Obama's grandmother dies

'Toot,' mentioned in his speech on race, helped raise him in Hawaii

Barack Obama once called his grandmother the "rock of our family," a practical woman who warned him, as he rose to national political prominence, to "keep your head on straight.''

Madelyn Dunham, the woman Obama called "Toot," died of cancer late Sunday night in Hawaii. She was 86.

"She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances,'' Obama and his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng said in a statement. "Our debt to her is beyond measure."

Indeed, Obama lived with Mrs. Dunham and her husband, the late Stanley Dunham, through his teens in Honolulu, with the grandparents serving as his parental role models.

"She's the one who taught me about hard work. 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," Obama said in his acceptance speech in August for the Democratic nomination for president. "She poured everything she had into me."

Mrs. Dunham rarely spoke to the press -- her last interview with the Chicago Sun-Times was in 2004 -- but appeared in one campaign ad, saying she believed her grandson had "a lot of depth and a broadness of view."

During a campaign stop Monday in Charlotte, N.C., Obama called her "one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America: They're not famous, their names aren't in the newspaper but each and every day they work hard, they look after their families, they sacrifice for their children and their grandchildren."

Born Madelyn Payne in Peru, Kan., she married Stanley Dunham, another Kansas native, in 1940. Two years later, Obama's mother, Ann, was born. By 1960, the Dunhams were living in Hawaii, with Stanley working as a salesman while his wife joined the Bank of Hawaii, eventually becoming one of the first female vice presidents there.

Meanwhile, Obama's mother, while attending the University of Hawaii, met Barack Obama Sr., married and gave birth to a son in 1961. The couple divorced in 1964; Obama's mother later married an Indonesian. While she stayed in Indonesia, Obama lived with his grandparents from 1971 until he graduated from high school in 1979.

In his memoir Dreams From My Father, Obama called his grandmother "a trailblazer" in business, battling prejudice against white women in Hawaii at the time. He described her as "suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense."

"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.'"

A small, private funeral will be held later this month, the Obama campaign said.

In an interview with the Sun-Times a few weeks after Obama's 2004 speech at the Democratic convention that thrust him into the national spotlight, Mrs. Dunham was effusive in her praise.

"I was a little amazed," she told Sun-Times political writer Scott Fornek. "It was really quite an exceptional speech, or I'm being prejudiced, I don't know. But to me it was really quite exceptional."

Mrs. Dunham found herself caught up in another speech, this one on March 18 as Obama tried to explain divisive comments of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his pastor at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, by harkening back to his own childhood as a biracial person being raised by white grandparents.

"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."

Mrs. Dunham did not comment on that speech. But Obama once recalled how during his teen years, his grandmother had been particularly annoyed when she was panhandled. When Obama asked why, his grandfather said Mrs. Dunham was bothered because the panhandler was black.

The comment hit Obama "like a fist in my stomach," he wrote later. He was sure his grandparents loved him deeply. "And yet, I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears."

Mr. Dunham died in 1992. Mrs. Dunham, whose nickname is short for "tutu," the Hawaiian word for grandmother, spent her final years playing bridge, listening to books on tape and watching her grandson on TV. In an interview with the Sun-Times following his 2004 speech, Obama said his grandmother "called me up and she said, 'You did well.' "