President Barack Obama has yet to read the letters his late father wrote while in Kenya seeking financial aid to study in the United States more than 50 years ago that were recently discovered by a researcher in New York City
“The papers are rich; they tell a fascinating, traditional, self-made man’s story. There’s a reason to bear witness to the personal legacy that is here,” noted Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
The letters from Barack Hussein Obama Sr. were discovered at the Schomburg among the papers of a foundation that provided scholarships to African students to study in the United States in the 1950s, the Times reports. He was living in Kenya at the time.
In 2013, the Harlem-based center invited President Obama to see the documents. They include nearly two dozen letters, transcripts from the University of Hawaii and Harvard University — along with references from professors, advisers and supporters.
A senior White House official told the New York Times that President Obama would most likely be interested in seeing the documents once leaving office.
Through these letters, Obama obtained the aid to study in the United States, where he would meet and marry Ann Dunham, a classmate from Wichita, Kansas, and father a son who would become the nation’s first African-American president.
The Times said that the documents were being “described publicly here for the first time,” saying that they rendered “a portrait of Barack Obama Sr. in his own words, sometimes in his own handwriting, as he describes his studies in the United States.
“But it also lays bare the beginnings of the fractured relationship between father and son.”
President Obama has discussed the void his father left in his life in the 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”
He said that he had visited Kenya when he was in his 20s, discovering some insight into his father.
However, “I still didn’t know the man my father had been,” the president wrote. “What had shaped his ambitions?”
Obama has previously told the Times that his not having his father in his life had left him struggling during his teenage years to figure out “what it meant to be a man.”
On Aug. 4, 1959, Obama Sr. boarded Flight 162 of British Overseas Airways Corp. and flew from Nairobi to Rome, records show. From there, he flew to Paris and then on to New York. A bus carried him to Los Angeles, where he caught a plane to Hawaii. A year later, he would meet Ms. Dunham, President Obama’s mother.
By then, Barack Obama Sr. had immersed himself in campus life. He had joined the debating club and the International Students Association and had been named editor of the International Students Newsletter, all the while marveling at the Hawaiian climate where, he wrote, “one would not know that it is winter.”
Barack Obama Sr. speaking at a peace rally in Ala Moana Park on the island of Oahu in Hawaii in May 1962, when he was a student.
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