Dr sengondo mvungi biography of barack obama

The health care law was also blamed for some Americans losing their existing insurance policies, despite repeated assurances from Obama that such cancellations would not occur. The legislation has faced numerous challenges in court and wound up at the U. Supreme Court three times. In the summer ofthe Supreme Court upheld part of the Act regarding health care tax subsidies.

Without these tax credits, buying medical insurance might have become too costly for millions of people. The latest Supreme Court decision about the Affordable Care Act began in when Congressional Republicans dropped the individual mandate tax penalty to zero. Texas and 17 other Republican states quickly sued to strike down the Affordable Care Act, mainly based on their opposition to its individual mandate.

A Texas federal judge ruled in favor of the suit, saying that because there was no longer a tax, the law was unconstitutional. The case was sent to an appeals court. A final ruling came in June when the U. Supreme Court voted, to uphold the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that the objecting states were not required to pay anything under the mandate provision and thus had no standing to bring the challenge to court.

As of Januarynearly On May 2, an elite team of U. There were no American casualties, and the team was able to collect invaluable intelligence about the workings of al-Qaeda. Armed Forces. He became the first president to voice support for same-sex marriage in May As he did induring his campaign for a second presidential term, Obama focused on grassroots initiatives.

Dr sengondo mvungi biography of barack obama: Sengondo Mvungi-Convection for Construction and

Representative Paul Ryan. On November 6,Obama won a second term as president, capturing more than 60 percent of the Electoral College. Obama officially began his second term on January 21,when U. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office. In his second inaugural address, Obama called the nation to action on such issues as climate change, health care, the federal deficit, and marriage equality.

Obama stated that the program had helped stop roughly 50 threats. However, the president suffered a significant drop in his approval ratings, to 45 percent, partially due to the revelations. In AugustObama ordered the first airstrikes against the Islamic State on targets in Syria, though the president pledged to keep combat troops out of the conflict.

Several Arab countries joined the airstrikes against the extremist group. However, U. As of Decembermore than 1, people have died, according to military officials. Outside watchdog organizations, like Airwars, dr sengondo mvungi biography of barack obama the number of casualties could be as many as several thousand. In SeptemberObama made diplomatic strides with Iran.

He spoke with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the phone, which marked the first direct contact between the leaders of the two countries in more than 30 years. This groundbreaking move by Obama was seen by many as a sign of thawing in the relationship between the United States and Iran. In JulyObama announced that, after lengthy negotiations, the United States and five world powers had reached an agreement with Iran.

The deal allowed inspectors entry into Iran to make sure the country kept its pledge to limit its nuclear program and enrich uranium at a much lower level than would be needed for a nuclear weapon. In return, the United States and its partners removed the tough sanctions imposed on Iran and allowed the country to ramp up sales of oil and access frozen bank accounts.

That year, Obama also traveled to India and reached a civilian nuclear agreement with Prime Minister Narendra Modi that opened the door to U. Elsewhere, Obama moved to reestablish diplomatic ties with Cuba in December He and Cuban President Raul Castro announced the normalizing of diplomatic relations between the countries for the first time since The policy change came after the exchange of American citizen Alan Gross and another unnamed American intelligence agent for three Cuban spies.

However, the long-standing U. Kennedyremained in effect. On March 20,Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Cuba sinceas part of his larger program to establish greater cooperation between the two countries. Just prior to the trip, on March 10,Obama met at the White House with newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the first official visit by a Canadian leader in nearly 20 years.

In Augustthe Obama administration announced the Clean Power Plan, a major climate change policy that included the first national standards to limit carbon pollution from coal-burning power plants and called for more renewable energy from sources like wind and solar power. Ultimately, the plan never took effect after facing backlash and lawsuits from business groups, companies, 27 states, and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnellwho was then the Republican minority leader.

In Februarythe Supreme Court ruled,to block the plan by putting a hold on regulations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, mostly from coal power plants. Obama also worked to respond to climate change on the global level. The agreement requires all participating nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to limit the rise of global temperatures and also to allocate resources for the research and development of alternative energy sources.

A fantasy if ever there was one, we thought. But that year, life would imitate art: Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm attempted to transform The Man into The Woman, when she became the first black woman to run for president in the Democratic Party. She received first-ballot votes at the Democratic National Convention. Then in Jesse Jackson got 1, delegate votes at the Democratic convention, 29 percent of the total, coming in second only to the nominee, Michael Dukakis.

The award for prescience, however, goes to Jacob K. Javits, the liberal Republican senator from New York who, incredibly, just a year after the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, predicted that the first black president would be elected in the year Undoubtedly, he will be well-educated. He will be a dedicated internationalist with working comprehension of the intricacies of foreign aid, technical assistance and reciprocal trade.

Assuredly, though, despite his other characteristics, he will have developed the fortitude to withstand the vicious smear attacks that came his way as he fought to the top in government and politics. Edward Brooke was elected to the Senate by Massachusetts voters in Thurgood Marshall was confirmed in In fact, thirtyseven black U. All in all, Sen.

Javits was one very keen prognosticator. I wish we could say that what happened last night will suddenly make black children learn to read and write as if their lives depended on it, and that their high school completion rates will become the best in the country. I wish we could say that these things are about to happen, but I doubt that they will.

It has been crossed by our very first postmodern Race Man, a man who embraces his African cultural and genetic heritage so securely that he can transcend it, becoming the candidate of choice to tens of millions of Americans who do not look like him. How does that make me feel? But ten thousand times better than that. How sweet the sound.

His birth coincided with a crucial turning point in the history of American race relations, although like many turning points it did not seem so at the time.

Dr sengondo mvungi biography of barack obama: Sengondo Mvungi of the National Convention

Few observers believed that Jim Crow was in its death throes. Board of Educationless than one percent of black schoolchildren in the South attended integrated public schools. At the undergraduate level, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was one of the few integrated southern colleges, having admitted three black students in By that number had risen—to four.

InCharlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes successfully integrated the University of Georgia, but most other major southern colleges, including Duke, Clemson, and the flagship state universities of South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi remained segregated. Despite the lack of de jure segregation, northern universities were only marginally better.

Ruffin, inbut nearly a century later, there were rarely more than two or three blacks in each graduating class, and there were no African Americans on the Harvard Law School faculty until Despite the Civil Rights acts of and and promises from the new administration of President John F. Kennedy, in some Black Belt counties of Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, up to 90 percent of African Americans were excluded from the political process, as they had been by state law and custom since the late nineteenth century.

There were a handful of black state legislators and city councilmen in the North, and a sprinkling of African Americans sat on boards of education and city councils in the urban upper South, but there were no black mayors other than in all-black towns. While ten percent of all Americans were black in the census, only four African Americans served in the member House of Representatives.

No African Americans sat in the hundred-member U. Senate between the departure of Blanche K. Brooke R-MA in The federal judiciary, the branch of government most responsive to black demands for equality, offered a slightly more positive picture. In the fall ofthe U. Senate confirmed James B. By Augusthowever, there was also an emerging challenge to the old racial order—at least in the South.

They began, in the summer ofwith the Freedom Rides that ultimately forced the president and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Virginia ruling prohibiting segregation in interstate travel. In the autumn of Moses penned a note from a freezing drunk-tank in Magnolia, Mississippi, where he and eleven others were being held for the crime of attempting to register black voters.

This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg from a stone that the builders rejected. By filling county jails and prison farms, by facing fire hoses, truncheons—and, for Jimmie Lee Jackson, Herbert Lee, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and others, by giving their lives—they ultimately made segregation and disfranchisement untenable.

In alliance with the more cautious, though equally determined, activists of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and the NAACP, and eventually with the support of the administration of a southern-born president, Lyndon B. So too did the Immigration and Nationality Act, which extended the same nondiscriminatory principle to immigration, ended the system of quotas favoring northern Europe, and ushered in new waves of immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

The nation into which Barack Obama was born was simply not a genuine democracy, and certainly not one in which a person of color might reasonably aspire to the presidency. Indeed, his very existence was to some degree a consequence of those struggles. His father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. As Barack Obama Jr. To that end, Mboya secured scholarship funds from such civil rights movement stalwarts as Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier.

In speeches, Barack Obama has mistakenly credited the family of John F. After Dunham became pregnant, they married. Interracial marriage was legal in Hawaii, but was outlawed at that time in twenty-two states. A Gallup poll found that 96 percent of white Americans opposed such unions. As Obama Jr. Obama Sr. Other than a brief Christmas visit by Obama Sr.

Those values were largely secular, though grounded in the church-based dr sengondo mvungi biography of barack obama of the early s civil rights movement. As her son later recalled, it was a fairly romanticized idealism. Assisted by her parents and government food stamps, she completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Hawaii, where she met her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student.

Contrary to claims later made by his political opponents, however, he did not attend an Islamic madrassa. He was enrolled, first, in a Roman Catholic elementary school and then in the state-run Basuki school, which taught children of all faiths—Christians, Buddhists, and Confucians, as well as Muslims. The language of instruction was Indonesian.

Dunham briefly moved back to Hawaii with her daughter with LoloMaya, to live with Obama and her parents, before returning to Indonesia to pursue an anthropology degree on peasant blacksmithing in Java. She later worked with development organizations in Pakistan and Indonesia to set up microfinance programs to help women in remote villages gain access to credit.

He outlines this process in Dreams from My Father with great honesty and, although it was clearly a time of much anxiety, not a little wit. Barry Obama was, after all, a teenager growing up in the s with black skin, a white mother; a half-Caucasian, half-Indonesian half-sister in Java; and an absent, unknown African father in Kenya. But at the end of his process of self-discovery, and notwithstanding his love for his white mother and grandparents, the physiological fact of his black skin proved to be the most important element in his psychological understanding of self.

Yet, while appreciating their genius, the teenage Obama despaired that, despite W. One of the first critics to discuss jazz as a political as much as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon, jazz exemplified to Davis a distinctive black, working-class challenge to white claims of racial superiority.

Dr sengondo mvungi biography of barack obama: Mvungi, Nakundwa Sengondo. Tanzania.

His poetry and criticism would have a significant influence on the Black Arts Movement of the s. Davis, a Kansas native, moved to Hawaii in the late s on the advice of Paul Robeson and worked as a journalist on a newspaper for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, one of the most powerful unions on the islands. Eighteen-year-old Barry Obama remained unsure, exactly, what college was for when he arrived at Occidental College, a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles in At both Occidental and Columbia, Obama was active in student politics, notably in antiapartheid protests, where he first discovered the power of his own oratory.

As his interest in basketball, drinking, partying, and recreational drugs waned, his devotion to academic study waxed. At Columbia he lived a monk-like existence in small, uncluttered dr sengondo mvungi biographies of barack obama, and absorbed himself in books on political theory, philosophy, international politics, and literature. During that time he also began to write fiction and keep a journal, developing some of the ideas and themes that later appear in Dreams from My Father.

Obama graduated from Columbia in with a BA in political science, having developed a vague notion that he might become a community organizer, although he was not entirely sure just what it was that a community organizer did. He did, however, have a romantic image, perhaps in grainy blackand-white, picked up from his mother and his old poet friend Frank, and from books and documentaries of the civil rights struggle.

They were stoic, short-haired, neatly dressed black students sitting in at a segregated lunch counter. Or dungareewearing SNCC workers like Bob Moses or Stokely Carmichael, leaning on a dusty porch in Mississippi, trying to persuade sharecroppers to take a chance and register to vote. His fellow employees from that time have suggested, however, that Obama exaggerates the degree to which the company symbolized rapacious s capitalism, perhaps to portray his community organizing career as a more self-sacrificing choice than it actually was.

But it was the general atmosphere of Manhattan, rather than simply its corporate excesses that Obama rejected when he decided to leave the city in The progressive left of the s, Obama realized, was no less shallow than the capitalist right. Believing that easy sloganeering and posturing had replaced the certitude and rectitude of SNCC and CORE in the early s, Obama contemplated abandoning his goal of community organizing.

The mids heyday of Reaganism was a time of retrenchment in the American labor movement, when industrial firms in the North closed their gates and reopened in the nonunionized South or in Mexico. But it was also a time when such work was most desperately needed. He would find that community and sense of place in Chicago, and especially on its South Side, the largest, most populous collection of African American neighborhoods in the country.

Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton portrayed in a ground-breaking study by that title Chicago was also the home of people-centered, community-based organizing was born after World War II in the theories and programs of Saul Alinsky. Ina Wellesley senior named Hillary Rodham wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky. The Developing Communities Project, which employed Obama from tofollowed the Alinsky principles that leaders listen, that change comes from the bottom up, and that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

During his first three years in Chicago, Obama achieved some modest success in mobilizing hundreds of residents in the South Side neighborhoods of Roseland and Altgeld Gardens. He also encouraged alliances among black, white, and Hispanic community organizations to stop plans that would have expanded a landfill into wetlands near residential neighborhoods.

Rush, have criticized him for taking too much credit for the asbestos removal victory at Altgeld Gardens and for ignoring the efforts of neighborhood residents who began a similar campaign before Obama arrived. He was quickly disabused of this notion by his experiences with black ministers who jealously guarded their prerogatives and congregations.

Man, these preachers in Chicago. You are not going to organize us. No, no, no. He knew his constituency; he truly enjoyed people. With ambitions of becoming a future Chicago mayor who might translate those principles into such an agenda, Obama applied to several law schools. Inhe was accepted by Harvard Law. Vowing to return to Chicago and community organizing after graduation, he left for Massachusetts, choosing to live not in Cambridge itself, but instead in a basement apartment in the nearby working-class, multi-ethnic town of Somerville.

In his first year he worked as an editor on the Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review, and impressed members of the faculty with his maturity and common sense as well as his breadth of knowledge. Obama was not the first African American to serve as president of a law review. That honor went to Clara Burrill Bruce, the daughter-in-law of former black U.

Bruce, who presided over the Boston University Law Review in Obama never hid his own political liberalism, however. He continued his active opposition to apartheid and support for affirmative action, and also spoke in favor of African American professor Derrick A. Bell Jr. Obama nonetheless earned the respect of political conservatives on the Law Review for acting as an honest broker between warring factions.

Indeed, he was more likely to be criticized by some on the left, including some of his fellow African American students, for not pursuing a more radical agenda. Such traits would serve him well in his future political career. After graduating from Harvard Law inObama turned down several offers of clerkships for federal judges, the typical next step for former editors of Ivy League law reviews.

Instead he returned, as promised, to Chicago. There he spearheaded voter registration efforts that helped secure the election of Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton. Judson Miner had been an important white liberal ally of Harold Washington. From toObama also taught courses on constitutional law at the University of Chicago. The couple had two daughters, Malia, born inand Natasha, known as Sasha, born in As a bonus, Michelle Robinson gave Obama important political connections as well.

Her family was well-known and regarded on the South Side, and she had attended school with Santita Jackson, daughter of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson and sister of U. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. Shortly before he won election to that body, Obama published Dreams from My Father a memoir about his unique background as the child of an African father and a white mother from Kansas and his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia.

The book also examines his student experiences and s work as a community organizer in the Chicago. Dreams from My Father has been reprinted many times and has sold over two million copies in hardcover and paperback. In he won a seat representing the 13th district in the Illinois Senate. He had launched his bid for the legislature after the incumbent, Alice Palmer, had stepped down to pursue a seat in the U.

When she failed in that effort and tried, with the support of established local black leaders, to reclaim the seat she had relinquished, Obama refused to back down. He also demanded an investigation of questionable signatures on the petitions required for her candidacy, and succeeded in having enough struck off to keep Palmer off the ballot. Obama won the Democratic primary unopposed, which in the Republican-phobic South Side meant he would win the general election with ease.

He helped craft a law that banned the personal use of campaign money by state legislators and banned lobbyists from giving gifts to lawmakers. As a reference on his pre-presidency this book is, in some ways, commendable. But as a presidential biography it proves a mind-numbing exercise in patience and pointless perseverance — 2 stars Full review here.

It also ends somewhat abruptly — just as Obama is leaving Chicago to attend Harvard Law and well before the start of his political career. But it is extremely well-researched, quite well written and, in the end, paints a compelling portrait of the 44th president as he approaches the end of his third decade of life. February 17, at pm. Steve said:.

February 18, at pm. John said:. February 28, at pm. Better late than never! Richard M Dasheiff said:. December 2, at pm. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. Tanzanian politician and academic. Kilimanjaro RegionTanzania. KinondoniDar-es-Salaam.