[20][21] The couple married in Wailuku, Hawaii, on February 2, 1961, six months before Obama was born.[22][23]
In late August 1961, a few weeks after he was born, Barack and his mother moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where they lived for a year. During that time, Barack's father completed his undergraduate degree in economics in Hawaii, graduating in June 1962. He left to attend graduate school on a scholarship at Harvard University, where he earned an M.A. in economics. Obama's parents divorced in March 1964.[24] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964, where he married for a third time and worked for the Kenyan government as the Senior Economic Analyst in the Ministry of Finance.[25] He visited his son in Hawaii only once, at Christmas 1971,[26] before he was killed in an automobile accident in 1982, when Obama was 21 years old.[27] Recalling his early childhood, Obama said: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."[21] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.