Higher Education of Barack Obama: A Brilliant Performance

 Dr. Keshab Chandra Mandal

E-Mail: mandalkeshab2013@gmail.com

In August 1981, at the age of 20 Barack Obama transferred to Columbia University in New York as a junior transfer stdent. He found New York a far different city than Los Angeles and certainly from Honolulu. All things of allurement were there from wealth to free life style. What pained him much is that most of the black people working there either as clerks or office messengers and very few in high posts. He chose to be moderate, started working hard and engrossed in deep studies. In Columbia he majored in Political Science with a specialty in International Relations and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983. 

After he earned his undergraduate degree in Political Science, he decided to become a  community organizer in Harlem—but quickly realized he could not afford to live in the city with a job that paid so little. He then decided to join in a consulting firm. Soon he was promoted and became a financial writer. He got an office and even a secretary. In this way he earned some money and opened a bank account to save extra money what he earned. After working in the business sector for two years, Obama moved to Chicago in 1985. 

Two years after graduating, Obama was hired by Martyr Kaufman, a community organzer of the 1960s who was in search for a black traniee in Chicago to join urban black and subarban whites in the Chicago areas to save the manufacturing jobs. He was offered a salary of $10,000 for the first year, and a $2,000 travel allowance to buy a car. In the firm he worked as the director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988. There, he worked on the South Side as a community organizer for low-income residents in the Roseland and the Altgeld Gardens communities. Obama here learnt that the factories had closed, industries that had left the area and as a result, there are unemployment, poverty, loss of pensions, and fears of lossin homes. In Chicago he started working with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants, to create enthusiasm among them, and provide steady progress so the affected people can get back their jobs and return to the area.

During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from one to thirteen. He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens. He also worked for the spreading education, and developing the condition of the public schools on the South Side and counceling the teen-agers and involved parents in the planning process for reform.   Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.

After working for three years as community organizer in Chicago, Obama became tired and felt a change of air. He decided to join Harvard Law School. Hence, he applied for admission in Law. In mid-1988, he before joining Harvard Law School traveled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Nairobi, Kenya to see Auma, his half sister who came back after finishing her studies from Germany in Linguistics, and his father’s family. Auma wa teaching there at a university. The trip was important because he met many of his parental relatives for the first time. 

Feeling it was time to move on Obama applied to and was accepted at Harvard Law School in late 1988, one of the top three law schools in the United States. After completing his first year he went to Chicago to work as an intern at a law firm where he found Michelle Robinson, an ex-Harvard graduate, who was a practicing as attorney there. In 1990, he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review journal in his second year defeating 19 other candidates. The position was prestigious to the students because it involved appointing editors and accepting or rejecting articles submitted for review. It was an influencial position and it widened the scope for or avenues to high-powered legal position or pursue an academic career, for which many of his classmates were vying. He was the first black student who held the post in the 104 years history of the prestigious institution of the United States. He was the first African American to serve in the post, which virtually assured him of any career path he chose after graduation. But he had some other things in his destiny. God had written something different for him. Obama declined the job offers from top Manhattan law firms, with their starting salaries that neared the $100,000-a-year range, in order to return to Chicago and work for a small firm that specialized in civil-rights law. This was an especially unglamorous and modest-paying field of law, for it involved defending the poor and the marginalized members of society in housing and employment discrimination cases. The decision was taken because he always had interest to work for the poor and marginalized sections of the society.

During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago. Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention. He was inundated with calls from publishers, reporters, publicists and literary agents. He, however, signed a publishing contract with a publisher that led to the advance for a book about race relations, which evolved into a personal memoir. In the faint light of the library of Harvard Obama spent many hours reading statues and cases. He worked very hard and became a voracious reader to write the manuscript of the book. He carefully attended the classes and listened to the lectures and debates of the law community.  The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father. 

Being a student of Political Science and with the degree of Constitutional Law Obama felt the interest to join in direct politics. In 1991 Barack Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. With the knowledge and experience as a community organizer, he started to dream a career in politics. A foreseer Obama considered Chicago a place from where he could launch a political career, and he became active in a number of projects in addition to his legal cases at work and another job he held teaching classes at the University of Chicago Law School. He had a deep love for all the people and especially for the people of his own community. He understood the deprivation and intimidation facing the black people there. Hence, he worked on a local voter-registration drive that registered thousands of black voters in Chicago. This effort of Obama was said to have helped Bill Clinton win the state in his successful bid for the White House in 1992.

University of Chicago Law School and Civil Rights Attorney

Because of his position in the Harvard Law Review, he was much sought after by numerous law firms including a chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C., circuit, a very powerful and prestigious position. In spite of all the requests, Barack Obama determined to return to the South Side of Chicago and attend the Law School. In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book. He then served as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years—as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004—teaching constitutional law. From April to October 1992, Obama directed Illinois's Project Vote, a voter registration drive with ten staffers and seven hundred volunteer registrars; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African Americans in the state, and led to Crain's Chicago Business naming Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be. In 1993 he joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 13-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004, with his law license becoming inactive in 2002.

From 1994 to 2002, Obama served on the boards of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the Developing Communities Project; and of the Joyce Foundation. He served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995 to 1999.