Early life and career of Barack Obama in the Illinois state Senate and attended Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March in Washington, DC. Early life and career of Barack Obama Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. (1936–1982) (born in Rachuonyo District, British Kenya) and Stanley Ann Dunham, known as Ann (1942–1995) (born in Wichita, Kansas, United States). Barack Obama spent most of his childhood years in Honolulu, where his mother attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Obama started a close relationship with his maternal grandparents. In 1965, his mother remarried to
Family of Barack Obama States in October 1963 when he was 17 years old as part of Kenya president Tom Mboya's Airlift Africa project, to send promising Kenyan students to the US for education, particularly undergraduate and graduate school. Once he arrived in the country, his half-brother, Barack Obama Sr., found him a place at a boys' school then known as Browne & Nichols, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He later dropped out of school and changed his name to O. Onyango Obama. He has operated a liquor store in Framingham, where he resided as of March 2011. Barack Obama lived with Onyango in the 1980s