Barack Obama's 65th Birthday Countdown

Barack Obama Timeline

About Barack Obama

A community organizer and U.S. senator from Illinois, Obama was elected in 2008 as the first Black president of the United States and served two terms. Since leaving office he has focused on the Obama Foundation, writing, and media production.

Seventeen minutes in Boston

In July 2004, Barack Obama was a little-known Illinois state senator - a former community organizer from Chicago's South Side who had taught constitutional law - when he was chosen to deliver the Democratic convention keynote in Boston. The roughly 17-minute speech, built around 'the audacity of hope,' made him a national figure overnight. That November he won a U.S. Senate seat, and just four years after the speech he was elected President of the United States.

November 4, 2008

Obama's 2008 victory made him the 44th President and the first Black president in American history. He received about 69.5 million votes - at the time the most ever cast for a U.S. presidential candidate - and won 365 electoral votes. In 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2012 he won a second term. Beyond politics, he has won two Grammy Awards for narrating his own audiobooks and an Emmy for narration.

Back to the South Side

Since leaving office, Obama's work has centered on the Obama Foundation, founded in 2014 in Chicago. Its My Brother's Keeper Alliance - a mentoring and opportunity program he started as president in 2014 - has reached more than 500,000 young people. The Obama Presidential Center, rising in Jackson Park on Chicago's South Side, is a 19-acre campus that includes a museum, an athletic center, and a new branch of the Chicago Public Library, a few miles from where he began as an organizer.

Quick facts

• Born August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii
• 44th President of the United States (2009-2017)
• First Black president of the United States
• Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009
• First Black president of the Harvard Law Review (1990)
• Has won two Grammy Awards for narrating his own audiobooks

Frequently works with