- Former president Barack Obama has written extensively about his parents and family, and continues to tell their story in his new memoir A Promised Land.
- His father, Barack Obama Sr., was a successful Kenyan economist, while his mother Ann Dunham was an accomplished American anthropologist.
- Here's what we know about the pair, including how they met while studying at the University of Hawaii in 1960.
"I am the son of a Black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas," former president Barack Obama famously said in a 2008 campaign speech in Philadelphia. Obama wasn't the first president (nor the last) to have a parent born outside of the United States, but his status as the first bi-racial president and an unconventional childhood—which began in Honolulu, Hawaii, and included time in Seattle, and Indonesia—made his upbringing the subject of much attention.
Per NPR, which excerpted A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother by Janny Scott, his mom, Stanley Ann Dunham (who went by Ann) and dad, Barack Obama Sr. met in 1960, and had their son in 1961. Though the two were not together for long, their lives remained intertwined as each went on to successful careers in the worlds of academia and international development.
As far back as a 2006 interview with Oprah, Obama spoke openly about his diverse family, joking about how different they looked from one another—and his wife, Michelle Obama's, reaction to his diverse crew.
"Michelle will tell you that when we get together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, it's like a little mini-United Nations," he said. "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher. We've got it all."
The lives (and travels) of Obama's parents have been central to his public life, dating back to the racist and unfounded "birtherism" movement that alleged, without evidence, that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen and ineligible to serve as president.
To better understand the history of our 44th president before reading his new memoir A Promised Land, we put together some key facts on the lives of Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr., the timeline of their relationship, and their role in President Obama's early life.
Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. met as students at the University of Hawaii.
In 1960, Ann Dunham—who would go on to study anthropology—and Barack Obama Sr., a prodigious math student, were both attending the University of Hawaii and met in a Russian class. Another NPR piece, this one citing Sally Jacobs' The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father, notes that the two became enamored with each other fast, even though at the time, it was somewhat unclear whether Obama Sr. had technically divorced his first wife, Kezia Aoko.
Per Scott, Dunham became pregnant in 1961, and she married Obama Sr. that year. Their marriage was exceptional for happening "at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage."
After their baby was born, Dunham decided to go to Seattle with baby Barack to be around family, while Obama Sr. remained at school.
Dunham's life has been mischaracterized, but she had a significant impact on the future president.
As Scott wrote in A Singular Woman, "The president's mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications." She explains that Dunham, who died long before her son became a national political star, has had many different identities projected upon her, from being portrayed as a "shy, small-town girl" or a "naive idealist" in Obama's Dreams from My Father to being perceived as a struggling single mother.
In actuality though, according to Scott, she was not only an important, inspirational figure in her son's life, but also a teacher and a forward-thinking worker who helped with local development and "consulted on microfinance projects" in Indonesia.
"He credits her with impressing upon him the importance upon one's duty to others — perhaps that the best thing that one can do is to give opportunities for others," Scott told NPR's Terry Gross. "And her work in many ways foreshadows his. There was a period in 1979 where she was working in what her boss described to me as 'community development in Java.' That's five years before he becomes a community development person in Chicago."
Per the Stanley Ann Dunham Scholarship Fund's website, Dunham finished school in 1967, and then got married to another international student at the University of Hawaii, Indonesian Lolo Soetro. The family then moved together to Jakarta, where she started working on what would eventually be an anthropology master's degree.
At the time, President Obama was just six years old, attending school in Jakarta and learning English while his mother worked. She also had another child with her second husband, Maya Soetoro-Ng, one of what he would later learn were several of his siblings.
After a few years, the young Barack ended up back in Hawaii to live with Dunham's parents while she continued working in Indonesia. She remained in her son's life, but as Scott wrote, their geographic separation likely took a toll on her emotionally.
During her career, Dunham made a major impact on the field of international development.
Dunham's work has been praised extensively, and is now considered ahead of its time by many in the industry. According to the Independent, she spent three decades working in Indonesia for organizations like the Ford Foundation, the Asian Development Bank, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. She specifically worked in microfinance, something that Indonesia still pioneers today, while also being an activist and supporter of citizen groups "opposed to the military dictatorship."
The Stanley Ann Dunham Scholarship Fund noted that she also spent time in Pakistan doing microcredit loans for low-income women and craftspeople. Towards the end of her life, she lived in New York and was an employee of Women's World Banking, which focuses primarily on offering assistance to women.
In 2009, Obama spoke about his mother's professional impact at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.
"She was an anthropologist who dedicated her life to understanding and improving the lives of the rural poor, from Indonesia to Pakistan," he said. "She championed the cause of women's welfare and helped pioneer the micro-loans that have helped lift millions from poverty."
President Obama was even once given a book of his mother's work while on a visit to the Philippines, per The Wall Street Journal.
Dunham died in 1995.
According to the Stanley Ann Dunham Fund's biography, she passed away of ovarian cancer in 1995 at age 52 in Hawaii.
President Obama has continued to speak about his mother and her extended family, who helped to raise him as a child, throughout his career. He recently shared a photo of himself and his mother with a tribute to her on Instagram.
"As I recount in my book, A Promised Land, my mother, Ann Dunham, was strong, smart, and marched to her own beat. For her, the world offered endless opportunities for moral instruction," Obama wrote. "My sister Maya and I got early lessons about the struggle for civil rights, the impact of poverty on people around the world, and the importance of respecting other cultures and considering other points of view. My mother believed that power came not from putting people down but rather through lifting them up,"
Barack Obama Sr. was married several times, which became a source of legal drama after he passed.
As Sally Jacobs wrote in The Other Barack, there was some ambiguity over whether Obama Sr. had ever divorced his wife Aoko, especially given that in the Luo culture they shared, ending a marriage was a complicated process.
In 1964, Dunham filed for a divorce of her own, and the couple split up, with Obama Sr. moving back to Kenya. He eventually returned to the States and married again.
After he died from injuries sustained in his third serious car crash, his ex-wives and children went to the courts to figure out who were his true legal heirs. Per Jacobs' book, there was "colorful legal drama, which went on for years, pitted the first wife against the fourth, the eldest son against the youngest, and generally divided the family into two warring camps."
Ultimately, a judge ruled that Aoko and Obama Sr. had legally divorced prior to his moving to the United States.
It's been speculated that racism drove Obama Sr. to leave America, leading to him working as a Senior Economist for the Kenyan government.
In a Politico piece that draws from the immigration file on Barack Obama Sr. obtained by The Arizona Independent, there is evidence of his encounters with American immigration officials who were part of the INS. The writer posits that racism may have contributed to him leaving the country.
Immigration officials were keeping close watch on Obama Sr. following his marriage to Dunham, and they even communicated with Harvard, where he was then studying, about pressing him on "his marital problems." The Politico piece said that then, "Harvard gets back to the INS and reports that while the student has passed all his exams, the university is 'going to try to cook something up to ease him out.'"
Eventually, school officials told Obama that they ran out of money to cover his scholarship, which would lead to the end of his student visa.
Elsewhere in the file, a woman who was likely the mother of his Obama Sr.'s third wife, Ruth Nidesand, called in and complained about her daughter agreeing to marry him.
Eventually, he received his Doctorate in Economics, and, according to The Barack H. Obama Foundation's website, worked "with the Kenya Government as a Senior Economist in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning." He also held jobs with Shell and the Central Bank of Kenya, per Jacobs.
Obama Sr. died in 1982.
As Jacobs wrote, Obama Sr. went back to Hawaii and spent a short amount of time with his son Barack before returning to Kenya. He then suffered a pair of grisly car accidents, the first of which crippled him, and the later in 1982, which led to his death.
At the time of his death, he was 46, and had eight children.
President Obama was always curious about the specifics of his father's life, as were his many siblings and half-siblings.
Speaking to The New York Times, President Obama opened up about the effect of barely knowing his dad, who the paper says he met "just once at 10 or 11."
"I spent a lot of time trying to figure out, in the absence of an immediate role model, what it meant to be a man — or in my case, a Black man or a man of mixed race in this society," he said.
President Obama has been candid about the impact that not being raised by his father has had in many facets of his life, including penning the book Dreams from My Father in 1995. The memoir tells the story of the younger Barack's childhood. and the questions he wondered about in relation to his father. And, according to Jacobs, President Obama is one of four children of Obama Sr. to have written books that "are at least in part a rumination of the Old Man and his impact on their lives." He's also open reflected that his upbringing led him to put a lot of thought and effort into how he's would raise his own daughters, and how he would behave as a husband.
Both Barack Obama Sr. and Stanley Ann Dunham lived fascinating lives, and their impact on the world runs even deeper than simply being the parents of President Obama.
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Grant Rindner is a culture and music journalist in New York. He has written for Billboard, Complex, and i-D, among other outlets.
