In honor of National Black History Month, The Elder Law Center of Kirson & Fuller is proud to feature African Americans that have impacted the nation through jurisprudence. 

Born in Hawaii in 1961, most notable as the first African-American president of the United States, Barack Obama earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and went on to attend Harvard Law School, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama then moved to Illinois, where he led Project Vote, a voter registration drive centered around increasing black voter turnout.

Before entering the political arena, Obama worked as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and as a civil rights attorney for Miner, Barnhill & Galland. In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate, where he served for eight years until he joined the U.S. Senate in 2004. That same year, he spoke at the Democratic National Convention, famously saying, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America. There’s a United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s a United States of America.”

Closing his two-term presidency in 2016, Obama began focusing more on his Chicago-based nonprofit organization, the Obama Foundation. He is married to Michelle Obama, who is also a lawyer and the first African-American first lady of the United States.

Source: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/14-groundbreaking-black-lawyers-gallery