Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Barack Obama Sr. to Tom Mboya, May 29, 1962
HOOVER INSTITUTION, STANFORD UNIVERSITY
January 25, 2010 news
Hoover Archives Unveils Correspondence Between Kenyan Independence Leader and American Philanthropist Responsible for Helping Educate Hundreds of Kenyans Including Barack Obama Sr.
Kenyan university students arriving at Idlewild Airport, New York, 1959 (William X. Scheinman Papers, Box 49:10, Hoover Institution Archives).The Hoover Institution Library and Archives recently announced the opening of the papers of William X. Scheinman (1927–1999), a longtime friend of and correspondent with Kenyan independence leader Tom Mboya. The highlight of the collection is the rich correspondence between Scheinman and Mboya, which contains hundreds of letters, beginning in 1957 and ending only with Mboya’s untimely death from an assassin’s bullet in 1969. Mboya served in the first cabinet of Kenya after it achieved independence from Great Britain in 1963.
Scheinman, an American businessman and investment adviser, first met Mboya in 1956. In subsequent meetings the two men, realizing that the future development of an independent Kenya required an educated populace, developed a program to bring Kenyan students to the United States to pursue their university studies. Founded in 1959, the African American Students Foundation, with Scheinman as its president, helped make it possible for funding the education of hundreds of Kenyan students to study in the United States; among them was President Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr.
[25] Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Jackie Robinson appeal letter, Aug. 24, 1959, box 3, Robinson Papers; Smith, “East African Airlifts of 1959, 1960, and 1961,” 25–43. Barack Obama wrote that his father “had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States,” but a list of the students who landed in New York on September 9, 1959, does not contain the name of the elder Obama. Tom Shachtman, working in the African-American Students Foundation (aasf) papers for a book on the airlifts, has found that the elder Obama came in 1959 with support from the aasf but appears to have been routed a different way as he made his way to the University of Hawaii. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York, 1995), 9; “Eighty-One Kenya Airlift Students Arrived New York Sept. 9th 1959,” box 3, Robinson Papers; Tom Shachtman telephone interview by James H. Meriwether, Aug. 19, 2008, notes (confirmed via e-mail by Shachtman) (in James H. Meriwether’s possession).
WND - '62 letter from father ignores Obama, mom 'My wife is in Nairobi and I would really appreciate any help you may give her'
Posted: November 09, 2010
