Category: Politics

By all accounts, Madelyn Payne Dunham was a smart, no-nonsense woman who rose to the challenges life threw her way.

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One of those was helping to raise her grandson, Barack Obama, after the collapse of her daughter Ann’s marriage to a Kenyan graduate student. Less well-known is that she worked on a Boeing aircraft B-29 assembly line during World War II, and later became one of the first female vice presidents at the Bank of Hawaii.

Last night, Barack Obama devoted his first speech as the presumptive Democratic nominee to Dunham, whom he and his half-sister call Toot” – short for “Tutu,” the Hawaiian word for grandparent.

In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama described his grandmother as “suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense.” He also called her “a trailblazer of sorts, the first woman vice-president of a local bank.”

“What Toot believed kept her going were the needs of her grandchildren and the stoicism of her ancestors,” Obama wrote. “‘So long as you kids do well, Bar,’ she would say more than once, ‘that’s all that really matters.’ ”

Yesterday was not the first time Obama made public mention of his grandmother, but it was the most openly sentimental.

In his March 18th speech on race in Philadelphia, he had said he could no more disown longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright, than his own grandmother “- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Some criticized him for the implicit criticism of Dunham. But in a radio interview two days later, Obama said he meant no disparagement. “The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity – she doesn’t,” he said. “But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know…there’s a reaction that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”

Dunham, 85, has given no interviews since her grandson’s breakthrough address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. A day after that speech, he told a Chicago Sun-Times reporter that she had called to congratulate him. “She said, ‘You did well.’ And I said, ‘Thank you.’ And she said, ‘I just kind of worry about you. I hope you keep your head on straight.’ ”

Born Madelyn Payne in Peru, Kan., on Oct. 26, 1922, Dunham married Stanley Armour Dunham, a Baptist furniture salesman, in 1940 against the wishes of her parents, who were stern Methodists.

As the two struggled to earn a living, they moved to California, Texas, Kansas, Washington and finally to Hawaii. Madelyn Dunham started working at the Bank of Hawaii in 1960 and was promoted to be one of the first bank female vice presidents in 1970 – no easy task in 1970s Honolulu, where both women and the minority white population were routinely discriminated against.

“Was she ambitious? She had to be to become a vice president,” Clifford Y.J. Kong, 82, who was a senior credit officer at the bank at the time, told USA Today. “She was a top-notch executive to get appointed. It was a tough world.”

Her colleagues at the bank recalled her as a “tough boss”, who would make you “sink or swim” but had a “soft spot for those willing to work hard.” She retired from the bank in 1986.

Both Dunhams were reportedly upset when their daughter, Ann, marrried Barack Obama Sr., particularly after receiving a long, angry letter from the graduate student’s father in Kenya who “didn’t want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman,” according to a story in the Chicago Tribune. But they adapted.

Obama went to live with his grandparents in Honolulu at age 10, after his mother had moved to Indonesia to be with her second husband to attend Punahou School in Honolulu. Obama writes in his memoir, “I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight.”

Stanley Dunham died in 1992. Madelyn Dunham took care of her daughter Ann in Hawaii in the months before Ann died of cancer in 1995 at age 53.

Today, Dunham lives in the same small high-rise apartment where she raised Obama, not far from his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng. Ng described her to USA Today as an avid bridge player, but said that these days, she mostly stays at home “listening to books on tape and watching her grandson on CNN every day.”

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