On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, black leaders recognized the need for aid to African education. With the encouragement of American civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph, the Kenyan Tom Mboya organized the African-American Students Foundation (aasf), which awarded Kenyan students scholarships for study in the United States. This photograph shows the Kenyan students arriving at Idlewild Airport in New York in September 1959 as participants in the first “African Airlift.” Courtesy Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Jackie Robinson Papers.
The baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who backed efforts to bring African students to the United States, greets the first “African Airlift” arrivals in New York in September 1959. Robinson later urged presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon to support the 1960 airlifts, appealing to Nixon’s interest in courting black voters in the upcoming election. Courtesy Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Jackie Robinson Papers.
CAN'T SEE OBAMA SNR IN THE IMAGES? NOW HERE'S AN INTERESTING FOOTNOTE:
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).
The date given by the journalist Philip O.(not even going to attempt spelling his last name this late) of September 5th, 1959 was when the students left Kenya, so they probably arrived in NYC on September 6, 1959. They remained in NYC for a period of something like 2 weeks for orientation before heading to their respective schools.