Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Occidental College.[24] In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental's disinvestment from South Africa due to its policy of apartheid.[24] In mid-1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and sister Maya, and visited the families of college friends in Pakistan and India for three weeks.[24]
Later in 1981, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations[25] and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983. He worked for a year at the Business International Corporation,[26] then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.[27][28]
Chicago community organizer and Harvard Law School
Two years after graduating, Obama was hired in Chicago as 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.[28][29] 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.[30] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.[31] In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time.[32] He returned in August 2006 for a visit to his father's birthplace, a village near Kisumu in rural western Kenya.[33]
In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year,[34] and president of the journal in his second year.[30][35] 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.[36] After graduating with a J.D. magna cum laude[37] from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.[34] Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention[30][35] and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations,[38] which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.[38]
University of Chicago Law School and civil rights attorney
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.[38][39] He then served as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve yearsas a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004teaching constitutional law.[40]
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.[41] 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.[42]
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.[28] 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.[28]
