On June 8, 1977, Kanye West was born in Atlanta, Georgia. When his parents split up when he was three years old, his mother moved the two of them to Chicago, Illinois.
After growing up in Chicago and attending Polaris School for Individual Education in Oak Lawn, Illinois, West was raised in a middle-class household.
When West was ten years old, his mother relocated to Nanjing, China, where she worked as a Fulbright Scholar and taught at Nanjing University. According to his mother, West was the only foreign student in his class, but he fit in well and picked up the language fast, though he has since lost much of it.
Kanye West parents: Meet Ray West, Donda West
Ray West, his father, is a former Black Panther and one of The Atlanta Journal-first Constitution’s black photojournalists.
Ray later became a Christian counsellor and, with startup capital from his son, opened the Good Water Store and Café in Lexington Park, Maryland, in 2006.
Before retiring to become West’s manager, Donda C. West, West’s mother, was also an English professor at Clark Atlanta University and the chair of the English department at Chicago State University.
