Hussein, is Barack Obama's grandfather.  It was Hussein for whom Obama was given his middle name.  Hussein, was "fiercely devoted to Islam."  He was one of the first Muslim converts in his village.  He had at least 3 wives: Helima, who had no children; Akuma who gave birth to Sarah Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. and Auma Obama; and Sarah, known as "Mama Sarah."
  

Seattle in the 1950s had no Space Needle, no Microsoft, no Starbucks.  Mercer Island, now a pricey home to corporate luminaries such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, was then "a rural, idyllic place," said Elaine Johnson, who remembered summers with "sleepovers along the water in sleeping bags.  It was so safe."  The island was quiet, politically conservative and all white.  As a suburb, Mercer Island was still in its infancy.  The 1950 census counted about 5,000 people, almost all white.  Sanctioned deer hunts had stopped just a few years before the Dunhams arrived.

But consistent with the 1950s, there were undercurrents of turmoil.  In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board, John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party.

Stanley Ann Dunham impressed her high-school classmates with a wickedly sharp wit.  She was an "intellectual rebel" with a fledgling beatnik sensibility that would eventually take her around the globe.

Dunham gravitated toward an intellectual clique.  According to former classmate Chip Wall, she caught foreign films at Seattle's only art-house theater, the Ridgemont, and trekked to University District coffee shops like the Encore to talk about jazz, the value of learning from other cultures and the very dull Eisenhower-ness of our parents.  She was not a standard-issue girl.  You don't start out life as a girl with a name like Stanley without some sense you are not ordinary.

Obama, himself, hints that his father and mother’s wedding may not have been properly documented.  "How and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I have never quite had the courage to explore.  There's no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride. No families were in attendance; it's not even clear that people back in Kansas were informed," Obama writes in his memoir.
  

 
A privileged African-American, educated at the finest schools, who has not shared the black American experience
By birth, blood and training, a Muslim, who became a member of a Marxist, Black-African church
A socialist whose politics are rooted in Marx and whose tactics were conceived by the communist, Alinsky
A master at shaping his own mythology
Completely unqualified to be Commander in Chief
And, he is not now, and has never been, a "natural born citizen"
  

  
Sometimes I would overhear him and my mother arguing in their bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his company dinner parties, where American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo's back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help.  He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother's voice would rise to almost a shout."

"They (Americans) are not my people!"
  

"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before," the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction.  "I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.  Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."

"[My experience] will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant."

"It is possible that Black individuals either chose to or felt pressured to come together . . . because of the belief that Blacks must join in solidarity to combat a White oppressor."

The Obamas are members of the Luo, Kenya's third-largest ethnic group, which is part of a larger family of ethnic groups, collectively also known as Luo.  This group belongs to the Eastern Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan phylum.  The Obama family is largely concentrated in the western province of Nyanza.