We kick off 2014 Mixed Experience Month with a profile of President Barack Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (1942-1995).
Dunham was born in 1942 in Wichita, Kansas.
After a series of moves during her childhood (California, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington state), Dunham's family moved to Honolulu after she graduated from high school.
Dunham attended University of Hawaii at Manoa where she met Barack Obama Sr. in her Russian class. The two married in 1961 when she was 3 months pregnant. Dunham was 18 when her son and future president, Barack Obama was born.
Dunham divorced in 1964 after living apart from her husband for much of their marriage. She continued her studies in Honolulu and raised her son as a single mother with the help of her parents. In 1965, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro. She moved to Indonesia with her son in 1967 upon graduating. She had a daughter with Soetoro in 1970.
In her professional life, Dunham worked as a teacher of English, a crafts instructor, consultant and researcher among other things. In 1992, she received her doctorate in anthropology. She died of uterine cancer in 1995.
Dunham was often portrayed as President Obama's "white mom from Kansas" who was of English ancestry as well as German, Swiss, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh. However, in 2012, Ancestry.com announced that there is evidence that Dunham had an ancestor of African origin, John Punch. Punch was an identured servant who fled his servitude only to be captured in a neighboring state and sentenced to a lifetime of enslavement. The New York Times reported that "some historians to regard him as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, years before Virginia adopted laws allowing slavery." It is believed that Punch had a family with a white woman. The family eventually went by the name Bunch and continued to intermarry. Dunham is believed to be part of this family line.--Heidi Durrow
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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience. Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog! Thanks for reading. And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013. Copyright 2014.
