President Bi Racial Obama

Sarah Sarah Obama is the third wife of Obama's paternal grandfather and was born in 1922.

Also known, through the addition of her late husband's name, as Sarah Onyango Obama, and sometimes referred to as Sarah Ogwel, Sarah Hussein Obama or Sarah Anyango Obama, she lives in Nyang’oma Kogelo village, 30 miles west of western Kenya's main town, Kisumu, on the edge of Lake Victoria.

The
Airlift
"When Obama Sr. arrived in Hawaii in June 1959, future President Kenyatta was in jail in Kenya," as reported by a story done in Hawaiian paper after he arrived:

"The Washington Post reported that when Barack Obama, Sr. first arrived in Hawaii he was interviewed by the Hawaiian Press, the reporter Hirozawa relays Obama’s comments, "he would study business administration and wanted to return to Kenya to help with its transition from tribal customs to a modern economy."

He was concerned, he said, about his generation’s disorientation as Kenyans rejected old ways yet struggled with "westernization," the date of the story was JUNE, 1959.

The whole story is a lie right from word one of daddy arrived courtesy of an airlift.  He didn’t even arrive with the other students, he arrived months before them, so the question becomes why?

All of this can be found at the following link aside from speculation of why.  Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Jackie Robinson appeal letter, Aug. 24, 1959, box 3, Robinson Papers; Smith, "East African Airlifts of 1959, 1960, and 1961," 25–43.

Barack Obama wrote that his father "had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States," but a list of the students who landed in New York on September 9, 1959, does not contain the name of the elder Obama.  Tom Shachtman, working in the African-American Students Foundation (AASF) papers for a book on the airlifts, has found that the elder Obama came in 1959 with support from the AASF but appears to have been routed a different way as he made his way to the University of Hawaii.

Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York, 1995), 9; "Eighty-One Kenya Airlift Students Arrived New York Sept. 9th 1959," box 3, Robinson Papers; Tom Shachtman telephone interview by James H. Meriwether, Aug. 19, 2008, notes (confirmed via e-mail by Shachtman) (in James H. Meriwether’s possession).

Kezia
 
Kezia was a 16-year-old schoolgirl while Senior, two years older, had just got his first proper job as an office clerk in Nairobi.

Kezia said: "It was at a dance in Kendu Bay, my home town.  Barack (Senior) was there on holiday with his family.

"I went to the dance hall with my cousin William and I saw Barack enter the room.  I thought, 'ohhh, wow'.  He was so lovely with his dancing.  So handsome and so smart.

"We danced together and then the next day my cousin came to our house and told me that Barack liked me.

"It was December, so I was off school.  Each day Barack and my cousin would stop by the house.

"Every time I looked they were always there, trying to convince me to go with Barack to Nairobi.

"About a week later, William and I took Barack to the station.  We were going to say: 'Bye bye, see you next time.'  Except there was no bye bye.

"When the train arrived William and Barack said, "You are going to Nairobi."  I went with him.'

Her father, a local driver, was furious.

Kezia said: "He did not like Obama.  My father and brothers came to Nairobi to bring me back.  They said I had to go back to school.

"When I wouldn't, they said they would never speak to me again.

"Barack was also worried about what his father (grandfather) would think because I was so young, but he gave us his approval.  He sent my mother and father 14 cows for my dowry.

Kezia and Barack Sr. were married in a tribal ceremony in January, 1957, and  set up a home in Jericho, a section of Nairobi created for government employees, and began a family.

First son Roy was born in March 1958.  Kezia insisted: "Barack was a good husband."
 
Also known as Kezia Grace Obama.  She currently lives in Bracknell, Berkshire, England.

Can you imagine if a Republican was running for president and it came out that his father had bought his first wife for 14 cows???!!!Just wow!!

The
Dunhams
 
The
Greatest
Generation
 
Stanley Armour Dunham was born 23 March 1918. , came from the oil-town of El Dorado, Kansas, the "other side of the railroad tracks."  He attended El Dorado High School and worked on oil rigs during the Depression.

Madelyn Lee Payne was born in Peru, Kan., on Oct. 26, 1922.  When she was 3, her family moved to Augusta, Kan., where she was raised.

Madelyn married Stanley Armour Dunham on May 5, 1940.  The newlyweds didn't tell her parents of the marriage until after she had her high school diploma in hand.
 
 

They eloped a month later, on the evening of her high school graduation in June, 1940.  She was seventeen and a half years old, he was twenty-one.  Her parents disapproved of the match.

Stanley enlisted for military service in World War II in June of 1942 and served in Patton's 3rd Army.  He saw no combat.

After the war Stanley became a retail furniture salesman.  He moved his family to Oklahoma, Texas, California and back to Kansas before they settled in the Seattle area in 1955. 
 
Although a Seattle Times article reports that the family rented an apartment in the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle, records also show that the family lived in the Wedgwood Estates apartment complex, in one of four units at 7529 39th Avenue NE, during their first year in Washington state.  Stanley Ann Dunham attended 8th grade at Eckstein Middle School in the Wedgwood neighborhood.
 
He died in Honolulu on Feb. 8th, 1992.  He is buried at Punchbowl Cemetery because of his military service.  Madelyn died November 2, 2008.  Obama spread her ashes onto the sea from the cliffs of Hawaii.

Madelyn attended college at the University of Washington and then went to work on a bomber assembly line during WW II.  After the war, she attended UC-Berkeley, worked various jobs on the Mainland.  In 1960, when they came to the Islands, she joined the Bank of Hawaii.

While Madelyn could be stern and tough at work, her personality changed around her husband.  A friend said he seemed like a real rough-and-tumble guy.  When Madelyn was with Stanley, she was very quiet.  He was the man of the house. 

The Dunhams had one daughter, Stanley Ann Dunham (Anna), who was born in  Wichita, Kansas, on November 29th, 1942.

The Dunhams moved to 3206 East Lexington St., Mercer Island, Washington in 1956,  after living in an apartment for a year in a nearby Seattle.  The lure was the high school that had just opened and the opportunity it offered for their daughter, who was then 13.
 
In 1956 the family learned of a new high school opening on Mercer Island, then a considerably more rural community (the city itself would not incorporate until 1960), and moved to the island, renting unit 219 of the Shorewood Apartments at 3206 E Lexington Way.  Stanley Dunham worked as a salesman at Standard-Grunbaum Furniture in downtown Seattle initially, though by 1957 he was working at Doces Majestic Furniture in Seattle.  Madelyn found work as an escrow officer in Bellevue.


 
As an historical aside, Anna Dunham's forebears were slaveholders.  One of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 Census in Nelson County, Ky.  The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.

Mercer
Island

The
Fifties The Dunhams went from El Dorado to a bigger opportunity in 1955 -- to a large store in downtown Seattle called Standard-Grunbaum Furniture at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Pine Street. "First in Furniture, Second at Pine," read the Yellow Pages ad in the Seattle telephone directory.

Seattle in the 1950s had no Space Needle, no Microsoft, no Starbucks. Mercer Island, now a pricey home to corporate luminaries such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, was then "a rural, idyllic place," said Elaine Johnson, who remembered summers with "sleepovers along the water in sleeping bags.  It was so safe."  The island was quiet, politically conservative and all white.  As a suburb, Mercer Island was still in its infancy.  The 1950 census counted about 5,000 people, almost all white.  Sanctioned deer hunts had stopped just a few years before the Dunhams arrived.

But consistent with the 1950s, there were undercurrents of turmoil.  In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board, John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party.

Madelyn and Stanley shed their Methodist and Baptist upbringing and began attending Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue.

"In the 1950s, this was sometimes known as 'the little Red church on the hill,'" said Peter Luton, the church's senior minister.  Skepticism, the kind that Stanley embraced and passed on to his daughter, was welcomed here. 

High School For four years on Mercer Island, Stanley Ann Dunham impressed her high-school classmates with a wickedly sharp wit.  She was an "intellectual rebel" with a fledgling beatnik sensibility that would eventually take her around the globe.
 
Stanley Ann Dunham's classmates, many of whom had lived on the island their whole lives, viewed Dunham as a novelty.
 
"She had a really ironic sense of humor, sort of downbeat and she was a great observer," said Iona Stenhouse, of Seattle, a former classmate.  "There was an arched eyebrow, or a smile on her face about the immaturity of us all.  I felt at times that Stanley thought we were a bit of a provincial group."
 
The diversions for Dunham and her class were solidly 1950s vintage: sock hops and sleepovers and the song "Rockin' Robin."  Dunham's father drove her and friends to boys basketball games, and would embarrass his daughter with his noisy cheering.
Dunham gravitated toward an intellectual clique.  According to former classmate Chip Wall, she caught foreign films at Seattle's only art-house theater, the Ridgemont, and trekked to University District coffee shops like the Encore to talk about jazz, the value of learning from other cultures and the "very dull Eisenhower-ness of our parents."
 
"We were critiquing America in those days in the same way we are today: The press is dumbed down, education is dumbed down, people don't know anything about geography or the rest of the world," said Wall, who later taught at Mercer Island High and is now retired in Seattle.
 
"She was not a standard-issue girl.  You don't start out life as a girl with a name like Stanley without some sense you are not ordinary."
 
At Mercer High School, two teachers -- Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman -- generated regular parental thunderstorms by teaching their students to challenge societal norms and question all manner of authority.  Foubert, who died recently, taught English.  His texts were cutting edge: "Atlas Shrugged," "The Organization Man," "The Hidden Persuaders," "1984" and the acerbic writings of H.L. Mencken.  Wichterman taught philosophy. 

The hallway between the two classes was known as "anarchy alley," and students pondered the challenging notions of Wichterman's teachings, including such philosophers as Sartre and Kierkegaard.  He also touched the societal third rail of the 1950s: He questioned the existence of God.  And he didn't stop there.  "I had them read 'The Communist Manifesto,' and the parents went nuts," said Wichterman, adding that parents also didn't want any discussions about "anything to do with sex," religion and theology.  The parental protests were known as "mothers' marches."

Anna

Class
Of
1960
Stanley Dunham had wanted a son, so when his daughter was born, he named her Stanley Ann Dunham, after himself.

Known as Anna, Obama's mother, was a strong-willed, unconventional member of the Mercer Island High School graduating class of 1960.   She spent 8th grade through high school there.  Here is her application for a Social Security card, submitted when she was 16.  Stanley Ann Dunham was issued Social Security number 535-40-8522.
 

 
Curious and precocious, Anna was greatly influenced by left-wing and communist teachers in the Mercer Island High School, who had the students read the philosophers Sartre and Kierkegaard, "The Communist Manifesto" and question the existence of God.  Anna touted herself as an atheist.

Mercer Island High was a hotbed of pro-Marxist radical teachers.  John Stenhouse, board member, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party USA and the school has a number of Marxists on its staff.  Two teachers at this school, Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman, both Frankfurt School style Marxists, taught a critical theory curriculum to students which included; rejection of societal norms, attacks on Christianity, the traditional family, and assigned readings by Karl Marx.  The hallway between Foubert’s and Wichterman classrooms was called "anarchy ally."

Susan Blake, a classmate and former city councilwoman from Mercer Island who long ago changed the infant Barack's messy diaper, said of her friend: "Hers was a mind in full tilt."

Anna gravitated toward an intellectual clique.  According to former classmate Chip Wall, she caught foreign films at Seattle's only art-house theater, the Ridgemont, and trekked to University District coffee shops like the Encore to talk about jazz, the value of learning from other cultures and the "very dull Eisenhower-ness of our parents."

"We were critiquing America in those days in the same way we are today: The press is dumbed-down, education is dumbed down, people don't know anything about geography or the rest of the world," said Wall, who later taught at Mercer Island High and is now retired in Seattle.

A high school classmate described Anna as "a fellow traveler. . . . We were liberals before we knew what liberals were."

The descriptive, "fellow traveler," was first applied to non-communists who were inclined toward the views of the Communist Party by Leon Trotsky.

On
The
Road

Summer
1960 Stanley Ann's graduation from high school is the last documented event for the next four years of which the researcher can be confident, although bits and pieces continue to surface.

Beginning that summer (1960), with the family's move to Hawaii, Stanley Ann enters her "beatnik" period.

Mainstream media sources, the recollection of friends and associates and Obama's account are frequently at odds about where Anna was, and what she was doing, at any point in time.  No one knows for sure, and there are no records to substantiate, where Stanley Ann Dunham was, or what she was doing, between the summer of 1960, until she showed up in Hawaii with a two year old.

What follows is the best account, cobbled together from multiple sources.  There are additional supporting sources at the "More Stuff" button.