Now, before anyone wants to remind me that the Kenyan came to the US as part of the student airlift that landed at Idlewild airport in September 1959 (months AFTER the kenyan showed up in Hawaii btw) they need to read this:
Title: African American Students Foundation (Cora Weiss collection)
Description: The African American Students Foundation (AASF) was founded in 1959. In April 1959, prior to Kenyan independence, trade unionist Tom Mboya visited the U.S. at the invitation of the American Committee on Africa; Mboya talked on many college campuses and was given scholarships from many colleges. The AASF was set up to raise money and bring students from East Africa to the U.S. to use these scholarships. Although based in New York, AASF had a national focus. Baseball star Jackie Robinson and performers Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier led the initial fundraising. AASF raised an initial $39,000 and as a result organized the first of several “airlifts” of East African students, mostly from Kenya, to the U.S. in September 1959. In 1960 the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation gave $100,000 to AASF. As a result in 1960 three planes were chartered bringing 222 students from east and central Africa. The archive includes photographs. Cora Weiss was Executive Director and student adviser. Archive deposited by Cora Weiss.
Housed At: Michigan State University Library, Special Collections
Location: 100 Library, East Lansing, MI 48824, United States
Catalog/Finding Aid: view
Restrictions: The archive may not yet be processed. Contact in advance.
Phone: 517-353-8700
Related Website: http://www.lib.msu.edu/coll/main/spec_col/
http://africanactivist.msu.edu/organization.php?name=African+American+Students+Foundation
CONCLUSION: If you want to see the records, make an appointment with CORA WEISS, who has recently been forced to admit the kenyan was NOT connected to the airlift of students. And Tom Mboya had nothing to do with the kenyan’s arrival in the US...because in his own words, he left Kenya in 1955 WHEN MBOYA WAS STUDYING AT OXFORD.
The newspaper story posted in comment #988 was written by Shurei Kirozawa and reports on Obama’s arrival in 1959. Kirozawa reports that Obama came as a lone Kenyan with two other foreign students and not part of an airlift. The later airlift is irrelevant.
Kirozawa says of Obama:
“He clerked several years in the capital city of Nairobi to save enough for college education and picked the University of Hawaii when he read in an American magazine about its racial tolerance.”
This reporting of Obama’s three years in Nairobi immediately before leaving for Hawaii is consistent with and thus corroborates numerous other accounts including Kezia’s in the Daily Mail, a time when he fathered two children who are very much in evidence.
Obama’s letters to Mboya are consistent with and corroborate Mboya’s help to Obama in coming to America in 1959.
In the story posted in comment # 998, Obama does NOT say in his OWN WORDS that he left Kenya in 1955. The reporter wrote "seven years" without attribution and could have screwed up his background notes any number of ways.
Here is what reporter John Griffen actually wrote:
“Obama, who has been away from Kenya for seven years, said he plans to go home after finishing at Harvard...”
Obama did NOT say he had been away for seven years. This claim has not been corroborated by any other story, especially not by the Massena School story decades later after Barry became famous and was based on the memories of a school principal at a school Obama Sr. left in 1953.
I trust there will be no basis for future postings claiming that Obama said “in his own words” that he had been away from Kenya for seven years or that he said he left Kenya in 1955.