World | Updated Nov 03, 2008 at 06:51pm IST

Obama set to make Dr King's dream come true

Marya ShakilMarya Shakil, CNN-IBN

New Delhi: Whether he wins or not Barack Hussein Obama has already made history by just entering the US Presidential race.

It is a long and extremely unusual journey for one man and a giant leap for race relations in the US.

Obama isn't white, his father wasn't American and till four years ago he wasn't even a Senator.

With Hussein as a middle name and an upbringing outside the US, Barack Obama knows he is not what anyone would have expected to be candidate for the President of the country.

Yet he is the favourite to become the next president of the USA.

Millions of Americans echo in support when he says, "America we can not turn back. Not with so much work to be done, not many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for."

"As Barack has said only in this country our stories both he and mine be possible," his wife Michelle Obama says.

Born in Hawaii, in 1961, to a Kenyan father and an American mother, Obama had an unstable childhood. His parents divorced when he was only two. His father went back to Kenya soon after and his mother remarried.

He saw his father only once before his death in an automobile accident. Obama was 21 then - a young man of mixed race brought up largely by white grandparents.

He seemed to have experienced the inequalities of America early in life

Manager Project Vote (Chicago) Sandy Newman says, "He could have taken the easy road to wealth and prestige and instead he gave both of those up because he believed in the democratic process."

Fresh out of Columbia University in 1985, Obama entered the public domain. He worked with the black community in Chicago, raising their awareness about issues ranging from healthcare to civil rights.

In 1991 he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review

Obama made his political debut in 1996, but it wasn't until the 2004 Democratic National Convention that America actually took notice of him.

"There is no liberal America or a conservative America there is a United States of America," Obama says.

At 44 he became the third African-American to the US Senate. With a campaign message of hope and change, he's captured the young voters.

Obama supporter Oprah Winfrey says, "Dr King dreamed the dream. But we don't have to just dream the dream any more."

So 45 years after Martin Luther King's transformational speech, the change it seems has come.

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