Dreams from My Father
By
Barack Obama
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a memoir by Barack Obama. It was first published in 1995 as Obama was preparing to launch his political career in a campaign for Illinois Senate, five years after being elected as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. The book chronicles the events of Obama's life up until his entry into law school in 1988.
- Away from my mother, away from my grandparents, I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.
- It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself.
- Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in my confusion. Just as there had been no shame in your father's before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There was only shame in the silence fear had produced.
