Obama becomes rising star among Democrats

Barack Hussein Obama is born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The name Barack means 'blessed' in Arabic. In an interview he did with the TODAY show in 2004, he makes light about his unusual name.

OBAMA: With the name, I would say my father's from Kenya and my mother's from Kansas and people call me Alabama or Yomama or Bahama. And I think people appreciate the fact that I can joke about it.

Obama's parents, Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr. meet at the University of Hawaii, where they are both students. 

They get married in 1960, but separate when Obama is only two and eventually divorce.  His father leaves the island to attend Harvard University on scholarship to get his Ph.D and leaves Obama and his mother behind.

Obama will not see him again until he is 10 years old, when his father visits the family for a month. They stay in touch, but 11 years later, his father would die in a car accident. The visit will be the last time he sees his dad.

In his 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," which became a Grammy winning audio book, Obama recalls his mother giving him insight into the father he barely knew.  

AUDIO BOOK: He hadn't cut corners, though, or played all the angles.  He was diligent and honest, no matter what it cost him.  He had led his life according to the principles that demanded a different kind of toughness.

When Obama is 6 years old, his mother remarries an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro and the family soon moves to Jakarta, Indonesia. Obama quickly adapts to his new surroundings, a skill that will serve him in the years to come. His early experiences expose him to a melting pot of races and cultures.

OBAMA: I grew up not only in Hawaii, but also in Indonesia in South East Asia. I've got a half-sister who's half-Indonesian who just married a Chinese-Canadian so I've got a new niece who has my DNA, but looks completely different. And so I'm constantly reminded of the fact that I'm connected to the people I see. I know their stories because they're my story too.

KELLMAN: His mom challenged him academically.  I mean she just wanted him to learn as much as he could. 

AUDIO BOOK: Five days a week she came into my room at 4 in the morning, force fed me breakfast and proceeded to teach me my English lesson for three hours before I left for school.

At age nine, Obama’s mother separates from his stepfather. She moves the family back to Hawaii and Obama attends the very prestigious private school Punahou Academy.

ERIC KUSUNOKI, OBAMA'S HOMEROOM TEACHER: He was an all-around guy, well-liked very personable, very respectful. He was very articulate, eloquent, carried himself very well and spoke very well. 

As a teenager, Obama exhibits his competitive side playing basketball and his intellectual side by reading a variety of books, many about African-American life from authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and Alex Haley.

By the time he is in high school Obama is struggling to make sense of his multicultural background, trying to understand where he fits in.

AUDIO BOOK: I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.

Obama says that in high school he used drugs and drank alcohol. In his book, he explains why. He writes "to push the questions of who I was out of my mind."

In 1979, Obama leaves Hawaii to attend Occidental College in California where that "interior struggle" continues to plague him. 

It's a confusing period of his life, but Occidental College is also where his desire for public service and his gift for public speaking start to take hold. 

AUDIO BOOK: I noticed people had begun to listen to my opinions.  It was a discovery that made me hungry for words.  Not words to hide behind but words that could carry a message, support an idea.

After two years Obama decides to transfer to Columbia University in New York City to study political science.  It is here that he starts to come to terms with who he is and what he is doing. In his book he writes that he stops using drugs and starts applying himself to his studies. After graduating in 1983, Obama is at a crossroads. He is torn between working in the community or working in a corporation.  He takes a job as a research analyst at a consulting firm.

KELLMAN: It was a job to put bread on the table. He viewed the job as sort of biding time and until he could do what he wanted to do, which is find out how to move people on a grassroots level.

Then destiny comes calling in the form of a newspaper ad for a community organizer in Chicago. 

KELLMAN: I arranged for a face-to-face interview and we spent two hours talking to one another he just wanted to learn.  He was very hungry to learn.

Obama gets the job, packs his bags and drives to Chicago.  He doesn't know exactly what lies ahead but somehow he's sure he's now moving in the right direction.

In 1985 Barack Obama leaves New York and a good paying corporate job to work in Chicago’s gritty south side as a community organizer. The job entails coordinating church groups and neighborhood associations - to help them lobby for basic services and amenities. Jerry Kellman runs the organization.

KELLMAN: Barack had opportunities to take a job that would have much more status and much more of a future. So why would he be willing to work for $10,000 a year to come to a city, where he had never lived before and work with the poor? He had to have some strong motivation to do that.

The 24-year-old Obama goes to work in a sprawling project named "Altgeld Gardens."

KELLMAN: So you were isolated: geographically, socially, and politically. And in that sense, it was a very devastated place.

Kellman is relieved he's found an African-American to work with the community, but Obama's still an outsider.

KELLMAN: Just his presence would be upsetting to some of the local politicians who had been able to call all the shots and so they weren't grateful t have him there. So Barack was frequently getting criticized and attacked and often he would come back to the office and vent some frustration.

Local residents are skeptical that the skinny kid with the funny name can help them find jobs or even get basic services. Obama organizes a delegation to meet the local state senator Emil Jones to talk about the problem of teenage drop-outs.

EMIL JONES, JR., PRESIDENT, ILLINOIS SENATE: He was with some ministers in the area and they were organizing to bring about protests to put pressure on the public officials to do something about school dropouts.

Jones is receptive to the proposals for the school-drop outs and immediately hits it off with the young activist.

JONES: He was genuinely sincere. We became good friends while we were working together. 

As a result of those efforts, we were able to go to the State Board of Education, get funding for dropout programs.

But for the next three years there are not many victories for the young grass-roots organizer. The sheer scale of the problems on Chicago’s south side are overwhelming and lead Obama to the conclusion that he needs to find another way to help. He decides to go to law school.

Obama feels that being a lawyer would be useful to him. He's now thinking about running for office where he could have more influence on public policy. Obama does well in law school. He works hard and plays hoops to unwind.

STEVE DONZIGER: He loved to smile. And he really smiled when he give his little fake and put up a jump shot and hit it you know over you.

Obama is often back in Chicago and while working there at a law firm one summer he meets attorney, Michelle Robinson. Though pursuing his legal studies he's still involved with community outreach.

MICHELLE OBAMA, WIFE: He took me to one of his community organizing trainings on the South Side. It was a basement full of senior citizens mostly African Americans. He took off his jacket rolled up his sleeves and just launched into one of the most eloquent passionate visions of the community and why people need to engage and people just connected with him in the ways that they do now.

JACKSON: He had a hole in his shoe. He had a car that was a thousand years old and barely worked.  He was someone who was consumed with the world of ideas.  And Michelle was a great counterweight to that. She's very, very pragmatic.  You know, she's someone who will say, "Okay, the balloon has floated high enough."  And she is that anchor for him.

Back at law school, Obama goes on to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review, the most prestigious legal journal in the country. He's the first African-American to hold the position.

DONZIGER: When word got out that he was elected President of the Harvard Law Review there was a palpable excitement among the entire student body that we were making history.

Gaining such a position opens a lot of doors for Obama. But he resists taking the conventional route.

DONZIGER: He could have any job in America. He could have clerked for any Judge on the Supreme Court. He could have had the most prestigious professorship in the country. He could have gone to a top law firm and made a princely some of money. And he again went back to Chicago and set down his roots and built on the base that he had created when he was a community organizer after college.

JONES, JR.: Came back to work on voter registration. I guess he liked Chicago. I never knew, at that time, that he did have, in the back of his mind, getting involved more politically as an elected official.

Obama starts to practice civil rights law and to teach at the University of Chicago. All the while he remains active in the community.  But there's more to Obama than building his resume. At the same time he's getting settled in his personal life. He and Michelle marry in 1992 at the Trinity United Church of Christ, a Southside congregation known for it's social activism where Obama finds a spiritual home.

In 1995 Obama's mother dies of ovarian cancer. It happens just a month after Obama publishes his very personal memoir,  "Dreams From My Father,” about his life and his unusual family background.

DONZIGER: It's a book very much about identity. And the amazing thing about the book is that I think it captures one of the extraordinary things that is about him, which is that he really is a confluence of a lot of the strains of American identity all in one person.

MORE FROM DOCUMENTARIES

Documentaries Section Front

Preview the 'Witness to Jonestown' documentary   Armed in America   Lockup Raw: Friend or Foe?   Lockup Raw: Inmates Gone Wild   Lockup Raw: Hell in a Cell Lockup: New Mexico   Lockup Raw: Hard Time   Lockup Raw: The Convict Code   An unprecedented election season   Lockup Raw: Criminal Minds Documentaries Section Front   Add Documentaries headlines to your news reader: