The "skinny kid with a funny name" -- as President Barack Obama referred to himself in his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address -- made history in 2008 by becoming the first black man to be elected President of the United States.
Breaking racial barriers is nothing new for him, however. Obama has been trying to find his place in society as an African-American starting in elementary school and continuing through his college years.
Obama's diverse background and strong foundation of American principles matches the melting pot appearance of the country he hopes to lead.Barack Obama -- Barack means "blessed" in the Central African language of Luo -- was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr.Obama's father was born in the Nyanza Province, Kenya, and grew up herding goats with his own father. In 1959, at the age of 23, Barack Obama Sr. won a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and study economics at the University of Hawaii. It was there that he met Ann Dunham.
Dunham grew up in Wichita, Kan., where her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression and marched across Europe in Patton's army. Her mother worked on a bomber assembly line during World War II. After the war, the family moved to Hawaii.
Obama's parents met at the University of Hawaii. They were both students when they married and Obama was born in 1961.
In 1963, when Obama was 2, the couple separated when his father moved from Hawaii to Boston with a scholarship to finish his Ph.D at Harvard. Barack Sr. returned to Kenya after his schooling with the goal of bettering his poverty-stricken country. Besides visiting his son once, Barack Sr. remained in Kenya until his death in a car accident in 1982.
Later, Dunham was remarried to Lolo Soetoro, a University of Hawaii student from Indonesia. In 1967, the whole family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia. Here, Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng was born in 1970.
While living in Indonesia, Obama found an American magazine article that showed blacks using skin-bleaching agents to make themselves lighter.
Obama told A&E, "I first realized that I was an African-American (at that moment), but also there were all sorts of implications to race and there were power relationships in race. ... I remember feeling shocked by that."
This event would trigger Obama's journey to find his identity in the black community.