Early Years
Barbour was born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, where he was raised as the youngest of three sons of Grace LeFlore (née Johnson) and Jeptha Fowlkes Barbour, Jr. Barbour is a descendant of Walter Leake, who was Mississippi's third governor as well as a U.S. senator. His father, a lawyer, died when Barbour was two years old. Haley's father who was a Circuit Judge had an inmate to assist him when Judge Barbour became ill. Leon Turner, who was given a posthumous pardon by Barbour in the closing days of his administration, had helped to raise him.
Barbour attended the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, but skipped the first semester of his senior year to work on Richard Nixon's 1968 election campaign. At the age of twenty-two, he ran the 1970 census for the state of Mississippi. He enrolled at the University of Mississippi School of Law, receiving a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1972.
Subsequently, Barbour joined his father's law firm in Yazoo City.
Read more about this topic: Haley Barbour
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Wondrous hole! Magical hole! Dazzlingly influential hole! Noble and effulgent hole! From this hole everything follows logically: first the baby, then the placenta, then, for years and years and years until death, a way of life. It is all logic, and she who lives by the hole will live also by its logic. It is, appropriately, logic with a hole in it.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)