Madelyn and Stanley Dunham

Madelyn and Stanley Dunham
File:Ann, Madelyn, and Stanley Dunham.jpg Right-to-left: Madelyn Payne Dunham and Stanley Armour Dunham with their daughter Ann Dunham
Born	Madelyn Dunham: Madelyn Lee Payne Stanley Dunham: Stanley Armour Dunham Madelyn Dunham: (1922-10-26)October 26, 1922 Stanley Dunham: (1918-03-23)March 23, 1918
Died	Madelyn Dunham: November 2, 2008(2008-11-02) (aged 86) Stanley Dunham: February 8, 1992(1992-02-08) (aged 73)
Nationality	American
Children	Ann Dunham
Parent(s)	Rolla Charles Payne and Leona McCurry Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, Sr. and Ruth Lucille Armour

Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham (Template:Pron-en DUN-əm; October 26, 1922 – November 2, 2008) and Stanley Armour Dunham (March 23, 1918 – February 8, 1992) were the American maternal grandparents of Barack Obama, the president-elect of the United States. They raised Obama from age 10 in their Honolulu, Hawaii apartment, where the widowed Mrs. Dunham died on November 2, 2008, only two days before her grandson was elected the 44th President of the United States.

Ancestry

Both Madelyn and Stanley Dunham descend from European ancestors, mostly from English people, who settled in the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Their most recent ancestor from Europe was Stanley's great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, a farmer who emigrated from Moneygall, County Offaly, Ireland during the Great Irish Famine and settled in Jefferson Township, Tipton County, Indiana. Kearney's youngest daughter, Mary Ann (Kearney) Dunham, was Stanley Dunham's paternal grandmother. Through a common ancestor, Mareen Duvall (a wealthy French Huguenot merchant who immigrated to Maryland in the 1650s), Stanley Dunham was related to President Harry S Truman (an eighth cousin twice removed) and the current Vice-President Dick Cheney (an eighth cousin once removed), among others. According to Obama, Madelyn Dunham's mother was of part Cherokee descent, in which Madelyn took great pride. To date, no concrete evidence has surfaced of Cherokee heritage. Obama's maternal heritage consists mostly of English ancestry, and smaller amounts of Irish and German ancestry.

Early life

File:Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham.jpg

Photograph of Madelyn Dunham taken about 1950

Madelyn Lee Payne was born in Peru, Kansas, the daughter of Rolla Charles and Leona (McCurry) Payne. She recalled them as "stern Methodist parents who did not believe in drinking, playing cards or dancing." She moved with her parents to Augusta, Kansas at the age of three. Madelyn was one of the best students in her high school graduating class in 1940. Despite her strict upbringing, she liked to go to Wichita, Kansas to see big band concerts. While in Wichita, she met Kansas-born Stanley Armour Dunham from the oil-town of El Dorado, Kansas and the "other side of the railroad tracks." Stanley attended El Dorado High School.

The Dunhams were Baptists. Unlike the Paynes, Stanley Dunham did not come from a white-collar background. At age 8, Stanley discovered his mother's body after she had committed suicide. Following his mother's suicide, his father abandoned the family and Stanley and his brother, Ralph, were sent to live with his maternal grandparents in El Dorado, Kansas. Described as "gregarious, friendly, impetuous, challenging and loud," he was a furniture salesman "who could charm the legs off a couch." Madelyn's parents did not approve of their marriage, which occurred on May 5, 1940.

During World War II, Stanley Dunham enlisted in the Army. Madelyn worked on a Boeing B-29 assembly line in Wichita. Her brother Charlie Payne was part of the 89th Infantry Division, which liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald, a fact Barack Obama has referred to in speeches.

Madelyn gave birth to a daughter they named Stanley Ann, who was later known as Ann, in Fort Leavenworth on November 29, 1942. With Madelyn and Stanley both working full-time, the family moved to California, Kansas, Texas, and finally settled in Seattle, Washington (on Mercer Island), where Ann graduated from high school. In El Dorado, Kansas, Stanley had managed a furniture store while Madelyn worked in restaurants. In Seattle, Stanley worked in a bigger furniture store (Standard-Grunbaum Furniture) while Madelyn eventually became vice-president of a local bank. Mercer Island was then "a rural, idyllic place," quiet, politically conservative and all white. Madelyn and Stanley attended Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue. While in Washington she attended the University of Washington. She later would also attend classes at the University of California, Berkeley.

Madelyn and Stanley then moved to Hawaii, where he found a better furniture store opportunity. She started working at the Bank of Hawaii in 1960 and was promoted to be one of the first female bank vice presidents in 1970. In 1970s Honolulu, both women and the minority white population were routinely the target of discrimination.

Ann attended the University of Hawaii and while she was there she met Barack Obama, Sr. a graduate student from Kenya. Both Dunhams were upset when their daughter married Obama Sr., particularly after receiving a long, angry letter from Obama Sr.'s father in Kenya who "didn't want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman." The Dunhams adapted, however. Madelyn Dunham was quoted as saying, "I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me."

Raising Barack Obama

Right-to-left: Barack Obama and Maya Soetoro with their mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham in Hawaii (ca. 1972-1973)

After the Obama marriage fell apart, the young Barack spent four years with his mother and her second husband in Jakarta, Indonesia. He returned to the United States at age 10 to live with his maternal grandparents in the Makiki district of Honolulu and enrolled in the fifth grade at the Punahou School. The tuition fees for the prestigious preparatory school were paid with the aid of scholarships. Ann would later come back to Hawaii and pursue graduate studies; she eventually earned a Ph.D. in anthropology and went on to be employed on development projects in Indonesia and around the world helping impoverished women obtain microfinance. When she returned to Indonesia in 1977 for her Masters' fieldwork, Obama stayed in the United States with his grandparents. Obama writes in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, "I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they'd leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight."

Obama and his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng referred to Madelyn Dunham as "Toot" — short for "tutu," the Hawaiian word for grandmother. In his book, Obama described his grandmother as "quiet yet firm", in contrast to Obama's "boisterous" grandfather Stanley. Obama considered his grandmother "a trailblazer of sorts, the first woman vice-president of a local bank." Her colleagues recall her as a "tough boss" who would make you "sink or swim", but who had a "soft spot for those willing to work hard." She retired from the Bank of Hawaii in 1986.

Stanley's death

Stanley Dunham died in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1992 and is buried there in the Punchbowl National Cemetery. Madelyn Dunham took care of her daughter in Hawaii in the months before Ann died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at age 52. Her last interview was in 2004, on the occasion of her grandson's keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Madelyn's later life

Until her death, Dunham lived in the same small high-rise apartment where she raised her grandson Barack. She was an avid bridge player, but mostly stayed at home in her apartment "listening to books on tape and watching her grandson on CNN every day." Madelyn Dunham suffered from severe osteoporosis. In 2008, she underwent both corneal transplant and hip replacement surgeries.

2008 presidential campaign

Madelyn Dunham was generally not seen in the 2008 presidential campaign. In March 2008, the 85-year-old Dunham was quoted as saying, "I am not giving any interviews...I am in poor health."

On March 18, 2008, in a speech on race relations in Philadelphia in the wake of controversial videos of Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright surfacing, Obama described his grandmother:

I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

On March 20, 2008, in a radio interview on Philadelphia's WIP (AM), Obama explained this remark by saying:

The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity - she doesn't. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know...there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that's just the nature of race in our society.

Obama's use of the phrase "typical white person" was highlighted by a gossip columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and subsequently picked up by commentators on the Huffington Post blog, ABC News and other media outlets. In a CNN interview, when Larry King asked him to clarify the "typical white person" remark, Obama said:

Well, what I meant really was that some of the fears of street crime and some of the stereotypes that go along with that were responses that I think many people feel. She's not extraordinary in that regard. She is somebody that I love as much as anybody. I mean, she has literally helped to raise me. But those are fears that are embedded in our culture, and embedded in our society, and even within our own families, even within a family like mine that is diverse.

Dennis Ching, who worked with her for more than 40 years, "never heard her say anything like that. I never heard her say anything negative about anything." Hawaiian State Senator Sam Slom, who worked with her at the Bank of Hawaii, said "I never heard Madelyn say anything disparaging about people of African ancestry or Asia ancestry or anybody's ancestry." Her brother, Charlie Payne, told the Associated Press that his sister's reaction to being made a campaign issue was "no more than just sort of raised eyebrows."

In April 2008, Madelyn Dunham appeared briefly in her first campaign ad for her grandson, saying that Obama had "a lot of depth, and a broadness of view."

In a September 10, 2008 interview with the Late Show with David Letterman, Obama described his grandmother as follows:

Eighty-seven years old. She can't travel. She has terrible osteoporosis so she can't fly, but, you know, she has been the rock of our family and she is sharp as a tack. I mean, she's just - she follows everything, but she has a very subdued, sort of Midwestern attitude about these things. So when I got nominated, she called and said, ‘That's nice, Barry, that's nice.'"

On October 20, 2008, the Obama campaign announced that he would suspend campaign events on October 23 and 24 to spend some time with Dunham. His communications director told reporters that she had fallen ill in the preceding weeks, and that while she was released from the hospital the week before, her health had deteriorated "to the point where her situation is very serious." In an October 23, 2008 interview with CBS News, Obama described his grandmother as follows: "She has really been the rock of the family, the foundation of the family. Whatever strength, discipline - that - that I have - it comes from her."

Death

On November 2, 2008 (November 3, 2008 in the continental U.S.), the Obama campaign announced that Madelyn Dunham had "died peacefully after a battle with cancer" in Hawaii. Senator Obama and his sister Maya released a statement saying, "She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility." At a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina on November 3, Obama said, "She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America. They’re not famous. Their names are not in the newspapers, but each and every day they work hard. They aren’t seeking the limelight. All they try to do is just do the right thing." Dunham's absentee ballot, received by the election office on October 27, was included in Hawaii's total.

External links

• "Family precedent: Obama's grandmother blazed trails'" USA Today, April 8, 2008
• Guest Book for Madelyn Dunham
• "Remembering Madelyn Dunham" Honolulu Advertiser, November 15, 2008, includes photo gallery and memorial service video