Ann had moved to Hawaii a year prior with her mother and father, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, when the family decided to leave Washington state. Barack Obama Sr. left his wife and child in Hawaii to study at Harvard in 1963 and Ann divorced him a year later. Barack Obama would only see his father once more, about ten years before the elder Obama died n a car accident in Kenya in 1982.

Shortly thereafter she met and married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student who would later become a government relations consultant with Mobil Corporation, in 1967. The couple moved with Barack to Indonesia when Soetoro was recalled to his native country when Suharto rose to power there. They separated in the early 1970s and finally divorced in 1980. Ann Dunham “had a world view, even as a young girl. It was embracing the different, rather than that ethnocentric thing of shunning the different. That was where her mind took her.”[1] A friend described has as having been a liberal even before people really knew what a liberal was. “She always felt that marriage as an institution was not particularly essential or important,”[2] said another friend.

She was a self-described atheist even from her high school days. Of his mother, Obama wrote that, “she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.”[3] He wrote further that for his mother, religion is “just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.”[4] In a 2007 Chicago tribune interview, Obama referred to his mother as “the dominant figure in my formative years... The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics.”[5]

According to Wikipedia, Obama had this to say about his mother and the role of religion in their lives:

In 2007 Obama described his mother as "a Christian from Kansas." "I was raised by my mother," he continued. "So, I’ve always been a Christian." Also in 2007, he said in a speech, "My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution."[6]

Ann Dunham died in November, 1995, succumbing to ovarian and uterine cancer after having lived an interesting and eclectic life experiencing things that for most women of her generation that were only the stuff of dreams. Much of that life was also filled with sadness: the sadness of rejection an ill treatment at the hands of her husbands, and the sadness of separation from her son, Barack, when she allowed him to return to Hawaii from Indonesia where he would live with his grandparents while attending the Punahou School from 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979. 

Formative Teen Years

Ann’s formative teen years in Washington state greatly shaped her worldview. An investigative report from the Chicago tribune stated that “the parental traits that would mold him (Obama) — a contrarian worldview, an initial rejection of organized religion, a questioning nature — were already taking shape years earlier in the nomadic and sometimes tempestuous Dunham family, where the only child was a curious and precocious daughter of a father who wanted a boy so badly that he named her Stanley — after himself.”[7]

Ann’s formal name was Stanley Ann Dunham, and as noted she as given that name because her father wanted a boy, and so she was named after him. Not that she liked this, but she accepted and dealt with this oddity until she arrived in Hawaii, when she started to go by Ann. But, in rural, conservative Mercer Island in the mid 1950s events were unfolding that would irreversibly impact young Ann’s life and shape the future and the future outlook of Barack Obama.

In 1955 the head of the Mercer Island School Board was called to testify before HUAC, the House Un-American Activites Committee, where he admitted to being a member of the Communist Party. Not surprisingly there were teachers and Mercer Island High School, Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman, who routinely encouraged the children to question traditions, norms, values, and even parental authority. One of them had quite a modern reading list for the students, books like “Atlas Shrugged” and ”1984.” Foubert’s class included a potent dose of controversial writings, including Margaret Mead's writings on homosexuality. Wichterman assigned his students to read the “Communist Manifesto,” which set off a firestorm in the quiet little conservative village. While it is fairly common for such books to be read in high schools in the United Sates now, at the time Ann Dunham was attending Mercer Island High it was unheard of and unthinkable. With the Cold War ramping up and anti-Communist paranoia in full swing the very fact that a teacher in a public school system would dare to tell students to challenge traditional norms, let alone assign them to read the Communist Manifesto is nothing short of remarkable.[8]

Although such assignments did result in the expected uproar of parents wondering what these teachers were doing pushing Marxist writing and Communism on their children in public, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham were not among them. Though certainly not members of the Communist Party, the Dunhams’ were undeniably sympathetic to some more “liberal” or “progressive” causes, as is evidenced by their membership and attendance at the East Shore Unitarian Church in Bellevue and their rejection of their Christian upbringing as Methodists and Baptists. At the time that church was referred to by locals as “the little red church on the hill.”[9]

During her years at Mercer Island High School, Ann was known by her friends, colleagues and teachers to be an “intellectual rebel” and a skeptic, “questioning things that their folks thought shouldn’t be questioned — religion, politics, parental authority.”[10] Ann was anything but ordinary and sought comfort with the more intellectual clique, discussing the current events and various other subjects, questioning norms and pushing limits. 

Ann Dunham thrived in her high school courses taught by Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman. “’As much as a high-school student can, she'd question anything: What's so good about democracy? What's so good about capitalism? What's wrong with communism? What's good about communism?’ Wichterman said. ‘She had what I call an inquiring mind.’”[11] After graduation in 1960, Ann’s father Stanley moved the family to Hawaii, where she enrolled as an anthropology major at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.