Name and Title: Sen. Barack Hussein Obama
Party Affiliation: Democratic
Birthday: Aug. 4, 1961
Birthplace/Where he has lived: Obama was born and grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii but spent part of his childhood in Jakarta, Indonesia. He has studied in Los Angeles, New York and Boston but has called Chicago home since 1985.
Education: Obama attended high school at Punahou School, a large private preparatory school. After graduating in 1979, he spent two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia University. He graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1991 after serving as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
Previous jobs: After his schooling, Obama worked as a civil rights attorney at the Chicago firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He specialized in employment discrimination, fair housing and voting rights legislation. He also taught constitutional law for 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School.
Beginning in 1985, Obama spent three years working as a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project on Chicago's South Side where he worked on projects that brought people with common problems together with the organizations or leaders who could help them. He speaks of this time as one of the most defining of his life.
In 1991, he worked on Project Vote, a campaign that registered 150,000 black voters for the 1992 election
In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in the Hyde Park neighborhood.
In 2000, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives but lost to incumbent Bobby Rush. He went on to make a successful run for the U.S. Senate in 2004.
Current job: Junior Senator from Illinois.
Endorsements:
More than 230 newspapers including The New York Times, The Anchorage Daily News, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Chicago Tribune have endorsed Obama. This includes nearly 50 newspapers that supported George W. Bush in 2004.
Other endorsements include:
President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.)
Oprah Winfrey
Scott McClellan, former White House Press Secretary under George W. Bush
Miscellaneous:
Obama is the fifth black senator in the history of the United States.
While at Columbia, Obama camped out in makeshift shantytowns with other members of Black Students' Association to pressure the university to cut ties with companies doing business with apartheid South Africa.
In his memoir Obama says he was locked out of his apartment on his first night at Columbia. He slept in an alley and bathed at a fire hydrant.
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