Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States, was born in Hawaii on 4 August 1961. With a Kenyan father and mother from Kansas, he was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patten's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool lo middle management at a bank. He had a middle- class upbringing in a strong family, where hard work and education are the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.
After working his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants. He went on to attend law school, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.
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