http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2492333/posts?page=514#514
“As far as can be determined from incomplete records, Mrs. Roberts and Miss Mooney paid his fare to Hawaii and provided a partial scholarship.”
quote from Airlift to America excerpt
more on Afican Colonial Thread, post #373
#515 No matter how often I read that very comprehensive information you posted, the one thing I cannot find anywhere is a firm, verified date of WHEN Obama Senior left Kenya.
#516
Unlikely Events Recall Story of This President
By Mike Seccombe
We are all the products of a series of accidents, really. Every human is a personification of chaos theory. As a butterfly flaps its wings and sets in train a hurricane, an act of generosity 50 years ago in Kenya gives America a President.
To explain. There were two American teachers, Helen Roberts and Elizabeth Mooney living in Nairobi in the late 1960s, and they had taken a shine to a bright young student. They wanted to foster his brilliance and they paid for him to fly to America to continue his education. That Kenyan man was Barack Obama Sr.
He went to Hawaii to study, and met a young woman. They had a son, who now is the President. But for the goodness of Ms. Roberts and Ms. Mooney, you could argue, the President’s parents would never have met.
But chaos theory involves infinitely complex causation. You could also argue that without the vision of a Kenyan man named Tom Mboya, the President would not exist either. For he arranged for the University of Hawaii to offer the scholarship taken by the senior Mr. Obama. And Mr. Mboya’s activities, in turn, depended on the dedication of a group of activists in America.
Cora Weiss
Cora Weiss, a 53-year summer resident of the Vineyard, was one of those activists. One of the main ones, in fact. And now a book has been written, Airlift to America, chronicling their efforts in bringing hundreds of African students to America to study, between 1959 and 1963.
The book was written by Tom Shachtman, much of it from records which had been stored in Mrs. Weiss’s garage for nearly 50 years. She also did many of the interviews.
“I was the executive director [1959-1963] of something called the African-American Students’ Foundation, set up in 1959 to facilitate the travel and care and feeding of what became nearly 800 students from East Africa,” she recalled on Wednesday, sitting in the kitchen of her Aquinnah home.
The organization began because Mr. Mboya, a Kenyan labor activist, became concerned about how his country would function, once it gained independence from British colonial rule. To the considerable displeasure of the British, he determined the country should look to America to help educate its future leaders.
“Tom was a young man, ambitious, brilliant. It was the height of colonialism there and of the civil rights movement here,” Mrs. Weiss said. “And Tom did a tour of American colleges, setting up scholarships everywhere, including the University of Hawaii.
“Then he [Mboya] said, ‘But we need an organization to run this.’
“So a few of us gathered in New York and I became the executive director, and on the board of directors,” Mrs. Weiss said. With the initial support of two other families in Riverdale, in the Bronx, where Mrs. Weiss and her husband Peter lived, they started it.
“I worked with a man named Frank Montero and a woman raised in a Japanese concentration camp in California named Mary Hamanaka,” she recalled.
“We were very fortunate in that guy named Milton Gordon, who owned Lassie the dog — Lassie was quite a property in those days — and Milton had an office in the Seagram Building in New York and he let us have a room in his office. That’s where we worked from.”
The Weisses were no strangers to activism of this sort. Peter Weiss was on the board of the American Committee on Africa, “a very strong anti-colonial organization.”
“And I had spent my years at the University of Wisconsin at the international club setting up speaking dates for the few foreign students there, so they could have some pin money. I helped the few African students there organize a student union,” said Mrs. Weiss.
She also helped raise funds for Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaign. The Weisses were connected, as evidenced by the fact that Dr. King himself persuaded the Georgia university to take six students.
The cause of helping these African achievers to further their education was always closely connected to the civil rights movement. “This country in those days had hundreds of small white Christian colleges in the South, who would not take a ‘negro.’ But would take a foreign student. So I think these black African students helped open the door a bit.
“The first plane was paid for because Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson and Sidney Poitier, together signed a fundraising letter,” Mrs. Weiss said. “In that first group of 1959, 81 students came.”
“Barack Obama missed out on a seat on that first plane. Luckily the two teachers stepped in and raised money for him to come over on a parallel flight,” she said.
“He picked up the scholarship from the University of Hawaii. And while he was there, he needed money for books and tuition and clothes, some of which we sent him.
“So he wasn’t on the airlift, but he was a member of the airlift family.”
VineYard Gazette Online
#517 ““Barack Obama missed out on a seat on that first plane. Luckily the two teachers stepped in and raised money for him to come over on a parallel flight,” she said.”
There it is again...that NEED to show Obama Senior’s arrival coincided with the first airlift, when in fact, he had already been in Hawaii months before it landed:
THE OBAMA FILE
“When Senior arrived in Hawaii in June 1959, Kenya’s future president, Jomo Kenyatta was in jail in Kenya,” as reported by a story done in Hawaiian paper after he arrived:
“The Washington Post reported that when Barack Obama, Sr. first arrived in Hawaii he was interviewed by the Hawaiian Press, the reporter Hirozawa relays Obama’s comments, “he would study business administration and wanted to return to Kenya to help with its transition from tribal customs to a modern economy.”
He was concerned, he said, about his generation’s disorientation as Kenyans rejected old ways yet struggled with “westernization,” the date of the story was June, 1959.
THE FIRST AFRICAN AIRLIFT ARRIVALS IN SEPTEMBER 1959
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.
#520 Here’s some info to chew on a bit. Cora Weiss, who must be ancient by now, is called here the “Red Queen of Peace”.
http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=20730
How about that—another communist connection! What a surprise!
Also here is video interview with her about the African Air Lift. I haven’t got time to watch it but it might be interesting.
http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4864
#522 In 1983, Weiss was a delegate to an IPS sponsored US-USSR confab for disarmament. Delegates included members of the Riverside Church, which is allied with the National Council of Churches (NCC) and World Council of Churches (WCC).
The anti-Americanism of Riverside, the NCC and the WCC is well known. All three organizations were advocates for the North Vietnamese. All three organizations were advocates for Marxists revolutions in Africa. (Indeed, the WCC contributed to Robert Mugabe’s Marxist army.) All three organizations were advocates for the Marxist revolutions in Central America in the 1980’s. All three protested the deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe. All three condemned the Gulf War. All three condemned US military action against the Taliban.
Weiss is definitely plugged in to the good old comrade’s network. For example, the IPS Board of Directors contains such liberal luminaries as Harry Belafonte, Time magazine journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, and editor of The Nation magazine Katrina vanden Heuvel (who was formerly the director of the IPS’s Transnational Institute).
Each of these people are well known for their unrepentant leftwing commitments. Ehrenreich is the Vice–Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. vanden Heuvel, is a staunch apologist for socialism. Belafonte was a founding member of the Hollywood chapter of SANE, a precursor of PAN. In December 2000, he received an honorary degree from Cuba’s Higher Arts Institute. Radio Havana reported that Belafonte said Cuba has always been an artistic haven for people who struggle for the liberation of humanity...
And THIS is the woman we are expected to rely upon to tell us when Obama Senior arrived in the US?
#524 “In the 1980s, Weiss was the director of the Disarmament Program at New York’s Riverside Church. This program was a leader in supporting the Soviet-inspired nuclear freeze movement. As Riverside’s director, Weiss was one of the organizers of a 1982 disarmament rally — the largest ever held — in New York City. The event was organized by a coalition of Communist and radical groups.”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderprofile.asp?fndid=5348&category=79
#526 Cora Weiss From KeyWiki
Cora WeissCora Weiss is the wife of New York Lawyer, Peter Weiss, founder of the Institute for Policy Studies and daughter of Samuel Rubin, a funder of many left-wing organizations. Weiss was a director of the Samuel Rubin Foundation from its inception. She was also instrumental in the funding decision to create the Institute for Policy Studies. She gained notoriety as a leader of the Vietnam War era anti-American coalitions who traveled to Paris and Hanoi for repeated meetings with communist leaders.
Contents [hide] 1 Hard Times Conference 2 Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama 3 Affiliations 4 References
Hard Times Conference In 1976 Cora Weiss for Friendshipment and Women Strike for Peace attended the Weather Underground and Prairie Fire Organizing Committee organized Hard Times Conference Jan 30 - Feb 1 at the University of Chicago.[1]
Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama In early 2008 Cora Weiss, an U.N. Representative, International Peace Bureau signed a petition circulated by Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama[2].
In the coming elections, it is important to remember that war and peace are as much \”women\’s issues\” as are health, the environment, and the achievement of educational and occupational equality. Because we believe that all of these concerns are not only fundamental but closely intertwined, this Tuesday we will be casting our vote for Senator Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Affiliations
Cora Weiss, formerly active with the Emma Lazarus Clubs and Women Strike for Peace, played a leadership role in the CPUSA-controlled anti-Vietnam coalitions New Mobilization Committee, People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice which collaborated closely with the WPC. She received considerable media attention for her numerous meetings with Vietnamese Communist officials in Paris and Hanoi and for her controversial role in the Committee of Liaison and in a project to provide material aid to Hanoi, the Friendshipment/Bach Mai Hospital Fund.
She and her husband, Peter Weiss, president of the IPS board, are officers of the Samuel Rubin Foundation, which provides the major financial support to IPSITNI, and of the Fund for Tomorrow, a smaller foundation which is apparently wholly funded by the Rubin foundation, which supports many activist groups spun-off by IPS including WISE.[3]
#537 Today I have spent more time than I should looking into Frank Montero who is mentioned in the Cora Weiss article above. I’ve found quite a lot but in my searching I came across this:
http://hooverinstitutionla.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html
This article contains a letter from 0 Sr. dated May 29, 1962 to Tom Mboya. It is part of a collection of papers from a William X. Scheinman who was the president of the African-American Students’ Foundation(the air-lift sponsors) and also became a close friend of Mboya. The letter describes how 0’s education in America has progressed. He says he has completed his Bachelor’s Degree and his Master’s Degree and has obtained the highest honors awarded in U.S. universities. This letter’s date is less than 1 year after 0 Jr.’s birth and even before the date we have used for his departure from Hawaii—June 1962. How in the world is this possible? At this point in time he hasn’t even been in U.S. for 3 full school years.
