06/16/2026
It truly takes a village….
Thank God for grandparents who will step up!!!!
Namaste 🙏🏾
On November 29, 1942, in Wichita, Kansas, a furniture salesman named Stanley Armour Dunham and his wife Madelyn had their first and only child. They had been hoping for a boy. Stanley Dunham wanted a son badly enough that when his wife delivered a girl, he named her after himself.
Stanley Ann Dunham grew up answering to that name. She was teased for it for years. By the time she enrolled in college, at seventeen, she had quietly dropped Stanley and was going by Ann.
She was, in late 1960, a freshman at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She was the daughter of working-class Midwesterners who had moved five times before she had turned eighteen, finally settling in Honolulu when her parents had decided that the new state of Hawaii offered better economic prospects than the long string of mainland cities the family had previously tried.
A few months into her first semester, she met a man.
The man's name was Barack Hussein Obama. He was a graduate student from Kenya, in his mid-twenties, the first African student the University of Hawaii had ever enrolled. He was charismatic, brilliant, and difficult. He was also, although Ann did not know this at the time, already married to a woman named Kezia in Kenya, with two children there.
They met in a Russian-language class.
She was pregnant within months.
In*******al marriage was illegal in twenty-two American states in 1961 and would remain so until Loving v. Virginia in 1967. In Hawaii, which had become a state only in 1959, it was not. They were married on February 2, 1961, on the island of Maui, in a ceremony so private that her son would later report being unable to find a single photograph or marriage certificate documenting that it had taken place. Ann was eighteen years old and three months pregnant.
Barack Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu.
Obama Sr. earned a scholarship to Harvard's graduate program in economics when his son was about a year old. He left for Massachusetts. Ann did not follow. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964. She was twenty-one, a single mother, and back at the University of Hawaii.
In 1965, she married a quiet Indonesian graduate student named Lolo Soetoro. In 1967, when Barack was six, she packed their lives into suitcases and moved them to Jakarta. Her daughter Maya was born there three years later.
Indonesia, in 1967, was emerging from the catastrophic anti-communist purges of 1965 and 1966, in which an estimated five hundred thousand to one million people had been killed. She enrolled Barack in a local Indonesian primary school. She began the doctoral fieldwork that would occupy the next twenty-five years of her professional life.
In 1971, when Barack was ten, she sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents. Years later, her son would tell Time magazine: when I think about the fact that I was separated from her, I suspect it had more of an impact than I know. She stayed in Indonesia. She earned a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Hawaii in 1974.
Her doctoral research was on the rural blacksmiths and metalworkers of Java. She spent fourteen years in the villages where the craft economies she was studying actually operated. The prevailing academic view of her era held that developing nations were poor because of cultural deficiencies. Dunham's dissertation argued the opposite. The villages she had spent her career inside lacked access to capital, not character.
In 1992, at the age of forty-nine, she earned her PhD from the University of Hawaii under the supervision of the anthropologist Alice G. Dewey. The dissertation was over a thousand pages. She dedicated it to her two children. To Barack and Maya, she wrote, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field.
Her work on village microfinance helped shape the largest microcredit program in Indonesia's history, run through Bank Rakyat Indonesia. She moved to New York in 1992 to serve as policy coordinator for Women's World Banking.
In late 1994, in Jakarta, she began to feel stomach pain. She was diagnosed at Memorial Sloan Kettering in early 1995 with uterine cancer that had already spread to her ovaries. She moved home to Honolulu to be near her widowed mother. She spent the last months of her life fighting her health insurance company over its claim that her cancer was a pre-existing condition for which it should not be required to pay.
She died on November 7, 1995. She was fifty-two.
Her son was thirty-four. He was a community organizer and a law professor at the University of Chicago. He had just published his first memoir, Dreams from My Father. He dedicated it to her memory.
She did not know, when she died, that he would, thirteen years later, win 365 electoral votes and become the first Black president of the United States.
She had simply been raising her son.
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