When the final exam for that Russian 101 course took place on January 28, 1961, Ann Dunham as well as her parents knew she was almost three months pregnant. According to later documents—no contemporary one has ever been located—on Thursday, February 2, 1961, Ann and Barack took a brief interisland flight from Honolulu to Maui and were married in the small county seat of Wailuku, with no relatives or friends present. Obama’s closest confidante, his younger sister Zeituni Onyango, recounted her older brother’s version of what had occurred: “the father of Ann said that they have to marry.” Stanley Dunham insisted that his pregnant daughter get married rather than give birth to a bastard. But why did they go to the time and expense of flying from Honolulu to Maui? Stanley and Madelyn likely did not want any potentially embarrassing questions arising at either Isle-Wide furniture or at the Bank of Hawaii, where Madelyn had been hired as an escrow officer. They knew that marriages on Oahu were regularly listed in both of Honolulu’s daily newspapers, but ones occurring in the outer islands were not.8
Ann Dunham Obama did not register for spring classes at the University of Hawaii. In contrast, Obama was honored with a Phi Kappa Phi certificate for his freshman-year grade point average and then a few weeks later was named to the Dean’s List because of his fall 1960 GPA. A young English professor, writing to AAI in support of Obama’s request for scholarship assistance for his sophomore year, reported that “Obama has done an exemplary job of getting along with people” and called him “a genuinely enlightened twentieth-century man.” Obama’s friends Neil Abercrombie and Andy Zane were leading local racial equality efforts, and when a national governors’ conference brought outspoken segregationist governor John Patterson of Alabama to Honolulu in June 1961, he was greeted at the airport by about two dozen picketers holding signs proclaiming “Welcome to the Land of Miscegenation.” The lone black participant certainly represented the truth of that slogan, and he told a reporter that “Hawaii gives them an example where races live together,” but he asked “not to be identified” other than as a UH student.9
But in that student’s own personal context, the races actually did not live together. During her pregnancy, Ann continued to reside with her parents at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, and Obama remained in his apartment on Punahou Street. When UH’s foreign-student adviser, Mrs. Sumie McCabe, learned of Obama’s new marriage some two months after it occurred, she immediately called the Honolulu office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to tell the INS about his changed circumstances. INS agent Lyle Dahlin memorialized McCabe’s call in a memo that went into Obama’s file, noting that “the problem is that when he arrived in the U.S. the subject had a wife in Kenya.” McCabe said Obama “is very intelligent,” but he “has been running around with several girls since he first arrived here and last summer she cautioned him about his playboy ways. Subject replied that he would ‘try’ to stay away from the girls. Subject got his USC [U.S. citizen] wife ‘Hapei’ and although they were married, they do not live together, and Miss Dunham is making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away. Subject told Mrs. McCabe that in Kenya all that is necessary to be divorced is to tell the wife that she is divorced and that constitutes a legal divorce. Subject claims to have been divorced from his wife in Kenya in this method.”
The INS was powerless to take any action absent a criminal conviction for bigamy, but Dahlin recommended that Obama be “closely questioned” before he was approved for another extension of his student residency visa and that “denial be considered.” If Ann were to petition on his behalf, “make sure an investigation is conducted as to the bona-fide[s] of the marriage.” Subsequent documents in Obama’s own hand would soon demonstrate that he in no way really considered himself divorced from Kezia. He had grown up in a family and ethnic culture where multiple wives were the norm, and he was not telling the truth about that to McCabe. There are no documents or anyone’s recollections to support Obama’s claim that Ann Dunham intended to give birth to their child and then put it up for adoption. Obama’s closest relative, his sister Zeituni, dismissed the possibility out of hand when the memo first came to light decades later: “no African especially in Kenya would think of giving his child away.”
So when Dr. David A. Sinclair delivered Barack Hussein Obama II at 7:24 P.M. on Friday, August 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital on Punahou Street, just three blocks south from where the child had been conceived, the Salvation Army was not called. Instead, Madelyn and Stan each called their siblings with the news. Madelyn’s younger brother Charles recounted her description of the new baby: “He’s not black like his father, he’s not white. More like coffee with cream.” Ralph Dunham remembered Stan calling him from the hospital and Madelyn getting on the phone too. Stan’s younger sister Virginia Dunham Goeldner recalled him phoning her too and, fifty years later, expressed astonishment that some of her longtime neighbors in Maumelle, Arkansas, doubted the fact of her grandnephew’s birth. “Why did Stanley call and say he was born and why were they over at the hospital? Why did he bother to call” on that Friday night?
The birth occurred exactly two years to the day, and indeed almost exactly to the hour, since Barack Hussein Obama had boarded his flight at Nairobi Embakasi. On Monday, Ann Dunham Obama signed her son’s Hawaii State Department of Health birth certificate, and it was signed on Tuesday by Dr. Sinclair and the local registrar of births. Five days later, on August 13, the Honolulu Advertiser’s listing of “Births, Marriages, Deaths” on page B6 included in the first category “Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy., son, Aug. 4.” The next day’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin carried the same listing on page 24, with copy editors at that paper spelling out “Highway” and “August” in full. The birth certificate only contained the address for “Usual Residence of Mother”; there was no request for an address following “Full Name of Father,” so the newspapers presumed that the newborn’s parents lived together.10
Less than four weeks after his son’s birth, Barack Hussein Obama applied for and quickly received a routine one-year extension of his student residency visa. Lee Zeigler, newly arrived from Stanford University, had replaced Sumie McCabe as UH’s foreign student adviser, and a different INS agent, William T. Wood II, not Lyle Dahlin, reviewed and approved Obama’s application. Obama said he had received $1,000 in scholarship support via the African-American Institute, but again requested to work for up to twenty-five hours a week to meet the balance of his expenses. He also indicated that sometime subsequent to March 1961 he had moved from Punahou Street to 1482 Alencastre Street, well east of UH’s campus. Barack listed Ann S. Dunham as his spouse, and Agent Wood’s summary memo noted, “They have one child born Honolulu on 8/4/61—Barack Obama II, child living with mother (she lives with her parents & subject lives at 1482 Alencastre St.).” But Wood noted something else too: “U.S.C. spouse to go to Wash. State University next semester.”
Sometime soon after Wood wrote that memo, Ann and her weeks-old son flew from Honolulu to Seattle: not so she could attend WSU, in far southeastern Washington State, but to enroll at her beloved UDub, which she had wanted to attend a year earlier. Ann and baby Barack stayed briefly with a family friend on Mercer Island before settling into an apartment at 516 Thirteenth Avenue East in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, well south of the university. According to her UDub transcript, she registered for two evening courses, Anthropology 100: Introduction to the Study of Man and Political Science 201: Modern Government. Classes began in late September.
But why did Ann Dunham Obama take her newborn and leave her husband, parents, and Honolulu for the familiar confines of Seattle? She clearly preferred UDub and its environs over UH, but she told half a dozen old high school friends, as well as a woman who also lived at 516 Thirteenth Avenue East and babysat young Barack while Ann attended classes, that she loved her husband. But the young couple never chose to live together at any time following the onset of Ann’s pregnancy, and Ann relocated herself a long airplane flight away as soon as her son was old enough to travel. None of the direct participants—Ann, Obama, Madelyn, and Stan—ever offered a clear explanation that has survived in anyone’s recollections a half century later.
Obama had taken to calling his son’s mother Anna, not Ann, and she seems to have adopted this as well, according to both the 1961–62 Polk City Directory