Barack Obama sits with his grandparents Stanley and Madelyn Dunham in New York City in the 1980s
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But as Obama acknowledged in his acceptance speech at the convention, his grandmother was the rock on which his character and future were built. "She's the one who taught me about hard work," he said. "She's the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she's watching tonight, and that tonight is her night as well."
A loving grandson could also be a judging one, as Obama showed in his Philadelphia speech on race early this year. He attempted to explain his relationship with his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, by talking about another complicated relationship: "I can no more disown him than I can my white 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 her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
Madelyn Lee Payne was born into a strict Methodist family in Peru, Kans., in 1922. She fell in love with Stanley Dunham, a furniture salesman, and, against her parents' wishes, married him in 1940. When he enlisted in the Army during World War II, she got a job on a Wichita assembly line making Boeing B-29s. Their daughter was born in 1942, and because Stanley had wanted a boy, they named the girl Stanley Ann. Over the next two decades, Dunham moved at least five times — always in pursuit of her husband's next adventure as a salesman. In 1960 the Dunhams moved to Honolulu, and a year later, Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was born.
Obama's birth does not appear to have been planned. His mother and father met at the University of Hawaii and got married when she was already pregnant. To help provide for the new baby, Obama's grandmother, who did not have a college degree, got a job as a secretary at a bank. For more than two decades, she got up at 5 a.m., put on a suit and took the bus to work, arriving first at the office. Eventually — and much more slowly than her male counterparts — she advanced and was promoted to vice president. She earned more money than her husband, and her job became a "source of delicacy and bitterness" for the couple, Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father.
(See pictures of Barack Obama's family tree.)
(See pictures of Barack Obama's campaign behind the scenes.)