In 1963, twenty-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham entered the University of Hawaii campus to resume her university studies, having previously interrupted them… See more

 

    In January 1963, twenty year old Stanley Ann Dunham walked back onto the campus of the University of Hawaii to resume the college education she had paused two years earlier, returning as a young mother raising a biracial toddler in a decade when interracial marriage was still illegal in more than a dozen American states. She had married Kenyan economics student Barack Obama Sr. in February 1961 while three months pregnant, given birth to their son that August, then spent nearly a year as a single parent in Seattle while her husband finished his degree in Hawaii and she attended the University of Washington. By the time Obama Sr. left for graduate school at Harvard in the fall of 1962, the marriage had effectively ended in practice if not on paper, and Dunham filed for divorce that following January, a filing Obama Sr. never contested. She raised her young son largely with help from her own parents in Honolulu during those years, working to finish her undergraduate degree while managing motherhood well before either task came with any modern support system for someone in her position. She later remarried an Indonesian graduate student named Lolo Soetoro in 1965 and eventually moved the family to Jakarta, where she taught English, worked in rural development, and pursued fieldwork that would eventually lead to a PhD in anthropology, all while continuing to insist that her son wake before dawn to complete English language correspondence courses so he would never fall behind academically. Friends and biographers who studied her life later described a woman entirely unconcerned with wealth or status, focused instead on making sure her son understood the world beyond whatever limits other people tried to place on him because of his race or his unconventional family background. That son grew up to become the 44th President of the United States, and decades after her death from ovarian cancer in 1995, Barack Obama continued crediting his mother's insistence on curiosity, independent thought, and education as the foundation everything else in his life was eventually built on.