Oxford university press biography of barack obama

Yet, while appreciating their genius, the teenage Obama despaired that, despite W. One of the first critics to discuss jazz as a political as much as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon, jazz exemplified to Davis a distinctive black, working-class challenge to white claims of racial superiority. His poetry and criticism would have a significant influence on the Black Arts Movement of the s.

Davis, a Kansas native, moved to Hawaii in the late s on the advice of Paul Robeson and worked as a journalist on a newspaper for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, one of the most powerful unions on the islands. Eighteen-year-old Barry Obama remained unsure, exactly, what college was for when he arrived at Occidental College, a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles in At both Occidental and Columbia, Obama was active in student politics, notably in antiapartheid protests, where he first discovered the power of his own oratory.

As his interest in basketball, drinking, partying, and recreational drugs waned, his devotion to academic study waxed. At Columbia he lived a monk-like existence in small, uncluttered apartments, and absorbed himself in books on political theory, philosophy, international politics, and literature. During that time he also began to write fiction and keep a journal, developing some of the ideas and themes that later appear in Dreams from My Father.

Obama graduated from Columbia in with a BA in political science, having developed a vague notion that he might become a community organizer, although he was not entirely sure just what it was that a community organizer did. He did, however, have a romantic image, perhaps in grainy blackand-white, picked up from his mother and his old poet friend Frank, and from books and documentaries of the civil rights struggle.

They were stoic, short-haired, neatly dressed black students sitting in at a segregated lunch counter. Or dungareewearing SNCC workers like Bob Moses or Stokely Carmichael, leaning on a dusty porch in Mississippi, trying to persuade sharecroppers to take a chance and register to vote. His fellow employees from that time have suggested, however, that Obama exaggerates the degree to which the company symbolized rapacious s capitalism, perhaps to portray his community organizing career as a more self-sacrificing choice than it actually was.

But it was the general atmosphere of Manhattan, rather than simply its corporate excesses that Obama rejected when he decided to leave the city in The progressive left of the s, Obama realized, was no less shallow than the capitalist right. Believing that easy sloganeering and posturing had replaced the certitude and rectitude of SNCC and CORE in the early s, Obama contemplated abandoning his goal of community organizing.

The mids heyday of Reaganism was a time of retrenchment in the American labor movement, when industrial firms in the North closed their gates and reopened in the nonunionized South or in Mexico. But it was also a time when such work was most desperately needed. He would find that community and sense of place in Chicago, and especially on its South Side, the largest, most populous collection of African American neighborhoods in the country.

Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton portrayed in a ground-breaking study by that title Chicago was also the home of people-centered, community-based organizing was born after World War II in the theories and programs of Saul Alinsky. Ina Wellesley senior named Hillary Rodham wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky. The Developing Communities Project, which employed Obama from tofollowed the Alinsky principles that leaders listen, that change comes from the bottom up, and that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

During his first three years in Chicago, Obama achieved some modest success in mobilizing hundreds of residents in the South Side neighborhoods of Roseland and Altgeld Gardens. He also encouraged alliances among black, white, and Hispanic community organizations to stop plans that would have expanded a landfill into wetlands near residential neighborhoods.

Rush, have criticized him for taking too much credit for the asbestos removal victory at Altgeld Gardens and for ignoring the efforts of neighborhood residents who began a similar campaign before Obama arrived. He was quickly disabused of this notion by his experiences with black ministers who jealously guarded their prerogatives and congregations.

Man, these preachers in Chicago. You are not going to organize us. No, no, no. He knew his constituency; he truly enjoyed people. With ambitions of becoming a future Chicago mayor who might translate those principles into such an agenda, Obama applied to several law schools. Inhe was accepted by Harvard Law. Vowing to return to Chicago and community organizing after graduation, he left for Massachusetts, choosing to live not in Cambridge itself, but instead in a basement apartment in the nearby working-class, multi-ethnic town of Somerville.

In his first year he worked as an editor on the Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review, and impressed members of the faculty with his maturity and common sense as well as his breadth of knowledge. Obama was not the first African American to serve as president of a law review. That honor went to Clara Burrill Bruce, the daughter-in-law of former black U.

Bruce, who presided over the Boston University Law Review in Obama never hid his own political liberalism, however. He continued his active opposition to apartheid and support for affirmative action, and also spoke in favor of African American professor Derrick A. Bell Jr. Obama nonetheless earned the respect of political conservatives on the Law Review for acting as an honest broker between warring factions.

Indeed, he was more likely to be criticized by some on the left, including some of his fellow African American students, for not pursuing a more radical agenda. Such traits would serve him well in his future political career. After graduating from Harvard Law inObama turned down several offers of clerkships for federal judges, the typical next step for former editors of Ivy League law reviews.

Instead he returned, as promised, to Chicago. There he spearheaded voter registration efforts that helped secure the oxford university press biography of barack obama of Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton. Judson Miner had been an important white liberal ally of Harold Washington. From toObama also taught courses on constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

The couple had two daughters, Malia, born inand Natasha, known as Sasha, born in As a bonus, Michelle Robinson gave Obama important political connections as well. Her family was well-known and regarded on the South Side, and she had attended school with Santita Jackson, daughter of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson and sister of U.

Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. Shortly before he won election to that body, Obama published Dreams from My Father a memoir about his unique background as the child of an African father and a white mother from Kansas and his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia. The book also examines his student experiences and s work as a community organizer in the Chicago.

Dreams from My Father has been reprinted many times and has sold over two million copies in hardcover and paperback. In he won a seat representing the 13th district in the Illinois Senate. He had launched his bid for the legislature after the incumbent, Alice Palmer, had stepped down to pursue a seat in the U. When she failed in that effort and tried, with the support of established local black leaders, to reclaim the seat she had relinquished, Obama refused to back down.

He also demanded an investigation of questionable signatures on the petitions required for her candidacy, and succeeded in having enough struck off to keep Palmer off the ballot.

Oxford university press biography of barack obama

Obama won the Democratic primary unopposed, which in the Republican-phobic South Side meant he would win the general election with ease. He helped craft a law that banned the personal use of campaign money by state legislators and banned lobbyists from giving gifts to lawmakers. In short, he pursued a pragmatic progressive agenda, very much in line with the policies of the Clinton administration that was in office at the time.

These veterans of the civil rights struggles of the s and s believed that the clearly ambitious Obama had not paid his dues, and needed to wait his turn. As at Harvard, Obama sought out the company of conservative Republicans and moderate downstate Democrats, and crafted harmonious working relationships with all shades of political opinion.

Thomas P. By lateat the age of thirty-eight, Obama had worked and lived in Chicago for fifteen years, even returning there to work during the summer recesses at Harvard Law School. While he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of teaching constitutional law, and had begun to earn the sometimes grudging admiration of his colleagues in the state legislature, it had become increasingly evident that his political ambitions and the transformative social changes he sought would not be satisfied in Springfield.

Daley as deeply entrenched in the Second City in the s as his father Richard J. Late inhe launched a bid for the U. House seat held by Bobby L. Rush, a four-term incumbent and former Black Panther leader. The district included much of the South Side, was two-thirds black, and the winner of the Democratic Party primary was virtually assured of victory in the general election.

His weak performance in the sole televised debate summed up a disastrous campaign. On primary day, Obama won a majority of white voters, but Rush defeated him by thirty points overall. In American politics, especially in House races, incumbents rarely lose. And Obama clearly raised his profile during the course of the race: beginning with a name-recognition of 11 percent, he ended with 30 percent of the vote.

But the chances of victory, particularly against Jackson, were remote. House of Representatives—James A. Garfield—has ever been elected directly to the Presidency. All twentieth-century presidents except Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II, had previously served either as governor, senator, or vice president.

Fortunately for Obama, Moseley Braun had won election to the U. Senate from Illinois inblazing that particular trail in his home state. But that is only the first step. That left Obama as the leading African American challenger in the Illinois Democratic primary, in part because of shrewd political calculation and organization, as well as luck.

Following his defeat, Obama began to mend fences with fellow black politicians, including Senator Donne Trotter and others who had mistrusted his Hyde Park connections and questioned his African American bona fides. This Jones did by securing for Obama the chairmanship of the prominent Health and Human Services Committee, when others had more seniority.

Jones also encouraged Obama to take the lead in a bill requiring the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases legislation. Obama did so with support both from death penalty opponents and the police, a tricky balancing act that highlighted his developing political skills and ability to forge coalitions. Obama also secured the backing of a handful of white state senate colleagues and worked hard to secure an endorsement from established white political leaders, notably Newton N.

Kennedyand from the wellrespected former Illinois U. But a first-class temperament! Axelrod, a successful political consultant with close ties to the Richard M. Senate bid. As a former journalist for the Tribune, Axelrod had deep ties to journalists and other media figures and professional politicians throughout the state. By getting Axelrod on oxford university press biography of barack obama, Obama had shown his seriousness of purpose, but he still had an uphill climb in securing the Democratic nomination for U.

That he did so was a mixture of luck and courage. Luck came in the form of a crowded field in the Democratic primary, where he faced only one other African American candidate a relative newcomer with no institutional support and two white heavyweight candidates, Blair Hull, a multimillionaire stock trader who financed his own campaign, and Dan Hynes, a well-connected state comptroller favored by many party officials and several unions who would split the white vote.

Hull spent his way to an early lead in opinion polls, but shortly before polling day the release of court records alleging that he had abused his wife dealt a grave blow to his campaign. Ironically, Obama was also helped by his future presidential rival, U. As for courage, Obama was the only major candidate in the field who had opposed the Iraq War from its inception—and said so publicly.

The Iraq venture of George W. A rash war. The campaign was also a remarkably clean one, devoid of negative advertising. In the wake of the Osama bin Laden terrorist attacks of September 11,Obama had feared that his surname might become less of a mild curiosity and more of a political liability. But none of his opponents made that charge, partly because they feared alienating black voters.

He would not be so fortunate four years later. Much to the surprise of the political world, Obama would in fact win a relatively easy primary victory with 53 percent of the vote, more than twice that of his closest rival, Dan Hynes. That weakness might have been exploited by a formidable Republican candidate, but the winner of the Republican primary in Illinois, businessman Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race following a sex scandal.

But Keyes had no tangible connection to Illinois, had never held elective office, and had won few votes in his run for the Republican presidential nomination in Even by the standards of the modern Republican Party, he was an ultraconservative fundamentalist Christian with little appeal to the suburbanites and moderate swing voters who were usually pivotal in Illinois elections.

And, as in his race for the U. Neither need have worried. Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan broke that color line inand gave a speech ranked by scholars of rhetoric as the fifth-greatest American speech of the twentieth century bettered only by Martin Luther King Jr. The speech also launched many of the themes that would propel Barack Obama into the White House a little more than four years later.

Most significantly, his keynote established Obama as a profoundly American politician, and arguably as the most representative American candidate ever to seek the presidency. Its little more than 2, words are, therefore, worthy of some detailed analysis. He announced himself as the son of an immigrant father from Kenya, who grew up herding goats and went to school in a tin roof shack.

Washington and the Horatio Alger stories of yore. Bill, bought a house through FHA, and later moved west all the way to Hawaii in search of opportunity. The middle of his speech was somewhat more prosaic, though still compelling. A few lines were crafted to appeal to Illinois voters—he had an election to win after all. Thus Obama gave shout-outs to the voters in the collar counties around Chicago who did not want their tax money wasted by either welfare agencies or the Pentagon; recounted a conversation with a presumably Irish American patriotic G.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. Ultimately, he argued, the election came down to a simple question: Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope? Indeed, in his rising cadences, he began for the first time in his speech to adopt the soaring rhetoric that most Americans, black, white, and others, traditionally expect of black politicians.

The words, however, came from another Chicago pastor—his own—the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. On the evening of his speech, and with trademark self-confidence, he predicted to a Chicago journalist that he would deliver a slam-dunk. Seller: GF Books, Inc. Book is in Used-Good condition. Pages and cover are clean and intact. Used items may not include supplementary materials such as CDs or access codes.

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Niven ; introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Physical description viii, 65 p. Online Available online. Full view. Green Library. More options. Find it at other libraries via WorldCat Limited preview.