Born on Aug 4, 1961 in Hawaii, Barack Obama Studied law at Harvard,
worked as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago, served in Illinois state
senate from 1996-2004 and elected to the US Senate in 2004. He is the
first black candidate to become the presidential candidate of
the major US party and today, history is made as Barack Obama beats
Republican, John McCain to become America's first black
president elect.
"Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to
study in a magical place - America, which stood as a beacon of freedom
and opportunity to so many who had come before," he said.
After his landslide US Senate election victory a few months later, he
became a media darling and one of the most visible figures in
Washington, with two best-selling books to his name.
He won the backing of talk-show host, Oprah Winfrey, who not only urged
him to declare his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination
on her programme but appeared on the campaign trail with him.
Almost 30,000 people attended a rally in South Carolina in 2007 at
which she described Mr Obama as having an "ear for eloquence and a
tongue dipped in the unvarnished truth".
He has also broke all records for fund-raising, by harnessing the
internet to collect huge numbers of small donations, as well as larger
sums from corporate donors.
As an Illinois senator, he has established a firmly liberal voting
record, but has also worked with Republican colleagues on issues such
as Aids education and prevention.
International upbringing
Mr Obama is named after his father, who grew up in Kenya herding goats
but gained a scholarship to study in Hawaii. There, the Kenyan met and
married Mr Obama's mother, who was living in Honolulu with her parents.
Barack Obama wowed the 2004 Democratic National Convention. When Mr
Obama was a toddler, his father got a chance to study at Harvard but
there was no money for the family to go with him. He later returned to
Kenya alone, where he worked as a government economist, and the couple
divorced.
When Mr Obama was six, his mother, Ann, married an Indonesian man and the family moved to Jakarta.
Although his father and step-father were Muslim, Mr Obama is a
Christian and attended secular and Catholic schools during the four
years he lived in Indonesia, a largely Muslim country. He then moved
back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attend school. Mr
Obama went on to study political science at Columbia University in New
York, and then moved to Chicago where he spent three years as a
community organizer.
In 1988 he left to attend Harvard Law School, where he became the first
African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. After Harvard, Mr
Obama returned to Chicago to practice civil rights law, representing
victims of housing and employment discrimination. He served in the
Illinois state senate from 1996 to 2004.
He is married to a lawyer, Michelle, and they have two young daughters, Malia and Sasha.
Race
The senator attended the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for
almost two decades but broke away from it in May 2008 after
controversial sermons by Trinity preachers hit the headlines. The Rev
Jeremiah Wright was quoted as saying the 9/11 attacks were like
"chickens coming home to roost" and that God should damn America for
treating black people as "less than human".Seeking to defuse the
uproar, Mr Obama tackled the issue of race directly, calling on the US
to move beyond its long history of racial inequality."The anger is
real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without
understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of
misunderstanding that exists between the races," he said.
Mr Obama was an early critic of the Iraq war, speaking out against the
prospect of war several months before the March 2003 invasion.His
willingness to talk to Iranian leaders without preconditions has been
criticised as reckless by his Republican rival for the presidency. Mr
Obama has often joked that people are always getting his name wrong,
calling him "Alabama" or "Yo Mama".
He clinched the Democratic nomination after a long and grueling battle
against former first lady, Hillary Clinton - a contest, that gripped
the US from January to June 2008. Speaking after it became clear he
won, Mr Obama talked of a "defining moment for our nation". "I face
this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own
limitations," he said."But I also face it with limitless faith in the
capacity of the American people."
Media darling
Mr Obama, 47, first shot to national - and international - prominence
with a speech that stirred the 2004 Democratic National Convention.The
son of a Kenyan man and a white woman from Kansas, Mr Obama emphasised
his personal history in a speech reflecting traditional American ideals
of self-reliance and aspirations.
He is the first black candidate to become the presidential candidate of
the major US party and today, history is made as Barack Obama beats
Republican, John McCain to become America's first black
president elect.
