Her father wanted a boy so badly that he named her Stanley. She spent her whole childhood being teased for it.
She was 18 years old, unmarried, and pregnant in a state where her relationship was illegal. She raised her son in 3 countries on almost nothing.
She earned a PhD at 49. She never saw him become president. Look at this photo. This is Ann Dunham. And that little pirate is her son.
Her full name is Stanley Ann Dunham. She is born on November 29, 1942, in Wichita, Kansas — the only child of a furniture salesman who wanted a boy so desperately that he named his daughter after himself.
She grows up being called Stanley. She hates it. By the time she reaches college she goes simply by Ann.
Her family moves 5 times before she turns 18 — Kansas to California to Texas to Seattle and finally, in 1960, to Hawaii. She enrolls at the University of Hawaii. She is 17 years old. In a Russian-language class, she meets a charismatic 24-year-old student from Kenya named Barack Hussein Obama Sr.
Within months she is pregnant.
She is 17 years old. He is her senior by more than 6 years. Interracial marriage is illegal in most states in America in 1961. In Hawaii, it is not. They marry — so quietly, so privately, that Barack Obama Jr. later says he could never find a single photograph or official record of the ceremony. Ann gives birth on August 4, 1961.
She names him Barack Hussein Obama II.
She is 18 years old and a mother.
Barack Obama Sr. is brilliant and restless. He earns a scholarship to Harvard. He leaves Hawaii when his son is 1 year old. He goes to Massachusetts. He plans, at first, to bring his family. Ann feels otherwise. By 1964, the divorce is final.
She is 21 years old, a single mother, and back at the University of Hawaii studying anthropology.
Then she meets Lolo Soetoro — a quiet, easygoing graduate student from the Indonesian island of Java. They fall in love. They marry in 1965. And in 1967, when Barack Obama Jr. is just 6 years old, his mother packs their lives into suitcases and moves them to Jakarta, Indonesia.
Barack has never been outside Hawaii.
Indonesia in 1967 is a country emerging from catastrophic political violence — between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed in the anti-communist purges of 1965 and 1966. The streets of Jakarta bear the marks of it. It is a country of profound beauty and profound poverty, and Ann Dunham is raising her biracial American son in the middle of it.
Barack attends a local Indonesian school. He learns the language. He eats what's available. He watches his mother work — always studying, always asking questions, always taking notes on the people and the crafts and the economies around her.
This photograph is taken during those years. Barack is around 8 years old, dressed as a pirate, standing in a garden in Jakarta.
Here's what makes Ann Dunham extraordinary: she does not stop.
Not for divorce. Not for displacement. Not for poverty. Not for the raised eyebrows of people who could not understand a white woman from Kansas raising a Black son alone in Southeast Asia.
1971. Barack is 10 years old when Ann sends him back to Hawaii to live with her parents — his grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham. She stays in Indonesia to continue her graduate work. Years later, Barack tells 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 earns her BA in anthropology in 1967. Her Master's degree in 1975. She spends years in the field — studying traditional craft economies, the blacksmiths and batik workers and village artisans of rural Indonesia. She fights the prevailing academic theory of her era, which held that developing nations were poor because of cultural deficiency. Her dissertation argues the opposite: that they lacked capital, not character.
She earns her PhD in 1992. She is 49 years old.
She dedicates it simply: "To Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field."
November 7, 1995. Ann Dunham dies of ovarian cancer in Honolulu, Hawaii. She is 52 years old. Her son Barack is 34. He is a community organizer and law professor in Chicago. He has just published his first memoir — Dreams from My Father — which he dedicates to her memory.
She will never know what happens next.
2004. He gives a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. The country stops and listens.
November 4, 2008. Barack Hussein Obama II is elected the 44th President of the United States — the first Black president in the history of the country. He wins 365 electoral votes. He gives his victory speech in Grant Park, Chicago, before a crowd of 240,000 people.
His mother has been gone for 13 years.
Look at that photograph again. A little boy in a pirate hat. A young mother kneeling beside him in the Jakarta night. She is somewhere in her late 20s. She has already been divorced once, remarried, moved across the world, and started a PhD. She has no money and no map and she is raising the future 44th President of the United States in a garden in Indonesia.
She does not know that either.
Share this with someone who needs to know — that the people who shape history are rarely the ones who expected to.