Former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts made an 11th-hour entry into the 2020 Democratic presidential primary on Thursday. Here’s a look at his background and where he stands on some of the major issues in the race.

Growing up on Chicago’s South Side

Mr. Patrick, 63, grew up in the 1950s and ’60s on Chicago’s South Side, then a neighborhood of Southern transplants, where he recalls being steeped in Southern culture and food, as well as Sundays given over to church services. (His speech retains a hint of a Southern cadence.)

He also remembers being poor. His jazz musician father, Pat Patrick, was largely out of the picture. In a speech last year to the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, Mr. Patrick told the story of how he, his mother and his sister, who were forced to move in to his grandparents’ two-bedroom tenement apartment, had to share a bunk bed in one of the rooms. “We would rotate from the top bunk to the bottom bunk to the floor, every third night on the floor,” he said.

A pivotal moment in his life came when one of Mr. Patrick’s public middle-school teachers recognized his intellect and contacted a nonprofit agency to arrange for Mr. Patrick’s scholarship to Milton Academy in Massachusetts.