Senator John F. Kennedy and the Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya speak to reporters after their meeting on July 26, 1960, in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Mboya had asked Kennedy to intercede with the State Department for funds to transport African students to the United States. Instead, Kennedy secured funds from a charity his family controlled. Photograph by Boston Herald American in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY.LINK
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.
[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).
THE FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS NETWORK
“Davis’s initial contacts with Hawaiiall had extremely strong ILWU ties. (Communist party member) Paul Robeson’s own Hawaiiacquaintances, which he passed on to Davis, insured that ‘when I came over, one of the first things that I got involved with―well, I met all the ILWU brass, (Communist Party executive committee member) Jack Hall and all of them, and I went―they had both of us over to various functions for them―Harriet Bouslog (Communist Party executive committee member) was also a good friend.’”
Taken at face value, this undated image shows a welcome at arrival in Hawaii. If it's 1959, what is Stanley Armour Dunham doing there?
Barack Obama (senior) was one of the featured speakers at a Mother’s Peace Rally in Ala Moana Park on Sunday May 13, 1962. ILWU leaders, including Jack Hall, joined the march and rally. Obama, an African student from Kenya studying economics at the University of Hawaii Afro-American Affairs Institute, told the crowd of 350, “Anything which relieves military spending will help us...Peace will release great resources...”
to be continued.
Shirley Graham Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah at Du Bois' casket