Читать книгу The Barack Obama Miscellany - Hundreds of Fascinating Facts About America's Great New President - Mark Hanks - Страница 9

Obama won a scholarship to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles, one of the oldest liberal arts colleges on the West Coast. He had been accepted into several good colleges, but chose Occidental mainly because he’d met a girl from Brentwood while she was vacationing in Hawaii.

Obama helped the JV Tigers basketball team at Occidental to an undefeated season.

Barack also gave a brief but well-received speech to kick off an anti-apartheid demonstration.

Joking about a Mexican cleaning woman’s distress at the mess he and his friends had left after a party, Obama was jolted back to reality by a fellow black student: ‘You think that’s funny?’ she asked. ‘That could have been my grandmother, you know. She had to clean up after people for most of her life.’

At the end of his sophomore year, Obama transferred to Columbia University in New York. He majored in political science, specialising in international relations.

He told his relatives he wanted to be called Barack and not Barry.

While at Columbia, Barack became involved with the Black Student Organization and anti-apartheid activities.

Barack’s mother filed for divorce from Lolo in 1980.

Barack’s father remained sporadically in touch. He was in several alcohol-related car accidents in Kenya, one of which resulted in the loss of both legs, and he died in a car crash in Nairobi in 1982 at just 46 years old.

Barack’s mother went to Kenya after Obama Sr died. She met his first wife, Kezia, and they became the best of friends. Stanley Ann also received her master’s degree from the University of Hawaii in 1983.

Barack graduated from Columbia in 1983, with a double major in English literature and political science, and a determination to ‘organise black folks. At the grass roots.’

His first job out of college was as a financial writer at Business International, a research service in New York.

Obama joined a public interest group in New York, campaigning for upgrades to the city’s subway system.

In 1985, Chicago elected its first black Mayor, Harold Washington. Inspired by this, Obama moved there at the age of 24. He became director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organisation on Chicago’s far South Side. Between 1985 and 1988, the staff at DCP grew from one to thirteen and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000. Obama helped establish a job training programme, a tutoring programme for would-be college students and a tenants’ rights organisation, while he was also working as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organising institute.

Obama was baptised at the Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988, and toyed with becoming a preacher, a journalist or a novelist. Eventually, he decided to pursue a career in law and he gained a place at Harvard Law School in 1988.

Obama travelled to Kenya before starting at Harvard. He visited his relatives in the Nyanza province, and cried as he sat between the graves of his father and grandfather. Barack realised the struggles his father had faced, and it gave him a sense that the work he was doing, and would go on to do, was directly connected to his Kenyan family and their struggles.

He funded himself through Harvard using student loans and by working. One summer, Barack worked for Sidley Austin, an elite Chicago legal firm where he met his future wife Michelle, an attorney at the firm who was assigned as his adviser.

At 28 years old, Obama was elected president of The Harvard Law Review, making him the first black president in the legal journal’s 104-year history.

Barack had to persuade Michelle for a month before she went on a date with him.

On their first date, Michelle and Obama went to the Art Institute, strolled down Michigan Avenue and caught Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing. ‘It was fantastic,’ Michelle said. ‘He was definitely putting on the charm … It worked. He swept me off my feet.’

We clicked right away … by the end of that date it was over … I was sold,’ Michelle said.

Barack graduated from Harvard with a distinction.

The young Barack’s success at Harvard led to his first book deal, the poignant memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

Obama was offered lucrative corporate contracts, but turned them down to practise civil-rights law back in Chicago. He represented victims of housing and employment discrimination and worked on voting-rights legislation.

Barack and Michelle married on 10 October 1992. Stevie Wonder’s ‘You and I’ was their wedding song. Obama noted, ‘I think it’s fair to say that, had I not been a Stevie Wonder fan, Michelle might not have dated me. We might not have married. The fact that we agreed on Stevie was part of the essence of our courtship.’

Barack was an associate at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland law firm from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.

In 1992, Obama was one of the founding directors of Public Allies – an organisation which advances new leadership to strengthen communities, non-profits and civic participation. He resigned before his wife, Michelle, became the founding executive director of Public Allies Chicago in early 1993.

At the age of 31, Obama was named in the 1993 annual ‘40 under 40’ list published by Crain’s Chicago Business recognising the city’s young leaders, stating he had ‘galvanised Chicago’s political community, as no seasoned politico had before’.

Obama was brought into close contact with the city’s Democratic political elite when Michelle worked for Chicago’s powerful Mayor Richard M. Daley.

From 1994 to 2002, Obama sat on the boards of two foundations who backed social and political reform – the Woods Fund and the Joyce Foundation.

He was also president of the board of the Annenberg Challenge Grant, which distributed some $50 million in grants to public-school-reform efforts.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Barack directed Illinois’s Project Vote, a voter-registration campaign which registered 150,000 of the state’s 400,000 unregistered African-Americans. This led to Carol Moseley Braun becoming the first African-American woman to claim a seat in the Senate.

Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center.

Obama was made Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School in 1996.