Barack Hussein Obama II ( (listen); born August 4, 1961) is an American politician and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988, he enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black person to head the Harvard Law Review. After graduating, he became a civil rights attorney and an academic, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. During his July 2015 trip, Obama also was the first U.S. president ever to visit Kenya, which is the homeland of his father.