Before he was the first African-American president of the United States, Barack Obama was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and an American mother. He earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and eventually went on to attend Harvard Law School, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama then moved to Illinois, where he led a voter registration drive centered around increasing black voter turnout called Project Vote. He was born in 1961.

Before entering the political sphere, Obama worked as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and as a civil rights attorney for Miner, Barnhill & Galland. In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate, where he served for eight years until he joined the U.S. Senate in 2004. That same year, he spoke at the Democratic National Convention, famously saying, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America. There’s a United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s a United States of America.”

After his two-term presidency ended in 2016, Obama began focusing more on his Chicago-based nonprofit organization, the Obama Foundation. He is married to Michelle Obama, who is also a lawyer and the first African-American first lady of the United States.