it would take
him to what is known as “Home Squared,” the ancestral family home.
Barack’s half sister Auma and her brother Roy, Barack’s half brother,
had visited there many times.
Auma told Barack that he would love
Granny, adding that she had a wonderful sense of humor, something she
said Granny needed after living with “The Terror,” her name for their
grandfather. She said they called their grandfather that because he was so
mean. Roy added that their grandfather would make them sit at the table
for dinner, serve the food on china, like an Englishman, and if someone
said the wrong thing or used the wrong fork, he would hit them on the
head with his stick.
Barack’s Aunt Zeituni assured Barack that she had
many good memories about her father; he was strict, yes, but he was well
respected.
Family H istory
Barack’s grandfather’s compound, in the village of Alego, was one of
the largest in the area. He was known to be an excellent farmer, and it was
said he could make anything grow.
Aunt Zeituni said that Hussein Obama
had worked for the British during World War II, serving a captain in the
British army. After working as a cook for many years, he learned their
farming techniques and applied them to his own land.
Auma suggested that if there were difficulties within the Obama fam
ily, they all seemed to stem from Grandfather Hussein, saying he was the
only person their father, Barack Sr., feared.
To Barack, this seemed right
somehow, and if he could learn more, fit the pieces of the story together,
he thought everything might fall into place.3
Arriving at the village where Granny lived, Barack first met his father’s
two brothers, Yusuf and Sayid. Sayid, his father’s youngest brother, said
he had heard many great things about his nephew and warmly wel
comed him.
There, in a compound with a low, rectangular house with a
corrugated-iron roof and concrete walls and bougainvillea with red, pink,
and yellow flowers, a few chickens, and two cows beneath a mango tree,
was what he came to know as “Home Squared.” A large woman with
a scarf on her head and wearing a flowered skirt came out of the main
house.
She had sparkling eyes and a face like his Uncle Sayid’s. “Halo!”
she said. Speaking in Luo, her African language, she said she had dreamed
about the day when she would finally meet the son of her son and that
his coming had brought her great happiness. Welcoming him home, she
gave Barack a hug and led him into the house, where there were pictures
of Barack’s father, his Harvard diploma, a picture of his grandfather, and a
picture of another grandmother, Akuma, his father’s mother.
After enjoy
ing tea, Barack visited two graves at the edge of a cornfield. One had a
plaque for his grandfather; the other was covered with tiles, but there was
no plaque. Roy, Barack’s half brother, explained that for six years, there
had been nothing to note who was buried there.
For the rest of the day, Barack was immersed in the daily life of Granny’s
compound and the nearby village.
Remembering each part of the day, he
said, “It wasn’t simply joy that I felt in each of these moments. Rather, it
was a sense that everything I was doing, every touch and breath and word,
carried the full weight of my life; that a circle was beginning to close, so
that I might finally recognize myself as I was, here, now, in one place.”4
It was in Granny’s compound—where his grandfather had farmed
and where members of his family still worked the land—where he heard
the stories.
One day, in the shade of a mango tree, Barack asked Granny
to start at the beginning and tell him about his family. He said that, as
Granny began to speak, he heard all his family’s voices run together, the
B arack O bama
sounds of three generations were like a stream and his questions like rocks
in the water.5 Granny told Barack that his great-great grandfather cleared
his own land and became prosperous, with many cattle and goats.
She said
he had four wives and many children, one of which was Barack’s grandfa
ther. Although the children didn’t attend school, they learned from their
parents and elders of the tribe; the men learned how to herd and hunt,
and the women learned how to farm and cook. The legend of his grand
father, Granny said, was that he was restless and would wander off for
days; he was an herbalist, learning about plants that could cure and heal.
When he was still a boy, white men came to the area for the first time,
and Onyango was curious about them.
He left the farm for a few months,
and when he returned he was wearing clothes like the white men—pants,
shirts, and shoes on his feet, which made his family suspicious of him. He
was banished by his own father and soon left, returning to the town of
Kisumu, where he had lived and worked for the white people who had
settled there. He learned to read and write and learned about land titles
and accounting.
His skills made him valuable to the British. Because Af
ricans in those days couldn’t ride the train, he walked to Nairobi, a two-
week trip on foot, and began to work in a British household. He prospered
in his job, which included preparing food and organizing the household.
He became popular among his employers and was able to save his wages
to buy land and cattle in Kendu, not far from Granny’s land.
On his land, Onyango built a hut, but it wasn’t like the traditional huts
nearby.
Instead, it was kept spotlessly clean, and he insisted that people
entering remove their shoes. As well, he ate his meals at a table, using a
knife and fork. He insisted that the food he ate be washed, and he bathed
and washed his clothes every night. He was very strict about his property,
but if asked, he would gladly give someone food, clothing, or money.
If
someone took something without asking, however, he became very angry.
His manners were considered strange by his neighbors. By this time, he
hadn’t married, and this too was unusual. At one point, he decided he
needed to marry; however, because of his high housekeeping standards, no
woman could maintain his home as he demanded.
After several attempts
at marriage, and after losing the precious dowries paid for women to be
his wife, he found a woman who could live with him. After a few years,
it was discovered that she could not bear children, and even though this
was typically grounds for divorce among the Luo tribe, she was allowed to
remain in the compound, living in a hut that was built for her.
Barack’s
grandfather was still living and working in Nairobi at this time, but he
often returned to Kendu to visit his land. He decided he needed a second
wife and returned to Kendu to inquire about the women in the village. He
Family H istory
chose a young girl named Akumu, who was known for her great beauty.
They had three children; the second child was Barack’s father.
Later, he
married again; his third wife was Granny, who, at 16, married Onyango
and lived in Nairobi with him. Akumu, living with her children in Kendu,
was very unhappy, and her spirit, according to Granny, was rebellious. She
found her husband too demanding. He was strict with the housekeeping
and with child rearing.
Life became easier for his second wife when, at the
start of World War II, Onyango went overseas with the British captain, as
his cook. He traveled with the British forces for three years and, upon his
return, brought home a gramophone and a picture of a woman he said he
had married in Burma.
By the age of 50, Onyango decided to leave the employ of the British
and moved to Alego, the land of his grandfather, leaving his farm in the
village of Kendu.
Because he had studied British techniques and learned
modern farming while in Nairobi, he put these methods to work on land
that was mostly African bush. In less than a year, Onyango had enough
crops to market. His grandfather planted the trees that Barack saw on
Granny’s land. He built huts for his wives and children and built an
oven for baking bread and cakes.
He played music at night and provided
beds and mosquito nets for the children. He taught his neighbors about
farming and medicines and was well respected by them. When Barack
Sr. was eight, his mother decided to leave her husband, leaving the chil
dren in Granny’s care. She had tried to leave several times before, always
returning to her family home; always Onyango had demanded that she
return.
This time, Onyango at first decided to let her go. However, be
cause Granny had two children of her own, he went to Akumu’s family
and demanded that his second wife be returned to care for their chil
dren. This time, the family refused because they had already accepted a
dowry from another man whom Akumu had married; the two had left for
Tanganyika.
There was nothing Onyango could do, and he told his third
wife she was now the mother of all of his children. Sarah, Barack Sr.’s
older sister, resented her father and remained loyal to her mother. Barack
Sr. had a different view and told everyone Granny was his mother. Granny
told Barack that his grandfather continued to be very strict with his chil
dren.
He did not allow them to play outside the compound, mostly be
cause he felt the other children were dirty and ill mannered. She added
that when her husband was away, she would let them play as they wished,
believing they needed to be children.
By the time Barack Sr. was in his teens, life in Kenya was rapidly chang
ing.
Many Africans had fought in the war, and when they returned to
their homeland, they were eager to use what they learned as fighters;
B arack O bama
they were no longer satisfied with white rule. Many young Africans were
influenced by discussions about independence. Barack’s grandfather was
skeptical that talk about independence would lead to anything, and he
thought Africans could never win against a white man’s army.
He told his
son, “How can the African defeat the white man when he cannot even
make his own bicycle?” He said that the African could never win against
the white man because the black man wanted to work only with his own
family or clan, while all white men worked to increase their power. He
said that white men worked together and nation and business were im
portant to them.
He said that white men follow their leaders and do not
question orders, but black men think they know what is better for them.
That is why, he said, the black man will always lose.6 Despite these opin
ions, government authorities detained Onyango, declaring him a subver
sive and a supporter of those demanding independence.
He was placed
in a detention camp and was later found innocent. When he returned
home, after being in the camp for six months, he was very thin and had
difficulty walking. He was ashamed of his appearance and his diminished
capacity, and, from that time on, he appeared to be an old man, far from
the vital man he had been prior to the false accusation.
Granny told Barack that what his grandfather respected was strength
and discipline.
And, despite learning many of the white man’s ways, he
remained strict about his Luo traditions, which included respect for elders
and for authority and order and custom in all his affairs.
She thought that
was why he had rejected the Christian religion, saying that, for a brief
time, he had converted to Christianity and even changed his name to
Johnson. He couldn’t understand the ideas of mercy toward enemies, she
said, and then had converted to Islam, thinking its practices conformed
more closely to his beliefs.7
After several years, Barack Sr.
moved away from his father’s home to
work in Mombassa. He later applied to universities in the United States.
Onyango supported his son’s desire to study abroad but had little money
to support his efforts. Barack Sr. was accepted at the University of Hawaii,
and, through a scholarship and monies he received from benefactors, the
funds were raised for him to leave Africa.
When he met Ann Dunham,
Barack’s mother, he proposed marriage. Onyango disapproved of the mar
riage, feeling his son was not acting responsibly. He wrote to Barack Sr.,
“How can you marry this white woman when you have responsibilities at
home? Will this woman return with you and live as a Luo woman?
. . . Let
the girl’s father come to my hut and discuss the situation properly. For this
is the affairs of elders, not children.” He also wrote to Barack’s grandfather,
Stanley Dunham, and said the same things.8 Onyango threatened to have
Family H istory
his son’s visa revoked. Despite his father’s opinions, the marriage took
place.
When Barack Sr. returned to Kenya without his wife and young
son, Onyango wasn’t surprised and knew his predictions had come true.
When Onyango died, Barack Sr. returned to his father’s home to make
arrangements for his burial.
At the end of Granny’s story, told in the shade of the mango tree, Barack
asked her if there was anything left of his grandfather’s belongings.
Sort
ing through the contents of an old trunk, he found a rust-colored book
about the size of a passport. The cover of the small book said: Domestic
Servant’s Pocket Register, Issued under the Authority of the Registration of Do-
mestic Servant’s Ordinance, , Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. Inside
were his grandfather’s left and right thumbprints.
A preamble inside the
book explained that the object of the book was to present a record of em
ployment and to protect employers against the employment of those who
were deemed unsuitable for work. The little book defined the term servant
and stated that the book was to be carried by servants or they would be
subject to fines or imprisonment if they were found without the docu
ment.
Barack’s grandfather’s name, Hussein II Onyango, his ordinance
number, race, place of residence, sex, age, height, and physical attributes
were all listed. His employment history was listed as well as a review of
his performance in each capacity. Along with the little book was a stack
of application-for-admission letters from Barack’s father, all addressed to
universities in the United States.
To Barack, this was his inheritance, the
documents about his grandfather, some letters describing his father, and
all the stories he heard on his pilgrimage to Kenya.
Stanley Dunham, Known as Gramps,
and Madelyn “Toots” Dunham—Barack
Obama’s Maternal Grandparents
Barack Obama writes affectionately about his maternal grandparents
throughout his book Dreams from My Father.
From the time he was born
until he left for college in California, Barack frequently lived with his moth
er’s parents, and they had an immeasurable influence on him.
Madelyn,
or Toots, a derivation of Tutu, the Hawaiian name for grandparent, grew
up in Kansas. Her heritage included Cherokee and Scottish and English
ancestors who homesteaded on the Kansas prairie. Stanley also grew up in
Kansas, in a town less than 20 miles from Madelyn. In his book, Barack
writes that they recalled their childhoods in small-town Depression-era
America, complete with Fourth of July parades, fireflies, dust storms, hail
storms, and classrooms filled with farm boys.9 They frequently spoke about
B arack O bama
respectability, saying that you didn’t have to be rich to be respectable.
Madelyn’s family, he wrote, were hardworking, decent people.
Her father
had a job throughout the Depression. Her mother, a teacher prior to hav
ing a family, kept the home spotless and ordered books through the mail.
Stanley’s parents were Baptists, and his mother committed suicide when
Stanley was eight years old. Known to be a bit wild in his youth, Stanley
was thrown out of high school for punching the principal in the nose.
For
the next three years, he did odd jobs and often rode the rail lines around
the country. Winding up in Wichita, Kansas, he met Madelyn, after she
moved there with her family. Her parents didn’t approve of their court
ship. Barack describes his grandfather in the days before World War II
as cutting a dashing figure, wearing baggy pants and a starched under
shirt and a brimmed hat cocked back on his head.
He describes his grand
mother as a smart-talking girl with too much red lipstick, dyed blond hair,
and legs that could model hosiery for the department store Madelyn and
Stanley eloped just prior to the attack at Pearl Harbor. Stanley enlisted
in the army and, while he was posted at an army base, Barack’s mother
Ann was born.
Madelyn went to work on a bomber plane assembly line.
After the war, the family moved to California, where Stanley enrolled at
the University of California, Berkeley, using the benefits of the GI bill.
After a time, Stanley realized that being in a classroom wasn’t right for
him, and the family moved back to Kansas, then to Texas, and finally to
Seattle, where Stanley worked as a furniture salesman and where Ann
finished high school.
Ann was offered early admission to the University of
Chicago; however, Stanley forbade her to go, believing she was too young
to live on her own.
At about this same time, the manager of the furniture company men
tioned that a new store was about to open in Honolulu, Hawaii. He said
that the opportunities seemed endless there, because statehood was immi
nent.
The Dunhams sold their home in Seattle and moved again. Stanley
worked as a furniture salesman, and Madelyn began working as a secretary
at a local bank. Eventually, she became the first woman vice president at
the bank.
Barack describes the move to Hawaii as part of his grandfather’s per
petual search for a new beginning.
By the time they moved, Stanley’s
character would be fully formed, with a generosity and eagerness to please
and a mix of sophistication and provincialism. He writes that his grand
father was typical of men of his generation—men who embraced freedom
and individualism and who were both dangerous and promising. Stanley
wrote poetry, listened to jazz music, and counted as friends many Jewish
people he met in the furniture business.
His grandmother, in contrast, was
Family H istory
s keptical by nature, with a stubborn independence, and deeply private
and pragmatic. To Barack, they appeared to be of a liberal bent, although,
he writes, their beliefs were never like a firm ideology. When his mother
came home from the University of Hawaii, telling her parents that she
met a man from Kenya, Africa, named Barack, their first impulse was to
invite him over for dinner
After Barack was born, his grandparents loved him fiercely and fear
lessly.
They were proud of him, and his mixed parentage never seemed
to be an issue for them. They encouraged him, disciplined him, and saw
that he received his education and did his best in school. While Barack’s
mother remained in Indonesia after sending her son back to Hawaii to
attend school and when she later returned to Indonesia to further her
anthropology studies, Barack lived with Stanley and Toots.
Although she
was more reserved than Stanley, Toots’s love for her grandson was never in
question. She always encouraged Barack and enjoyed it when his friends
came over to play or, later, to just hang out. Neil Abercrombie, a Demo
cratic congressman from Hawaii and a close friend of Ann and Barack Sr.
at the University of Hawaii, said he would frequently see Stanley and
Barack about town and added, “Stanley loved that little boy.
In the ab
sence of his father, there was not a kinder, more understanding man than
Stanley Dunham. He was loving and generous.”12
Barack Obama Senior, Barack
Obama’s Father
A few months after Barack’s 21st birthday, when he was living in New
York, a stranger called. It was his Aunt Jane, calling from Nairobi to tell
Barack that his father had been killed in a car accident.
She asked that
he call his uncle in Boston and relay the news. Telling him she would try
to call again, the line went dead. The news about a father he hadn’t seen
since he was 10, the father who had returned to Africa in when
Barack was only 2 years old, wasn’t easily processed. Now, at 21 years of
age, he heard from an aunt he didn’t know that his father, who was some
what more a myth than a man, was dead.
Barack writes in his book Dreams from My Father that, at the time of his
father’s death, he really only knew him from the stories he had heard from
his mother and grandparents.
They each had their favorites that young
Barack heard many times. His grandmother seemed to have a “gentler
portrait” of Barack Sr. Barack’s mother said that his father could be a bit
domineering and that he was an honest person and sometimes uncom
promising. She told him the story of his father accepting his Phi Beta
10 B arack O bama
Kappa key in his favorite outfit of jeans and an old knit leopard-print
shirt.
No one had said it was a big honor, and when he found everyone
at the ceremony dressed in tuxedos, he was, for the first and only time in
her memory, embarrassed. Barack’s grandfather said that Barack Sr. could
handle just about any situation, a quality that made everyone like him.
Barack’s grandfather said that one thing Barack could learn from his father
was confidence, which he believed was the secret to a man’s success The
stories were often told in the evenings, and then stories about his father
would be put away, to be brought up again at a later time.
Later in life,
Barack learned more about his father, the man he and his half sister Auma
called the “old man,” from the stories he heard on his first trip to Kenya.
Barack’s father was a Kenyan, of the Luo tribe, born near Lake Victoria
in a village called Alego. His mother Akumu, his father’s second wife, left
the household when Barack Sr.
was nine, leaving her first two children
to be raised by his father’s third wife, known to her extended family as
Granny, and taking her third child, an infant, with her. Granny described
Barack Sr. as mischievous, appearing to be obedient in front of his father,
but, outside of his father’s view, he usually did what he pleased.
Even
though he behaved badly sometimes, he was also very clever. At a very
early age, he learned his alphabet and numbers.
As a young man, Barack Sr. tended his father’s goats and attended the
local mission school that had been set up by the British. Learning came
very easily to him, and he told his father he could not study there because
he already knew everything the instructor had to teach him.
He was sent
to another school, and even there he knew all the answers and corrected
his teacher. He soon became bored with school and would sometimes stop
going altogether. He would find a classmate to give him the lessons and
would learn everything he needed to know for the exam. He was almost
always first in his class. This pleased his father, because, to him, knowledge
was the source of white man’s power, and he wanted to make sure his son
was as educated as any white man.
Life in Kenya was changing by the time
Barack Sr. was a teenager. Many Africans had fought in World War II,
and when they returned home, they weren’t satisfied with living under
the white man’s rule. There was talk of independence from the British.
Barack Sr. was influenced by all the talk, and when he returned home
from school he often talked about what he had seen.
Although his fa
ther, Onyango, agreed with many of the demands, he was skeptical of any
sort of independence. He thought Africans could never win against the
white man’s army. He said that the black man only wanted to work with
his own family or clan, while all the white men worked to increase their
power. “The white man alone is like an ant.
He can be easily crushed . . .
Family H istory 11
the white man works together. His nation, his business—these things are
more important to him . . . he will follow his leaders and not question
order. Black men are not like this. Even the most foolish black man thinks
he knows better . . . that is why the black man will always lose.”14 Despite
these views, Onyango was thought to be a subversive and spent time in a
detention camp.
Even though he was later found innocent, he never fully
recovered from the experience.
While his father was in a detention camp, Barack Sr. was away at
school, some 50 miles south of his father’s home. He had taken a district
exam and was admitted to a mission school that admitted only a small
number of the brightest Africans. The teachers of the school, impressed
by his intelligence, overlooked some of his pranks.
However, it was his
rebelliousness in the end that caused him to be expelled. He returned
home, and when his father found out, he was furious. He told Barack Sr.
that if he didn’t behave properly, he would have no use for him. His father
arranged for him to travel to Mombassa to take a job as a clerk for an Arab
merchant, telling his son that now he would see how much he could enjoy
himself, now that he had to earn money for his own keep.
Having no
choice but to obey his father, he took the job, but after an argument with
the merchant, he quit. To find another job, he had to accept less pay, and
his father told him he wouldn’t amount to anything. Onyango told his son
to leave because he had brought him shame.
Barack Sr. then went to Nairobi and found work as a clerk for the
railroad.
Influenced by Kenyan politics, he became bored with the job
and began attending political meetings. After being arrested and put in
jail for taking part in a meeting, he asked his father for bail, but his father
refused. Upon his release, Barack Sr. was discouraged and began to think
his father was right, perhaps he would amount to nothing.
At 20 years old,
he had no job, was estranged from his father, and was without money or
prospects. And by now, he was married with a child, having met his first
wife, Kezia, when he was Attracted by her beauty, after a short court
ship, he decided to marry her. Having no money for a dowry, he’d had to
ask his father for help. When Onyango refused, Barack Sr.’s stepmother
intervened, saying it would be improper for Barack to beg for help for a
proper dowry.
After a year of marriage, a son, Roy, was born. Two years
later, a daughter, Auma, was born.
Barack Sr. took any work he could find to support his family. He was
desperate and depressed because many of his classmates from the presti
gious mission school were now leaving for university and some had gone
to London to study.
They all, he knew, could expect good jobs when they
returned to a now liberated Kenya. Barack wondered if he would end up
12 B arack O bama
working as a clerk for the rest of his life. Then good fortune struck. Barack
met two American women who were teaching in Nairobi. They loaned
him books and invited him to their home. When they realized how intel
ligent he was, they suggested he continue his studies at university.
Barack
explained that he had neither a secondary school certificate nor sufficient
funds to pay the tuition. The answer was to take a correspondence course
to earn the needed certificate and pursue scholarship funds at a university
in the United States. Once he began working on the lessons, he worked
diligently, and a few months later, he sat for the exam at the American
embassy.
After several months, the acceptance letter came; he had earned
the certificate. He still needed to gain acceptance to a university and find
the funds to pay tuition and transportation expenses to the States. His
father, once he saw how diligently Barack had worked, was proud and im
pressed; however, he wasn’t able to raise the needed money.
Determined
to further his studies, Barack Sr. wrote letters to schools throughout the
United States. The University of Hawaii responded, saying they would
provide a scholarship for him to attend. Moving his pregnant wife and
son to his father’s compound, he left Nairobi in ; at the age of 23,
he became the first African student at the University of Hawaii, where he
studied econometrics.
A short time later, in a Russian language class, he
met a young American woman named Ann Dunham and fell in love. A
short time later they were married and, in August , Ann gave birth
to a son. He was named after his father and grandfather, but was called
Barry. In , after graduating in three years and first in his class, Barack
Sr. won another scholarship to pursue his Ph.D.
at Harvard University.
He accepted the scholarship, moved to Boston, and left his wife and son
in Hawaii. His son, Barack, was two years old. Barack Sr. and Ann di
vorced. After leaving Harvard, Barack Sr. returned to Africa.
Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s Mother
Barack’s grandparents eloped just before the start of World War II.
His grandfather Stanley enlisted in the army, and he and his young wife,
Madelyn, moved to an army base, where their daughter, Stanley Ann, was
born.
After the war, the family moved around, living in California, Kan
sas, and Texas, before relocating to Seattle. Stanley Ann was often teased
because of her first name (so named because her father wanted a son),
and Madelyn sometimes worried about her, especially when she tended
to spend so much time alone. Barack writes in his book Dreams from My
Father that his mother was something of a loner, being an only child who
had moved around a lot during her youth, but that she was always cheerful
Family H istory 13
and easy-tempered.
He said she often had her head in a book and would
sometimes wander off on a walk. When Madelyn came home from work,
she often found Ann alone in the front yard, lying in the grass or on the
swing, off in some world of her own
In his book, Barack also writes about racism and how his mother and
grandparents were exposed to it while living in Texas.
He tells the story
of how Ann, at about 10 years old, made friends with a black girl. One af
ternoon, his grandmother came home from work and found Ann and her
friend in the front yard, where they were being taunted by other children
who stood in the street, yelling and throwing rocks. Realizing how scared
the two girls were, she said, “If you two are going to play, then for goodness
sake, go on inside.” Madelyn reached for the black girl’s hand, but the
girl instead ran out of the yard and down the street.
Upon hearing about
the incident, Ann’s father was angry, and the next day he visited Ann’s
school principal to complain about the other children’s behavior. He also
called the parents of the misbehaving children. The responses were all
the same: white girls didn’t play with “coloreds in this town.” Whenever
his grandfather spoke of racism to his grandson, he would add that he left
Texas because of it.
His grandmother felt a bit different, saying that racism
wasn’t even a part of their vocabulary at the time, adding that they both
felt they should treat people decently and that was all there was to it
From Texas, the family moved to Seattle, where Ann graduated from
high school. She dreamed of studying at the University of Chicago, but
Ann’s father said she was too young to live on her own, and so, in ,
she moved to Hawaii with her parents and enrolled at the University of
Hawaii.
In one of her courses, Ann, a shy and awkward year-old, met
an African named Barack Obama. He was charming, with an acute intel
lect, and when he was introduced to her parents, they were wary at first but
were soon won over. Barack and Ann were married in a civil ceremony.
Their son, given the name of his father, was born on August 4, Ann
and Barack Sr.
later divorced. She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indone
sian student at the University of Hawaii. When Barack was six, he moved
with his mother and Lolo to Indonesia. They lived in Jakarta, where Lolo
worked as a geologist and Ann taught English to Indonesian businessmen
at the American embassy as part of the U.S.
foreign aid package to devel
oping countries. Barack writes that his mother was grateful for Lolo’s at
tentiveness toward his new stepson and that she guessed he wouldn’t have
treated his own son differently. He writes that his mother would picture
herself at 24, moving with a child and married to a man whose history and
country she knew little about, and that her very innocence was carried to
another country right along with her passport.
14 B arack O bama
She expected the new life to be difficult, so she learned all she could
about Indonesia, then the fifth most populated country in the world, and
its many tribes and dialects.
Early on, she realized life was tougher than
she thought it would be, in a country with endemic dysentery and fevers
and cold-water baths and a hole in the ground instead of a toilet. What
had drawn her to Lolo, after Barack Sr. had left her and Barack, was the
promise of something new and important and the idea of helping him
rebuild a country.
She wasn’t prepared, however, for the loneliness she en
countered; her job at the embassy and the money she earned there helped,
but they didn’t help the loneliness she felt
Ann concentrated on Barack’s education. There wasn’t enough money
to send him to the International School, where most of the foreign chil
dren were educated, so she arranged to supplement his Indonesian ed
ucation with lessons from a correspondence course.
Five days a week,
beginning at four o’clock in the morning, she would make Barack his
breakfast and give him English lessons for three hours before he left for
school and she left for work. During these sessions, she also reminded
Barack of his heritage. She described his grandparents’ upbringing and
his father’s story, how he had grown up poor in a distant poverty-stricken
country and how his life had been hard, how he had succeeded, and
how he had lived his life according to his principles.
She told him he
should follow his father’s example, that he had no choice because it was
in his genes. She said, “You have me to thank for your eyebrows . . . but
your brains, your character, you got from him.” She brought home books
on the civil rights movement, recordings of Mahalia Jackson, and the
speeches of Martin Luther King. She told Barack stories of the school
children in the South and how, even though they had to read the books
discarded by the white children, they became successful doctors and law
yers.
Barack learned from his mother that “To be black was to be the
beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that
only we were strong enough to bear.”18
The uneasy political situation in Indonesia and near constant loneli
ness and worry made Ann feel more and more apprehensive about life
there. As she learned more about the Indonesian government and the
difficult life for many of the Indonesian people, she took some comfort
in the fact that, as a white American, she was protected and could leave
if she wanted to.
Ann also considered what the environment was doing
to and for her son, being of mixed heritage, part white and part African.
What resulted from all this uneasiness was a distance between Ann and
her husband. Lolo had learned to live with those who ran the country and
to work within its boundaries. He was able to obtain a new job with an
Family H istory 15
American oil company with the help of his well-connected brother-in-
law.
He moved his family to a better neighborhood, purchased a car and a
television, and obtained a membership at a local country club. Although
these luxuries made daily life easier, the additional demands of Lolo’s new
job caused more difficulties between Ann and Lolo. Despite the difficul
ties, Ann became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Maya.
When
Barack was 10, Ann sent him to Hawaii to live with her parents, deciding
he needed to go to an American school. She stayed behind with Maya,
promising her young son that she and his sister would soon follow. She
separated from Lolo, and a short time later they were divorced. In the
article “The Not-So-Simple Story of Barack Obama’s Youth,” which was
published in the online edition of the Chicago Tribune, Barack’s half sister
Maya Soetoro-Ng said of Barack, their mother, and their grandparents,
Stanley and Madelyn (Toots), “Looking back now, I’d say he really is kind
of the perfect combination of all of them.
All of them were imperfect but
all of them loved him fiercely, and I believe he took the best qualities from
each of them.”19
There is no doubt that Barack’s mother and his grandparents were im
portant influences in his life. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Barack
writes extensively about family and specifically of his mother and grand
mother.
They were the ballast in his life, he writes, and it was the women
who kept him and his family afloat and kept his world centered. He writes
of his mother’s love and clarity of spirit; it was because of her and his
grandmother that he never wanted for anything important, and, from
them, he understood the values that have always guided him
Notes
1.
Christine Brozyna, “Get to Know Barack Obama,” ABC News, Novem
ber 2,
2. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (New York: Three Rivers Press,
),
3. Ibid., –
4. Ibid., –
5. Ibid.,
6. Ibid.,
7. Ibid.,
8. Ibid.,
9. Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid., 16–
16 B arack O bama
Kirsten Scharnberg and Kim Barker, “The Not-So-Simple Story of Barack
Obama’s Youth,” Chicago Tribune Online Edition, March 25, , http://www.
story.
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (New York: Three Rivers Press,
), 8.
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid., 20–
Ibid., 41–
Ibid., 50–
Kirsten Scharnberg and Kim Barker, “The Not-So-Simple Story of Barack
Obama’s Youth,” Chicago Tribune Online Edition, March 25, , http://www.
story.
Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York: Crown Publishers,
),
Chapter 2
Formative Years in Hawaii
and Indonesia
I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a
black child and as a white child.
And so what I benefit from is a mul-
tiplicity of cultures that all fed me.
—Barack Obama
In , just after her high school graduation, Ann Dunham moved with
her parents to Honolulu, Hawaii. Her father, Stanley, had been offered
a job at a new furniture store, and her mother, Madelyn, began working
at a local bank. Ann, a shy, extremely bright year-old, enrolled in the
University of Hawaii.
In one of her classes, Ann met a year-old man
named Barack Obama, the first African student accepted to the univer-
sity. Studying econometrics, Barack was an intense scholar; he was also
quite gregarious and had formed many friendships throughout the univer-
sity community. Ann and Barack fell in love and were married, despite
the misgivings of Barack’s father, who wrote from Kenya that he didn’t
approve of the marriage.
Barack’s father threatened to have his son’s visa
revoked, which would have required his immediate return to Kenya. He
didn’t know the marriage had taken place until a few years later.
Ann’s parents were wary at first but soon accepted their son-in-law.
His charm, his intelligence, and the couple’s obvious love impressed them.
On August 4, , Ann and Barack had a son they named Barack Hus-
sein Obama—Barack after his father and Hussein after his grandfather.
The son, born to a white American woman and a black African man,
was called Barry.
In , Barack Sr. was awarded a scholarship to study
at Harvard University for a Ph.D. Although the scholarship money was
17
18 B arack O bama
sufficient to support him, it was not enough to support Ann and their
son. Barack Sr. went to Boston, leaving Ann and Barry, now two years
old, in Hawaii. Ann and Barack Sr. divorced, and Ann continued her
studies at the university.
Ann’s parents, Stanley and Madelyn (known as
Toots, short for Tutu, the Hawaiian word for grandparents), were a con-
stant presence in Barry’s life.
Barry didn’t know his father, except from the stories he heard from
his mother and grandparents and from the photographs he found tucked
away in closets. Barack writes in his memoir Dreams from My Father about
an early memory of sitting on the floor with his mother staring at photos
of his father’s dark laughing face, his prominent forehead, and his thick
eyeglasses.
His mother told him about his father growing up in Kenya,
as part of the Luo tribe, in a village named Alego. Barack listened as
his mother told him about his father tending goats and attending a local
school, where he was thought to have promise. She described how he had
won a scholarship to study in Nairobi and was selected by Kenyan leaders
and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States.
She
added that his father was expected to learn about Western technology
and return to Africa with the skills to help create a new, modern Africa.
She explained that his father had returned to fulfill that promise to his
country. And even though she and Barry stayed behind, the bond of love
survived the distance.1 By the time Barry was old enough to listen to and
remember the stories, his mother had begun a relationship with a man
who would become her second husband.
After his father left to study at Harvard, Barry began to spend a good
deal of time with his grandparents.
He accompanied his grandfather to
a park to play checkers and went fishing with him and his friends. All
the while, he knew his father was missing. The stories he heard didn’t
tell him why his father had left or what life might have been like if he
had stayed. Barack didn’t blame his family for what was left out or what
they didn’t tell him.
Instead, he created his own picture of his father. In
his memoir, Barack wrote about finding an article that appeared in the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin at the time of his father’s graduation from the uni-
versity. In the picture that accompanied the article, Barack describes his
father as guarded and responsible, a model student, and an ambassador
for Africa.
Barack Sr., he writes, scoffed at the school’s treatment of for-
eign students, who were forced to attend programs designed to promote
cultural understanding, which he said was a distraction from the training
the students were seeking. Barack writes that his father noted that other
nations could learn from Hawaii how races are willing to work together
toward a common development, adding that this was something whites
in other places were unwilling to do.
There is no mention in the article
Fo r mative Yea rs in Hawaii and I ndon esia 19
of Ann or their son, Barack notes; the omission of this information made
him wonder whether this was on purpose, based on his father’s pending
departure from the family, or due to the fault of the reporter not asking
more questions.
Barack found the article about his father with his own
birth certificate and vaccination records.2 For years, Barack pictured his
father in his mind, always wondering why he left. Years later, memories
of his “ghost” of a father were triggered, sometimes by reading an article
about Africa or seeing a group of children on a street corner.
Barack might
wonder if any of the children were without their fathers.
In December , Barack said that thoughts of his father would “bub-
ble up”; memories would come to him at random moments. “I think about
him often. . . . Men often long for their fathers’ approval, to shine in their
fathers’ light.” And when asked how he feels about his father today, what
is the dominant emotion in these thoughts, Barack answers, “I didn’t
know him well enough to be angry at him as a father.
Mostly I feel a cer-
tain sadness for him, and the way that his life ended up unfulfilled, despite
his enormous talents.”3
Living in Indonesia and a New Father
I have wonderful memories of the place [Indonesia], but there’s no
doubt that, at some level, I understood that I was different.
It meant
that I was, maybe, not part of the community as much as I might have
been, otherwise. On the other hand, it also gave me an appreciation
of what it means to be an American.4
Barack was two when his father left for Boston and Harvard Law
School. When he was four, his mother met an Indonesian man named
Lolo Soetoro, also a student at the University of Hawaii.
They dated for
two years and were married. During the two-year courtship, Lolo spent
a great deal of time at the Dunham household, and, by the time Ann
told Barry that she and Lolo were to be married and would be moving to
a faraway place, Barry, now six, wasn’t surprised and didn’t object. Lolo
returned to Indonesia, and Ann remained in Hawaii to make necessary
preparations to move.
Arriving in Jakarta, Ann and Barry were met at the
airport by Lolo and groups of soldiers wearing brown uniforms and carry-
ing guns. In anticipation of their arrival, a new home had been built, and
Barry was already enrolled in a school. As they rode to their new home in
a borrowed car, Barry gazed at the landscape of the new place—the vil-
lages, forests, rice paddies, water buffalo, congested streets and markets,
and men pulling carts loaded with goods.
The new house, located on the outskirts of town, was made of stucco
and red tile and had a mango tree in the courtyard.
When he arrived at
20 B arack O bama
the new home, Barry’s stepfather presented him with a gift: an ape named
Tata, brought from New Guinea. Another surprise were the animals in the
backyard, including chickens, ducks, a yellow dog, two birds of paradise, a
cockatoo, and two baby crocodiles in a pond at the back of the property.
Dinner on their first night in their new home included a hen that a friend
of Lolo’s killed while Barry watched.
Later, lying beneath a mosquito net
canopy, Barry tried to sleep as he listened to chirping crickets. He could
barely believe his good fortune.
Barack writes in his memoir that, after being with Lolo for two years,
his face had become familiar. In less than two years, Barack had learned
the language, customs, and legends of Indonesia.
He survived chicken
pox, the measles, and the scratches suffered from his schoolteachers’ bam-
boo switches. His best friends were the children of the farmers and the
servants, and together they ran the streets, looking for odd jobs and fly-
ing kites. Lolo had taught him to eat raw green peppers, dog meat, snake
meat, and grasshoppers.
He wrote to his grandparents and gladly accepted
the boxes of chocolate and peanut butter they sent. In his letters, Barack
didn’t mention some aspects of his life—those that he found too difficult
to explain—like the faces of the farmers when the rains didn’t come or
when the rains lasted for over a month and the farmers had to rescue their
goats and hens as their huts were washed away.
He didn’t describe the fre-
quently violent world that he was quickly learning about, the world that
was sometimes cruel and often unpredictable.
At the end of the day, when she returned from her work at the Ameri-
can Embassy, he talked with his mother about what he had seen, and she
would stroke his forehead and try to explain to him as best as she could.
He turned to Lolo for guidance and instruction, finding him easy to be
with, glad that Lolo introduced him as his son to his family and friends.
When Lolo explained the scars on his legs that came from the leeches that
stuck to him and his fellow soldiers as they marched through the swamps
in New Guinea, he told Barry that it hurt when the skin was singed after
using a hot knife to remove the leeches.
He said, “Sometimes you can’t
worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you
have to go.” He told Barry that he killed a man because the man was weak.
He said, “Men take advantage of weakness in other men . . . better to be
strong . . . if you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone
who’s strong . . .
but always better to be strong yourself. Always.”5
Before Ann and Barry moved to Indonesia, she tried to learn all she
could about life there. She was prepared for most of what she encoun-
tered, but she didn’t expect the loneliness. Lolo had changed since he left
Hawaii. When he left Hawaii to prepare a home for his bride and her son,
Fo r mative Yea rs in Hawaii and I ndon esia 21
they were apart for a year.
During that time, he lost the energy he had as a
student in Hawaii, and his dream of teaching at a university upon his re-
turn to Indonesia also vanished. Ann later found out that Lolo and all the
Indonesian students studying abroad were ordered to return home by the
Indonesian government. When he landed in Jakarta, Lolo was questioned
by army officials and was conscripted to serve in the army in the jungles of
New Guinea for a year.
The vitality that had attracted Ann to Lolo while
they were students at the university was gone, and, as a result, Ann was
lonely; her life wasn’t what she’d hoped it would be.
Her job at the American Embassy helped her cope, as did the money
she earned there and the friendships she made. At the embassy, Ann
learned what was going on in the government—news and information she
couldn’t get otherwise.
Knowing she could leave if she wanted or needed
to, and knowing her white race and American passport protected her, she
felt some comfort. What worried her more was what the situation was
doing or might do to her son. Lolo, who had been working as a geologist,
obtained a job in a government relations office of an American oil com-
pany with the help of his well-connected brother-in-law.
A higher income
enabled the family to move to another neighborhood, purchase a car and
a television, and obtain a membership in a country club. All this did little
to help Ann understand and cope. She decided she needed to concen-
trate on Barry’s education, outside of what he learned at the Indonesian
school. There was no money to send Barry to the International School
that most of the foreign children attended, so she supplemented his edu-
cation with lessons from a U.S.
correspondence course. Five days a week,
at four o’clock in the morning, while Barry ate his breakfast, she gave him
English lessons before he left for school and she left for work. As well,
she would remind Barry of his heritage, describing how his father grew up
poor in a poverty-stricken country, telling Barry that hard work and liv-
ing life according to strict principles was how his father lived, and Barry
had no choice but to do the same.
Besides the correspondence course, she
brought home books on the civil rights movement, music recordings of
black singers, and copies of speeches by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; she
told him stories about the black children in southern U.S. states who were
forced to read books discarded by the white children.
They succeeded
despite their hardships, she said. She told Barry that to be black was to be
the beneficiary of a great inheritance and a special destiny.6
Ann spent many hours supplementing what Barry was learning in the
Indonesian school. She was adamant that he learn about race, heritage,
and about being an American.
All of the information confused Barry
about who he was, where he came from, and his mixed-race heritage.
22 B arack O bama
When he looked in the mirror, he wondered if something was wrong
with his reflected face. Watching television shows with black actors and
thumbing through the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog his grandparents
sent to him only confused him further.
Most of what he felt and observed
he kept to himself, believing that either his mother didn’t see or feel the
same way or she was attempting to protect him. Through it all, he trusted
his mother’s love for him, despite feeling that what she had taught him
was incomplete somehow. Barack lived in Indonesia for four years. Dur-
ing that time, Ann gave birth to a daughter named Maya.
When Barack
was 10, Ann sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, believing
he needed to attend school there rather than continue his education in
Indonesia. She promised her young son that she and Maya would soon
join him in Hawaii.
Barack’s time in Indonesia stayed with him long into adulthood. In
his book The Audacity of Hope, published in , he writes that he is
haunted by memories of his life in Bali.
He thinks about how packed
mud felt beneath his bare feet as he walked through rice paddies, of how
the sky at sunrise looked behind volcanic peaks, fruit stands along the
road, and the muezzin’s call at night. He writes that he hopes to take his
wife, Michelle, and their two daughters there someday, so he can share
something of his life as a child with them.
But his plans, he says, are al-
ways delayed, and he worries that what he might find there now wouldn’t
match his memories. He adds that, even with today’s cell phones, direct
flights, and hour news coverage and Internet cafes, Indonesia feels
more distant to him than it did 30 years ago. He fears, he says, that the
land where he spent four years of his childhood has become a land of
strangers.7
Moving Back to Hawaii and Living
with Grandparents
Traveling by himself and confident that his grandparents would be at
the airport to meet him, Barry arrived in Honolulu carrying a wooden
mask that the Indonesian copilot, a friend of his mother’s, had given him.
Sure enough, his grandparents Stanley and Toots were there, waving and
anxious, welcoming their grandson home again.
Toots put a garland of
gum and candy around his neck, and Stanley, whom Barry called Gramps,
put his arm around Barry’s slim shoulders. On the way to his grandparents’
apartment, Gramps and Toots talked about what they were having for din-
ner that evening and how Barry would need new clothes for school. Barry
was 6 when he left Hawaii, and now he was For four years, he’d lived
Fo r mative Yea rs in Hawaii and I ndon esia 23
in a completely different place, and the change was dramatic.
Suddenly
he felt as if he would be living with strangers. While he had been away,
his grandparents had sold their house and had moved into a two-bedroom
apartment. His grandfather had left the furniture business and was selling
insurance. He had landed in something familiar, but very different.
As he listened to his grandparents, Barry remembered how his mother
had said it was time for him to attend an American school, since he had
completed all the lessons from the correspondence course.
She said she
and Maya would join him soon, in a year at most, and that she’d try to be
there for Christmas. She had reminded him of previous summers, filled
with ice cream and days at the beach, and told him that he wouldn’t have
to wake up at four o’clock in the morning to do his lessons. Over the
course of the summer, Barry adapted to life with his grandparents.
Every
morning, Toots left the apartment in her tailored suit and high-heeled
shoes to go to her job at the bank, and Gramps would make phone calls,
trying to sell insurance policies. As the summer came to a close, Barry
became anxious about starting school. The previous summer, while visit-
ing his grandparents, he had interviewed for admission to the prestigious
Punahou Academy, a prep school started by missionaries in After
one of the interviews, Barry and Gramps were given a tour of the school
grounds by the admissions officer, a woman who had grilled Barry on his
academic and career goals.
The school’s green fields and shade trees spread
over several acres and included tennis courts, swimming pools, and, in the
glass-and-steel buildings, photography studios. On the tour, Gramps was
so impressed that he told Barry, “Hell, Bar, this isn’t a school. This is
heaven. You might just get me to go back to school with you.”8 Barry’s ac-
ceptance at the school was a contributing factor in his mother’s decision
to send him back to Hawaii.
The waiting list was long, the admission stan-
dards strict, and Barry’s admission was helped along by his grandfather’s
boss, a graduate of the school.
On Barry’s first day of the fifth grade, Gramps took him to school and
insisted that they arrive early. As the teacher took attendance, she read
Barry’s name.
There were giggles throughout the classroom. The teacher,
who had called him by his African name, Barack, told him that Barack
was a beautiful name and that she had lived in Kenya. She asked what
tribe Barry’s father was from, and when he answered the Luo tribe, the
children laughed. Throughout the day, Barry was in a daze, especially after
one of his classmates asked to touch his hair and another asked if his
father ate humans.
When he returned home after school and was asked
about his day, he went into his room and closed the door. As one of the
few black students at the elite school, Barry stood out among the children
24 B arack O bama
of Hawaii’s wealthy, most of whom were white and Asian. As Rik Smith,
a black student two years older than Barack, described it for the Chicago
Tribune in March , “Punahou was an amazing school.
But it could be
a lonely place. Those of us who were black did feel isolated—there’s no
question about that.”9
Barry’s novelty gradually wore off, yet his sense that he didn’t belong at
the prestigious school lingered. His clothes were different, and the same
shoes he wore in Jakarta were neither suitable nor the least bit fashion-
able.
Many of his classmates had been together since kindergarten and
lived in the same neighborhoods. For Barry, at 10 years of age, life seemed
difficult. Slowly, he made a few friends, but his life, for the most part, con-
sisted of walking home from school, watching television while Gramps
took his afternoon nap, completing his homework before dinner, and fall-
ing asleep listening to music on the radio.
One day, a telegram arrived,
announcing Barack Sr. was coming for a visit.
At school, Barry told his classmates that his father was a prince and that
his grandfather was a chief of the tribe. He told them that his last name,
Obama, meant “burning spear.”10 Because the story brought acceptance
with his classmates, Barry began to believe the story he told; yet he knew
he was telling a lie.
His mother, who was visiting for Christmas as prom-
ised, seemed apprehensive of the pending visit and tried to reassure her
son. She told him she had maintained a correspondence with his father
and that he knew all about Barry’s life in Indonesia and in Hawaii. She
told Barry his father had remarried and that Barry now had five brothers
and a sister living in Kenya.
She said his father had been in a car accident
and that his visit was part of his recuperation after a long hospital stay.
Ann said Barry and his father would become good friends, and she spent
hours giving Barry information about Kenya. After listening to his mother
talk about Kenya and his father’s life there, Barry visited the public library
and read a book on East Africa.
He read about his father’s tribe and how
they raised cattle, lived in mud huts, and ate cornmeal and yams. He left
the book open on the library table. On the day his father was to arrive,
Barry left school early. Filled with apprehension, he stood at the door
of his grandparents’ apartment and rang the doorbell.
When his grand-
mother opened the door, there stood his father, a tall, dark figure who
walked with a limp. His father crouched down and put his arms around
Barry. He said, “Well, Barry, it is a good thing to see you after so long. Very
good.” He led him by the hand into the living room and said he’d heard
Barry was doing well in school.
When Barry didn’t answer, his father said
he had no reason to be shy about doing well in school and that his broth-
ers and his sister were also excelling in their schoolwork. He told Barry
Fo r mative Yea rs in Hawaii and I ndon esia 25
this was in his blood. He gave Barry three wooden figurines: a lion, an
elephant, and an ebony man in tribal dress beating a drum.
When Barry
mumbled a thank you, his father looked at the carvings, touched his son’s
shoulder, and said, “They are only small things.”11 In his memoir, Barack
writes that, after a week of seeing his father, he decided that he preferred
the more distant image of his father—one that he could change or even
ignore.
His father, he wrote, remained something unknown, something
volatile and somewhat threatening
Barack Sr. spent a month in Hawaii, recuperating from his injuries suf-
fered in the car crash and reconnecting with his son. Looking back on it,
Barack writes in his memoir that he was often silent around his father, and
he was fascinated by the power his father seemed to have over his mother
and grandparents at first.
Barack remembers his father’s laugh, his deep
voice, and how he stroked his beard. Barry’s grandmother was more vocal
about her opinions, and his grandfather seemed more energetic around his
father. For the first time, Barry thought of a father as something real, and
maybe even a permanent presence in his life. Then, after a while, tensions
rose.
His mother looked strained, and his grandmother would mutter to
herself; his grandfather complained about this or that, until one evening
talking turned to shouting over whether Barry should watch a holiday
television show. Barack Sr. thought his son watched too much television
and that he should work harder on his studies. Their voices grew louder,
and Barry stayed in his room.
After the argument was over, year-old
Barry began to count the days until his father would leave, hoping life
would return to normal.
Before his father returned to Kenya, he was invited to speak at Barry’s
school. Barack Sr. spoke to Barry’s class about boys proving their man-
hood, the elders of the tribe, and about his country’s struggle to be free
from British rule.
The class applauded his father and a few asked ques-
tions; one of the teachers said he had an impressive father, and a classmate
thought his father was very “cool.” Two weeks after visiting Barry’s school,
Barack Sr. returned to Kenya, leaving Barry with real images and genuine
memories of his absent father.
Barack continued his education at the Punahou Academy.
By the
time he was in his teens, there were still only a few black students at the
school. Since Barack Sr. had visited, life had been relatively calm, but, as
Barry got older, life became more complicated. There were calls from the
principal’s office, a part-time job, marginal report cards, and a few awk-
ward dates.
There was also the usual comparison with friends and what
they had and what Barry did not have. By this time, Ann and Lolo had
separated and she and Maya returned to Hawaii to pursue her master’s
26 B arack O bama
studies in anthropology. For three years, the three of them lived in a small
apartment near the academy, supported by the grants Ann had received.
She often reminded Barry that she was a single mother going to school and
raising two kids, and the less than perfect housekeeping and the lack of
food in the refrigerator were all a part of their life.
Despite his claims of in-
dependence, and sometimes age-driven sullen attitudes, he did his best to
help his mother with shopping, laundry, and looking after his sister. When
the time came for Ann to return to Indonesia to complete her fieldwork
in anthropology, she wanted Barry to return with her and Maya. His re-
sponse was an immediate no, knowing he could live with his grandparents
again.
According to his sister Maya, “I don’t imagine the decision to let
him stay behind was an easy one for anyone. But he wanted to remain at
Punahou. He had friends there, he was comfortable there, and to a kid his
age, that’s all that mattered.”13 The arrangement to live with Gramps and
Toots, who were very much like parents to Barry, was what he wanted.
He realized he was growing up to be a black man in America; the trouble
was, neither he nor anyone around him knew what this meant.
His father
had given him few clues in the sporadic letters he sent. The letters were
about his family in Kenya and Barry’s progress in school and noted that
he and his mother and sister were welcome at any time in Kenya. Neither
Gramps nor his few black friends offered much advice.
One outlet for Barry was basketball.
By the time he was in high
school, Barry was on the varsity squad, but not a starter. Known as “Barry
O’Bomber” because of his long jump-shot ability, it was on the court where
Barry met other blacks whose confusion and anger would help shape his
own. According to Alan Lum, who later coached at Punahou and also
taught elementary school there, Barack was always the first to confront
coaches when he felt they weren’t fairly allotting playing time, and he
wasn’t shy about advocating for himself or his fellow players.
He added,
“He’d go right up to the coach during a game and say, ‘Coach, we’re killing
this team. Our second string should be playing more.’ ”14 Barry also went
to the gym at the university, where black men played. There he learned
about an attitude that came from what one did, not from someone’s fa-
ther or family.
On the court, Barry found a community where being black
wasn’t a disadvantage.
By the time he was in high school, Barry was feeling what it meant to
be black in Hawaii, and he was searching for his own identity. He writes
in his memoir about giving a classmate a bloody nose when the boy called
him a coon and about an elderly neighbor who felt scared when he got on
the apartment building elevator and told the building manager that Barry
had been following her.
He writes about a tennis pro who told him not
Fo r mative Yea rs in Hawaii and I ndon esia 27
to touch the schedule on the board because his color might rub off and
then asked Barry if he could take a joke. He remembers his white assistant
basketball coach whispering within earshot that his team shouldn’t have
lost to a “bunch of niggers.” When Barry told him to shut up, the coach
calmly explained that it was an obvious fact that “there are black people,
and there are niggers .
. . those guys were niggers.”15 Barry was learning
about the term white folks, and it was uncomfortable for him. He was
aware of the low expectations some white people had for him. He knew
that people were satisfied as long as he was courteous and smiled and made
no sudden moves. He wrote in his memoir, “Such a pleasant surprise to
find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry.”16 When
he would speak with his friend Ray, a black student two years his senior,
he would refer to white folks, and then he would suddenly remember his
mother, and his words would seem awkward or false.
He would think of
his grandparents and helping his grandfather dry the dishes after dinner
and his grandmother saying she was going to bed, and the phrase white
folks would flash in his mind. He had no idea, as a black man in a place far
from the South, who he was. He just knew he was different. Moving back
and forth between his black friends and his white family, living within the
languages and cultures, he hoped the two worlds would somehow meet,
despite always feeling that something wasn’t right.
When Barack was a senior at Punahou Academy, he stopped writing
to his father and his father stopped writing back.
He had put his studies
aside, still struggling with who he was, and experimented with drugs and
alcohol to try to put the struggle out of his mind. Her fieldwork com-
plete, his mother had returned from Indonesia, and she began to ask Barry
questions about school, his friends, and where he was headed after high
school. When he attempted to politely reassure her, she wasn’t at all as-
sured.
She wondered whether he was being a bit casual about his future.
His grades were slipping, and he hadn’t started on college applications.
Wasn’t he concerned about the future? Answering that he thought he
could stay in Hawaii and take some classes while working part-time, she
responded that he could get into any school in the country with some ef-
fort.
Barry graduated from Punahou and was accepted by several schools.
He decided to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles, mainly because
he had met a young woman vacationing with her family in Hawaii who
lived in a suburb of Los Angeles. When asked by an old friend of his grand-
father’s, an elderly black poet named Frank who lived in a run-down part
of Waikiki, what he expected to get out of college, Barack answered that
he didn’t know.
Frank told Barack, “Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? All
you know is that college is the next thing you’re supposed to do. And the
28 B arack O bama
people who are old enough to know better, who fought all those years for
your right to go to college . . . the real price of admission.” He added that
Barack wasn’t going to college to be educated, but to be trained—about
equal opportunity and the American way—and to keep his eyes open
In the fall of , Barack left Hawaii for California, feeling like he was
going through the motions of attending college and armed with an atti-
tude he didn’t know how to change.
Notes
1.
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (New York: Three Rivers Press,
), 9–
2. Ibid., 26–
3. Kevin Merida, “The Ghost of a Father,” Washington Post, December 4,
, A
4. Christine Brozyna, “Get to Know Barack Obama,” ABC News, Novem-
ber 1,
5. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (New York: Three Rivers Press,
), 36–
6.
Ibid., 50–
7. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York: Crown Publishers, ),
–
8. Ibid.,
9. Kirsten Scharnberg and Kim Barker, “The Not-So-Simple Story of Barack
Obama’s Youth,” Chicago Tribune Online Edition, March 25, , http://www.
story.
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (New York: Three Rivers Press,
),
Ibid., 65–
Ibid.,
Kirsten Scharnberg and Kim Barker, “The Not-So-Simple Story of Barack
Obama’s Youth,” Chicago Tribune Online Edition, March 25, , http://www.
story.
Ibid.
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (New York: Three Rivers Press,
),
Amanda Ripley, David E.
Thigpen, and Jeannie McCabe, “Obama’s As-
cent,” Time, November 15, , 74–
Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (New York: Three Rivers Press,
),
Chapter 3
College and Community
Activism in Chicago
Occidental College
In the fall of , as Barack left Hawaii to attend Occidental College
in Los Angeles, Jimmy Carter was president, a first-class stamp cost 15
cents, and the average retail price of gasoline was 88 cents per gallon.
In
November, Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and held
63 Americans hostage for days. For Barack, his new home didn’t
look, at least on the outside, much different from his home in Hawaii. It
was sunny, there were palm trees, and the Pacific Ocean was nearby. On
campus, the other students were friendly and the college instructors were
encouraging; there were enough black students to form friendships—a
sort of tribe where issues such as race and common concerns were dis-
cussed.
However, he also found that many of his black friends in Los
Angeles weren’t necessarily concerned with the same complaints as his
black friends in Hawaii. Most had the same concerns of white students:
continuing with classes and finding a good job after graduation. Barack
continued to search for an identity and struggle with his mixed race.
In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Barack wrote that growing up
in Hawaii instead of the more difficult streets and neighborhoods where
many of his friends had lived might have left him without the same feel-
ing of needing to “escape.” For him, there was nothing he had to escape
except his own inner doubts.
He felt more like the black students who had
grown up in the safer environment of the suburbs; their parents had al-
ready escaped from more difficult circumstances. They, he wrote, weren’t
defined by their color; they were individuals, refusing to be categorized.
29
30 B arack O bama
One friend told Barack that she wasn’t black, but multiracial, born of an
Italian father and a mother who was part African, French, and Native
American.
She didn’t feel she had to choose between them. She added
that it wasn’t white people who asked her to choose, but black people
who were making everything racial and who were trying to make her
choose.1 Barack recognized himself in her and others who spoke the same
way. And yet it caused him to question his race even more. As a result,
he chose his friends carefully at Occidental, wanting some distance from
those like his friend who pronounced herself a multiracial individual.
He
felt only white people were individuals and that others were confused. It
was this confusion that made him keep questioning who he was, and he
sought distance to prove to himself and others which side he lived on and
where his loyalties were.
While at Occidental College, Barack went from being called Barry to
being called Barack.
This happened after he met a black student named
Regina. He had seen her around campus, usually in the library or organiz-
ing black student events. At their first meeting, he was introduced by
a mutual friend as Barack. “I thought your name was Barry,” she said.
“Barack’s my given name. My father’s name .
. . it means ‘blessed.’ In Ara-
bic. My grandfather was a Muslim.” Regina repeated the name a few times
and told him it was a beautiful name and asked why everyone called him
Barry. He responded that it was habit, that his father had used it when he
came to the States, and that it likely was easier to pronounce and helped
his father fit in.
In Regina’s story, as she explained it the first time they
met, he found a vision of the possibility of black life, a history that was
fixed and definite. He envied her and her memories of a childhood in
Chicago, with an absent father and a struggling mother, with her uncles,
cousins, and grandparents laughing around a table.
Her response to this
was that she envied her new friend, wishing she had grown up in Hawaii
like him. As a result of this friendship with Regina, Barack felt stronger
and more honest with himself and that a bridge had developed between
his past and his future.2
As a sophomore, Barack became involved with a divestment campaign
at Occidental.
As his role with the campus group expanded, he found
his opinions were being heard, and, as a result, he searched for his own
messages and ideas. When asked to give the opening remarks at a rally
on campus, he explored his memories of his father’s speech to his class
at Punahou Academy and his father’s power to transform words into real
changes.
At the rally, he was meek at first but then gained confidence as
he looked out at the crowd. With a voice that at first was barely heard,
he began to speak about the struggles, not between blacks and whites, not
College and Community Activism in Chica go 31
between the rich and the poor, but in fairness, dignity, and injustice and
servitude; between commitment and indifference and between right and
wrong.
The crowd watched and listened and then began to applaud. He
quickly realized a connection had been made. When it was time for him
to leave the stage, he was reluctant to do so because he had more to say.
However, later, when he was offered congratulations on his speech that
others said was delivered from the heart, Barack had already decided it
was his last speech.
He felt he had no business speaking for black people,
deciding instead he had nothing to say; the applause, he thought, only
made him feel better, not those about whom he was asked to speak.
His friend Regina told him he was naive to believe he could run away
from himself and avoid what he felt. She told him he needed to stop
thinking that everything was about him.
It wasn’t about him, she told
him; it was about people who needed his help, about children everywhere
who were struggling, suffering, and who were not interested in his bruised
ego. For Barack, this success on the stage and his feeling afterward of
finding fault within himself were the result of fear—fear that he didn’t
belong, that unless he hid or pretended to be something he wasn’t, he
would remain an outsider, away from anyone who stood in judgment of
him.
He decided his identity might begin with his race, but it didn’t end
there. But still, he asked himself where did he belong? He was two years
away from college graduation and had no idea of what he would do then.
His childhood in Hawaii felt like a dream, and he knew he wouldn’t re-
turn to settle there. And he felt that no matter what his father in Kenya
might say, he couldn’t claim Africa as his home.
What he needed, he
determined, was a community, a place where he could put down roots
and test his commitments. He decided to take advantage of a transfer
program between Occidental College and Columbia University in New
York City.
Columbia University
In August , when he was 20 years old, Barack arrived in New York
to study political science and international relations at Columbia as a ju-
nior transfer student.
After finding a place to live, he acclimated himself
to the city, finding it a far different place from Los Angeles and certainly
poles apart from Honolulu. New York City dazzled him; the beauty and
the ugliness, the excess and the noise, the wealth and poverty all amazed
him. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Barack writes of the city’s
allure and its power to corrupt.
With the stock boom of the s, he
noticed that men and women barely out of their twenties were already
32 B arack O bama
enjoying great wealth. Uncertain of his ability for self-control and to lead
a moderate lifestyle, and fearful of falling into old habits of drugs and al-
cohol, he saw temptation everywhere.
What he saw happening was remi-
niscent of the poverty he saw in Indonesia and the violent mood of the
young people in Los Angeles. Whether it was because of the high density
of people in New York or the very scale of the city, he began to grasp the
problems of race and class in the United States. He had hoped to find
refuge in the black community in New York.
But instead of finding a
satisfactory life for himself—a vocation, family, and a home—he noticed
that, for the most part, blacks working in the offices were the messengers
and the clerks, not the occupants of the high-rise offices. Discussing what
he found with friends and associates, he tried to determine his future in
a place that seemed out of control, a place where obvious divisions were
natural.
With money, he found he could have a middle-class life and orga-
nize his life around friends, favorite places to hang out, and political affili-
ations. But he knew that if he stayed in Manhattan, living a middle-class
life like his black friends, at some point his choices couldn’t be changed.
Unwilling to do this, he spent a year observing what the city had to offer,
looking for a place he could enter and remain.3
Barack immersed himself in his studies, determined to buckle down
and work hard.
During his first summer in New York, Barack’s mother and
sister Maya came to visit him. While he worked full-time on a construc-
tion site during the day, they went sightseeing, and they would all meet
for dinner and talk about what they had seen or done that day. Noticing
an envelope he had addressed to his father, Barack’s mother asked if they
were arranging a visit and that it would be wonderful for them to get to
know each other.
She said she realized it might have been difficult for a
year-old to understand his father, but now that he was older, it was a
good time for them to meet again. She hoped he didn’t feel resentful, and
she began to tell Barack that it wasn’t his father’s fault that he left, but
that she had divorced him. She said her parents weren’t happy about the
marriage in the first place, but they had agreed, and that Barack’s grand-
father didn’t approve of the marriage either.
She said the three of them
were to go to Kenya after Barack Sr. finished his studies. He chose to go
to Harvard—despite receiving only enough money from the school for
tuition and not enough to support a family—because he had to prove he
was the best, and going to Harvard was the way to do it.
She told Barack that when his father came to Hawaii to visit, he wanted
them to return to Kenya with him, but she was still married to Lolo, and
it wasn’t possible.
Barack heard in his mother’s stories about his distant,
absent father and about the love between them, a black man and a white
College and Community Activism in Chica go 33
woman, and she was trying to help her son see his father in the same way.
A few months later, Barack’s father died. Instead of traveling to Africa for
his father’s funeral, he wrote to his father’s family to express his condo-
lences.
He wrote in his memoir that he felt no pain at his father’s passing,
only a vague sense of a lost opportunity. Later, he wrote, he dreamed about
his father and afterward dug out the letters he had received over the years.
Remembering his father’s visit so long ago, he realized how, even in his
absence, his father’s strong image gave him structure, something to live
up to or to disappoint.4
Barack graduated from Columbia University in In his profile in
a Columbia alumni magazine in , Barack recalled his college years as
“an intense period of study,” saying, “I spent a lot of time in the library.
I
didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk.”5
Moving to Chicago
In , Barack decided to become a community activist, even though
he didn’t know anyone who made a living doing this job nor did he know
what such a job’s duties might be. When asked about it, he would answer
that there was a need for a change in the mood of the country.
Change,
he decided, happened at the grassroots level, and he would organize black
people to effect change. He was congratulated for his ideas, but most of
his friends were skeptical. Barack was about to graduate from college, and,
while his friends were mailing off their applications for graduate school, he
was thinking of his mother, his father’s death, about living in Indonesia,
and Lolo; he thought about his friends at Occidental and at Columbia.
All of these memories were a part of his story and his struggles and a
part of the struggles of black people.
He believed that through organizing,
communities could be created and fought for, and through this, his own
uniqueness could be defined.
To become an organizer, he wrote letters to every civil rights organi-
zation he could think of. He also wrote to elected black officials and to
neighborhood councils and tenant rights groups.
When he received no
response, instead of being discouraged, he decided to find a job to pay
off student debts and save some money. He was hired as a research as-
sistant at a consulting firm. He was soon promoted to a financial writer,
with an office and a secretary. Eventually, he had money in his bank ac-
count. One day, as he was writing an article on interest rates, his half sister
Auma called.
Barack and Auma had been writing over the years, and he
knew she had left Kenya to study in Germany. The idea of her visiting
the United States or of him visiting her in Germany had been discussed,
34 B arack O bama
but nothing came of it. For the first time, he heard his sister’s voice as
she asked if she could visit him.
Just before she was scheduled to arrive
in New York, she called to say one of their brothers had been killed in a
motorcycle accident, and she was going to fly home to Kenya. After the
call, Barack thought about his family in Africa, wondering just who they
were and why he wasn’t sad at the loss of his half brother. The timing of
his first contact with his half sister Auma was a catalyst.
The idea of being
an organizer remained an idea that tugged at him. His personal wounds,
his struggles to form an identity, and taking a path that he thought would
relieve some of the pressures within him were all tied to being part of a
community, a far more personal path than the one he was on as a financial
writer. A few months after Auma’s call, he resigned from the consulting
firm and looked for a job as a community organizer.
Once again, he wrote
letters. After a month or so, he received a response from a prominent New
York civil rights organization. The director reviewed his credentials and
said he was impressed with his corporate experience and offered a position
organizing conferences on drugs, unemployment, and housing. Barack
declined the offer, wanting a job that was closer to what was happening
on the streets and in the neighborhoods.
Within six months, Barack was
still unemployed and broke. He had nearly given up when he received a
call from Marty Kaufman, who had started an organizing drive in Chicago
and needed a trainee. When they met, Kaufman asked why a black man
from Hawaii wanted to be an organizer. He asked if Barack was angry
about something, noting that anger was a requirement and typically the
only reason someone would be a community organizer.
Marty was white,
Jewish, in his late thirties, and from New York. He had started organizing
during the s and was now attempting to join urban blacks and sub-
urban whites in the Chicago area to save manufacturing jobs. He needed
someone to help him, and that someone had to be black. He told Barack
that most of the work would be done through local churches.
When he
asked Barack what he knew about Chicago, one of Barack’s answers was
that he had followed the career of Harold Washington, just elected mayor,
a black man not accepted by the white people of a segregated midwestern
city. He said he had written to Mayor Washington for a job but hadn’t
received a response.
Marty’s job offer included a salary of $10, for the
first year, and a $2, travel allowance to buy a car.6 After giving the
offer some thought, Barack packed his belongings and drove to Chicago.
For three years, Barack drove his battered Honda Civic to church and
neighborhood meetings in an effort to effect changes. For him and the
many other organizers working in Chicago, there were successes and fail-
ures, and, while progress was made in some areas, the goal of retaining
College and Community Activism in Chica go 35
industry jobs and creating new jobs wasn’t accomplished.
However, Barack
kept at it with his positive outlook, determination, and drive to succeed.
And what he did for three years on the South Side of Chicago affected
him. He was 24 years old, doing what he felt he needed to do.
Barack had been to Chicago once before, just before his 11th birthday.
The three-day visit was part of a summer trip touring the States with
his grandmother, mother, and sister.
When he returned to the city in his
twenties to begin a new job, he remembered the visit, deciding this time
the city seemed prettier to him. On his own for a few days, he drove
around the city, visiting neighborhoods and landmarks, imagining other
newcomers arriving there looking for work, or visiting the nightclubs to
listen to legendary performers.
Remembering the stories of people he had
met in Hawaii, California, and New York, he looked for his own place and
how he could take possession of the city.
As his new boss showed him around the South Side, Barack learned
about the factories that had closed, industries that had left the area, and
how, as a result, blacks, whites, and Hispanics had all lost jobs.
They all had
the same types of jobs at the factories and plants, and, despite living simi-
lar lives, they didn’t have anything to do with one another when they left
work.
When Barack asked how and why they would work together now,
he was told that they had to if they wanted to get their jobs back. The
job losses and layoffs had swept the South Side, leaving unemployment,
poverty, loss of pensions, and fears of losing homes. There was a com-
mon sense of betrayal throughout these communities. An organization
of 20 churches formed the Calumet Community Religions Conference,
or CCRC, and another eight churches joined an arm of the organization
called the Developing Communities Project, or DCP.7 And while the
CCRC had been awarded a job placement program grant, Marty told
Barack that things weren’t moving along as quickly as anyone hoped
and that to keep momentum, to get jobs back to that part of suburban
Chicago, they needed to get the unions on board and keep everyone
working together.
It was Barack’s job to get and keep everyone working
together, to create some enthusiasm, and to provide steady progress so
people in the affected communities would stay on board and jobs would
return to the area.
Barack was handed a list of people to interview and was charged with
the task of finding their self-interest.
That was how people became in-
volved in organizations, Marty said, because they believed they would
get something out of the process. Once he found an issue, a self-interest,
that people cared about, he could get them to take action, and with ac-
tion, there would be power. Barack liked these concepts of issues, spurring
36 B arack O bama
a ction, power, and people’s self-interest.
For the first three weeks of his job,
he worked around the clock. He soon realized that getting interviews was
very hard work, and there was a lot of resistance to meeting. After a few
interviews, he noticed common themes. Many people had grown up in dif-
ferent areas of the city but had moved to the South Side for work because
homes there were more affordable, there were yards for their children, and
the schools were better.
People were searching for something better. When
Barack turned in his first report of interviews, Marty told him, “It’s still too
abstract . . . if you want to organize people . . .
go towards people’s centers
. . . what makes them tick . . . form the relationships you need to get them
involved.”8 Barack wondered how he would ever steer what he was hear-
ing into any action.
After being in Chicago about two months, with a few missteps and no
success at organizing or effecting change, Barack scheduled a meeting at
Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project of 2, apartments located
on the edge of the South Side.
The area was surrounded by a landfill, a
sewage treatment plant, an expressway, and closed factories.
A biography of michelle obama: When he acknowledged that he had benefited from affirma- tive action, those who supported affirmative action were happy. As his new boss showed him around the South Side, Barack learned about the factories that had closed, industries that had left the area, and how, as a result, blacks, whites, and Hispanics had all lost jobs. After graduating with honours he settled in Chicago where he met Michelle Robinson. Martin Luther King Jr.
It was a place
to house poor black people. With an occupancy rate of about 90 percent,
many of the apartments were well kept, yet everything about the housing
seemed to be in a state of disrepair. Managed by the Chicago Housing
Authority, there were rarely any maintenance workers on-site to fix the
broken pipes, ceilings, and backed-up toilets.
Contrary to the project’s
name, the children and others who lived there rarely saw anything that
looked remotely like a garden.
Barack scheduled a meeting at a Catholic church at Altgeld to meet
with leaders of the community to discuss the organizing efforts. He knew
from his meetings with Marty and the local unions, and with organizers
who lived in the communities he was trying to change, about unemploy-
ment, lack of job training, how desperate it was in the communities, and
why morale was so low among organizers.
When he walked into the meet-
ing, the leaders told him they were quitting. They assured him it wasn’t
because of him or his work; it was because they were tired and frustrated,
and they didn’t want to make promises to their neighbors and then have
nothing happen. For Barack, at first there was panic, then anger.
He was
angry that he had come to Chicago in the first place, and he was angry
with the leaders for being shortsighted. He told the small group of com-
munity organizers that he didn’t come to Chicago because he needed a
job, but because he heard there were people there who were serious about
doing something to change their neighborhoods.
He said he was there and
was committed to helping them, and if they didn’t believe anything had
changed after working with him, then they should quit. Surprised at what
he said, the group discussed what had and hadn’t happened in the past
College and Community Activism in Chica go 37
and agreed they would give it a few more months.
Barack agreed to con-
centrate on Altgeld Gardens and the problems facing the community.
After discussing the meeting with Marty, Barack stepped up his efforts
to find more leaders in the neighborhood. One of the ideas was to hold a
series of street-corner meetings. At first, Barack was skeptical that any of
the area residents would come to meetings held out in the open on street
corners.
Slowly, however, people came. When they were told that the
local church at Altgeld was part of a larger organizing effort and that the
leaders wanted them and their neighbors to talk about what they always
complained about while sitting at their kitchen tables, they answered
that it was about time their complaints were heard.
After a few corner
meetings, the group numbered close to 30 people from the neighborhood.
Slowly, there was some movement toward community organizing.
As Barack concentrated his efforts on Altgeld Gardens, he scheduled
meetings to find solutions for the unemployment throughout the com-
munity. One such meeting was with an administrator of a branch of the
Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training (MET), which helped to
refer people to training programs.
Unfortunately, the local office was a
minute drive from Altgeld Gardens, hardly convenient for the neigh-
borhood or the people who lived there. By the time Barack and the three
community leaders arrived for their appointment, the administrator had
left the office. They were given brochures with a list of the programs of-
fered by the office throughout the city; none were located anywhere near
Altgeld Gardens.
Barack decided this was the issue he and his community
leaders would concentrate on. They would push for a training center for
the South Side and drafted a letter to MET. A director of MET agreed to
meet with the organizers at the Gardens. At the meeting of close to
people, the administrator promised to have an intake center in the area
within six months.
Feeling elated at his first success, Barack decided he
could do the job of community organizing.9
As Barack continued his interviews, Marty encouraged him to take
some time off and build a life away from his job. Personal support was im-
portant, he said; without it, an organizer could lose perspective and burn
out.
When he wasn’t working, Barack was mostly alone. Barack had devel-
oped friendships with some of the leaders of the organization, seeing them
both professionally and socially. He writes in his memoir, Dreams from My
Father, that the leadership was teaching him that the self-interest he was
looking for extended beyond the issues and that beneath people’s opin-
ions were explanations of themselves.
Their stories of terror and wonder,
with the events that haunted and inspired them, made them who they
were. This realization, he writes, was what allowed him to share more of
himself with the people he was working with, to break out of the isolation
38 B arack O bama
that he carried with him to Chicago.
He was afraid, at first, that his prior
life would be too foreign for their feelings and opinions. Instead, when the
people he worked with listened to his stories of his grandparents, mother,
father, and stepfather, of going to school in Hawaii and Indonesia, they
would nod their heads or shrug or laugh. They wondered how someone
with his background had ended up so countrified and were puzzled by him.
Why would he want to be in Chicago when he could be back in Hawaii?
Their stories, in response to his stories, helped him bind the two worlds
together, and they gave him a sense of place and purpose that he’d been
looking for.
He found that Marty was right—there was always a commu-
nity there if you dug deep enough
Meanwhile, after writing to each other and speaking on the phone for
years but never having met, Barack’s half sister Auma came to Chicago
for a visit. Immediately, there was a connection; their conversation was
natural and easy, and the love they shared was fierce.
He told her about
New York, his work as an organizer in Chicago, his mother and Maya,
and his grandparents. She’d heard about all of them from their father
and felt like she already knew them. Auma told Barack about studying in
Germany and about finishing her Master’s degree in linguistics. As they
talked, she referred to their father as the Old Man.
The description felt
correct to Barack: familiar, distant, and someone not understood. Barack
took Auma on a tour of Chicago and introduced her to three members
of the leadership. It was evident to Auma that her half brother was well
respected and liked. She asked Barack if he was doing his work for them,
the communities, or for himself.
As they spent time together, Auma told Barack stories of their father.
She said she really didn’t know him and that maybe no one did.
She
told him about Roy, her brother (Barack’s half brother); Ruth, Barack
Sr.’s white American wife; and Ruth and Barack’s two sons. Barack heard
about how their father had made a trip to Germany to see Auma; it was a
time when he began to explain himself to her. She told Barack that their
father always talked about his namesake and how he would show Barack’s
picture to everyone, telling them how well he was doing in school, that
the letters Barack’s mother sent to Kenya comforted their father, and how
he would read them aloud over and over again, shaking the letter in his
hand and saying how kind Ann had been to him.
When the stories ended,
Barack felt dizzy with the all the new information about his father and
his extended family in Africa. All his life he’d carried an image of his
father—an image he had rebelled against and never questioned, and one
he had later tried to take for his own. He writes in his memoir that his
father had been a brilliant scholar, a generous friend, and a leader, and,
College and Community Activism in Chica go 39
through his absence, he had never foiled this image.
He hadn’t seen his
father shrunken or sick, his hopes ended or changed, his face full of regret
or grief. It was his father’s image, a black man from Africa, that he sought
for himself, and his father’s voice had remained “untainted, inspiring, re-
buking, granting or withholding approval,” and he could hear him say his
son wasn’t working hard enough and that he needed to help his people’s
struggle.
The image he had always had changed after hearing Auma’s sto-
ries. The curtain had been torn away, and he could now do whatever he
wanted to do; his father no longer had the power to tell him otherwise.
His father was no longer a fantasy and could no longer tell him how to