Hawaii: Today in History 8/4
8-4-1961 Barack Obama, 44th United States President (Democrat: 2009-17) and first African-American president, born in Honolulu, Hawaii
Barack Hussein Obama II (/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/ (About this soundlisten);[1] born August 4, 1961) is an American attorney and politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American to be elected to the presidency. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
Obama was born on August 4, 1961,[6] at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii.[7][8][9] He is the only president who was born outside of the contiguous 48 states.[10] He was born to a white mother and a black father. His mother, Ann Dunham (1942–1995), was born in Wichita, Kansas; she was mostly of English descent,[11] with some German, Irish (3.13%), Scottish, Swiss, and Welsh ancestry.[12] His father, Barack Obama Sr. (1936–1982), was a Luo Kenyan from Nyang’oma Kogelo. Obama’s parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student on a scholarship.[13][14] The couple married in Wailuku, Hawaii, on February 2, 1961, six months before Obama was born.[15][16]
In late August 1961 (a few weeks after he was born), Barack and his mother moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where they lived for a year. During that time, the elder Obama completed his undergraduate degree in economics in Hawaii, graduating in June 1962. He then left to attend graduate school on a scholarship at Harvard University, where he earned an M.A. in economics. Obama’s parents divorced in March 1964.[17] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964, where he married for a third time and worked for the Kenyan government as the Senior Economic Analyst in the Ministry of Finance.[18] He visited his son in Hawaii only once, at Christmas time in 1971,[19] before he was killed in an automobile accident in 1982, when Obama was 21 years old.[20] Recalling his early childhood, Obama said, “That my father looked nothing like the people around me – that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk – barely registered in my mind.”[14] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.[21]
In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro at the University of Hawaii; he was an Indonesian East–West Center graduate student in geography. The couple married on Molokai on March 15, 1965.[22] After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966. His wife and stepson followed sixteen months later in 1967. The family initially lived in the Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet sub district of south Jakarta. From 1970, they lived in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng sub district of central Jakarta.
