[Spunky]

"I'd also place the "Welcome" picture in 1959,..."

Ok, I go along with that but what puzzles me is NOBODY knew who Barack Obama Sr. was before he came to Hawaii. In that picture he is receiving a BIG welcome (hence the Lei) If all those people were arriving at the same time they would all have Lei's on also. So who are all those people there with him? To me it seems plausable that they are people who had met him while going to school in Hawaii and are welcoming him back after a long absence.
I just like to put twists to things. :-)

[Calpernia]

>>>NOBODY knew who Barack Obama Sr. was before he came to Hawaii.

We don’t know that. If this picture is from Late 50s early 60s, then why is Stanley Davis there? Why is Janice Okuba there? Is that Frank Davis squatting in front? (yes, I know I’m speculating on who these people are).

One point all shouldn’t miss. Kenya was not unknown back then. They were a central point in mining and transporting diamonds and tanzanite. Back then, the protestors would be all over the diamond exchange in England screaming ‘No Blood for Diamonds’.

[bvw]

Hawaii is interesting as a US State. It's almost a territory of Japan, in some social ways. Japan's tropical resort.

I think that perhaps, after WW II, there may have been the sense among some that Hawaii could be the political redeemer of the world. Just speculation. A place in search of a sense of purpose!

Did you know that Grover Cleveland won the national popular vote for President three times -- and that if he had decided to run for a third term there's a good chance he would have won?

President Cleveland was a supporter of Princess Victoria Kaʻiulani. He opposed those who wished to annex Hawaii, Cleveland was an anti-imperialist. But according to Wikipedia

The Republic of Hawaii put their former queen on trial. The prosecution asserted that Liliʻuokalani had committed "misprision of treason," because she allegedly knew that guns and bombs for the Wilcox attempted counter-revolution had been hidden in the flower bed of her personal residence at Washington Place. She was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment at hard labor and a fine of $10,000. But the imprisonment was served in a small bedroom at ʻIolani Palace where she had a full-time maid-servant, and her "hard labor" consisted of composing songs and sewing a protest quilt containing symbols of the monarchy.

[browardchad]

 Ok, I go along with that but what puzzles me is NOBODY knew who Barack Obama Sr. was before he came to Hawaii. In that picture he is receiving a BIG welcome (hence the Lei)

This was a well-publicized event in Hawaii. The people in the picture are welcoming him. Obama, Sr. was pictured in local papers upon his arrival and upon his graduation in 1962 (the same year he left for Harvard).

During his 1959 trip to the United States, the 29-year-old Mboya raised enough money for scholarships for 81 young Kenyans, including Obama Sr., with the help of the African-American Students Foundation. Records show that almost 8,000 individuals contributed. Early supporters included baseball star Jackie Robinson , who gave $4,000, and actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.
There was enormous excitement when the Britannia aircraft took off for New York  with the future Kenyan elite on board. After a few weeks of orientation, the students were dispatched to universities across the United States to study subjects that would help them govern Kenya after the departure of the British. Obama Sr. was interested in economics and was sent to Hawaii, where he met, and later married, a Kansas  native named Ann Dunham. Barack Jr. was born in August 1961.
Among the other students on the first airlift was Philip Ochieng, who went on to become a prominent Kenyan journalist. In a 2004 article for the Nation, Kenya's leading newspaper, Ochieng remembered Obama Sr. as "charming, generous and extraordinarily clever," but also "imperious, cruel and given to boasting about his brain and his wealth." Obama Jr. paints a similar portrait in his best-selling 1995 autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," describing his father as exceptionally gifted but also "wild," "boastful" and "stubborn."

>>>snip<<<

According to a letter on file in the Mboya papers at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, "most" of Obama Sr.'s early expenses in the United States were covered by an international literacy expert named Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, who had traveled widely in Kenya. Kirk wrote to Mboya in May 1962 to request additional funds to "sponsor Barack Obama  for graduate study, preferably at Harvard." She said she would "like to do more" to assist the young man but had two stepchildren ready for college. 

Source: Obama Overstates Kennedys' Role in Helping His Father, Washington Post, March 30, 2008