Ann Dunham

Stanley Ann Dunham (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995), known as Ann Dunham, is the mother of Barack Obama.

Early life

She was born in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Her father gave his only child his name because he wanted a boy.

Her parents Stanley Armour Dunham (born on March 23, 1918, raised in El Dorado, Kansas died February 8, 1992 -- buried in the Punchbowl National Cemetery) and Madelyn Dunham (maiden name, "Madelyn Lee Payne") (who was born in 1922 and raised in Augusta, Kansas and is still living in Honolulu, Hawaii) met in Wichita, Kansas and married on May 5, 1940. People who knew the family said that the shape of Obama's face strikingly resembles his maternal grandfather Stanley Armour Dunham.

After the Pearl Harbor attack her father joined the Army and her mother worked at a Boeing plant in Wichita.

After World War II she moved with her parents to Seattle, Washington where her father was a furniture salesman in downtown Seattle and her mother worked for a bank. The family moved to Mercer Island, Washington, in 1956 so that 13-year old Ann could attend the high school that had just opened.

First marriage

Dunham moved to Hawaii to attend the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she studied anthropology. There she met Barack Obama Sr. of Kenya. When they became engaged, both sets of parents opposed the marriage, with Barack Sr.'s father in particular objecting. The couple married in 1960.

Dunham has been described by her friends as "a fellow traveler... We were liberals before we knew what liberals were" and as "the original feminist".

In an interview, Barack Obama referred to his mother as "the dominant figure in my formative years... The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics."

Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. divorced in 1965, when he left for Harvard to continue his education. The senior Obama, after finishing his degree in economics at Harvard, returned to Kenya and he obtained a position in the Kenyan government. He was killed in an automobile accident in 1982.

Second marriage

Two years after the divorce, when her son was five, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, Indonesian oil manager, and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia . Soetoro and Dunham had a daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng. Four years later Barack (at the age of 10) was sent back to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents and attend the Punahou School. Dunham and Soetoro divorced in the late 1970s.

Dunham pursued a career in rural development that took her to Ghana, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal and Bangladesh. In 1992 she earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawai'i. Her dissertation, "Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds," was 1067 pages long.

Ann Dunham died in 1995 of ovarian cancer and uterine cancer at the age of 52.

Religion

Barack Obama has said of Ann Dunham, "My mother was a Christian from Kansas." Earlier he had said, "I was not raised in a religious household... My mother's own experiences... only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones... And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known." And his half-sister said, when asked if their mother was an atheist, "I wouldn't have called her an atheist," she said. "She was an agnostic. She basically gave us all the good books - the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching – and wanted us to recognise that everyone has something beautiful to contribute." And, from another source, "She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue," said Maxine Box, who was Dunham's best friend."

Dreams from My Father

She was to help her son write his book Dreams from My Father as she was dying from cancer. Obama wrote:

During the writing of this book, she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood, careful not to comment on my characterizations of her but quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father's character.

Obama was to note in the book that it was Ann rather than his natural father who taught him about his African American heritage.

She would come home with books on the civil rights movement, the recordings of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King. When she told me stories of schoolchildren in the South who were forced to read books handed down from wealthier white schools but who went on to become doctors and lawyers and scientists, I felt chastened by my reluctance to wake up and study in the mornings…Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena Horne. To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.

Obama noted in the book that he might have written a different book if he had known she was dying when he wrote it:

I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book -- less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won't try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.

2008 Presidential Campaign Ad

A photograph of her holding a young Obama was included in a 30-second television advertisement called “Mother.” Obama says in the ad which focuses on his calls for health care improvements said that his mother spent her final months "more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well."

Also see

• Barack Obama Sr.

External links

• Family tree of Barack Obama, Jr.