JFK Really Did Bring Obama's Dad to America

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From MyDD

JFK Really Did Bring Obama's Dad to America

by Paul Hogarth, Tue Mar 06, 2007 at 12:37:14 PM EST

I wrote this for today's Beyond Chron, San Francisco's Alternative Online Daily.

At his March 4th speech in Alabama to commemorate the Anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, Barack Obama confronted the allegation that he is "not black" by connecting his family history to the civil rights movement. Some of what he said in the speech was technically untrue, but Obama was not trying to mislead the audience. While he implied that the 1965 Selma March - which occurred when he was four years old - caused his parents to first meet, Obama later explained that he meant to say "the civil rights movement as a whole."

But a more puzzling part of the speech was Obama's assertion that President John F. Kennedy - egged on by the civil rights movement - helped pay for his father's trip to America through a scholarship. Barack Obama Senior emigrated from Kenya in 1959 and Kennedy was not President until 1961 - but it was JFK the presidential candidate who helped pay for the airfare, as a means of shoring up his credentials in the black community. Now that black voters have rallied behind Obama's candidacy, the media should put to rest the ridiculous notion that the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother is somehow "not black" enough to become the first black President.



Of all the attacks being hurled against Obama - that his last name sounds like Osama, that his middle name is Hussein, that he went to school in Indonesia, and that he (gasp!) smokes cigarettes - the allegation that he is "not black" is probably the most politically damaging. Obama's ancestors may not have been brought on slave ships from West Africa in the 1500's, but his family has suffered the same type of racism that all black people have encountered in their lives.

"My Grandfather was a cook to the British in Kenya," he said in his March 4th speech. "Grew up in a small village and all his life, that's all he was - a cook and a house boy. And that's what they called him, even when he was 60 years old. They called him a house boy. They wouldn't call him by his last name. Sound familiar?"

Obama then explained that the civil rights movement embarrassed America's leaders, because the fight against Jim Crow segregation was hurting our image abroad. "So the Kennedy's decided we're going to do an air lift," he said. "We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is." One of those men, said Obama, was his father - who came from Kenya on a scholarship and enrolled at the University of Hawaii.

But the Kennedy's weren't in the White House at the time - Obama's father came to America in 1959, two years before Kennedy became President. But the story is true - although it technically happened when Senator John F. Kennedy was still running for President.

In 1958, Tom Mboya, a cabinet minister in Kenya and a prominent trade unionist, launched a program called "Education Overseas" that organized a series of airlifts for Kenyan students who were seeking to get educated in the United States. One of the students who had received a scholarship was Barack Obama's father.

But according to a 1960 article in Time Magazine, Mboya suddenly found himself stranded. "Education Overseas" needed $100,000 to airlift 250 students from Kenya, but the State Department refused to help because Kenya was a British colony. So Mboya actively lobbied presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy to make it happen. For the same reason that he later got Martin Luther King out of jail, Kennedy helped secure the necessary funding from his father to get the students to America.

It may have been misleading for Obama to say that his parents were brought together by the 1965 Selma March - or slightly inaccurate to say that President Kennedy brought his Dad to America. But he was right. Barack Obama is a product of the civil rights movement, and it should lay to rest the continuing nonsense that he is "not black."

-snip-
But Obama confronted that part of his family history head-on in his March 4th speech. "When my father came over to this country," he said, "he met this woman whose great great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they decided that we know that the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants."

When Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, he said that one day the "sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners" would be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood. Just because Obama's white ancestors owned slaves doesn't mean that he isn't black. What it means is that his mother was willing to marry a black man - despite her own family history.

And that's what Dr. King's dream was all about.

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http://www.mydd.com/story/2007/3/6/123714/8483

OT: I helped a professor do research on this topic when I was in college. She turned it into a book.

Cold War Civil Rights:
Race and the Image of American Democracy
Mary L. Dudziak

In 1958, an African-American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of an embarrassed John Foster Dulles. Soon after the United States' segregated military defeated a racist regime in World War II, American racism was a major concern of U.S. allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Each lynching harmed foreign relations, and "the Negro problem" became a central issue in every administration from Truman to Johnson.

In what may be the best analysis of how international relations affected any domestic issue, Mary Dudziak interprets postwar civil rights as a Cold War feature. She argues that the Cold War helped facilitate key social reforms, including desegregation. Civil rights activists gained tremendous advantage as the government sought to polish its international image. But improving the nation's reputation did not always require real change. This focus on image rather than substance--combined with constraints on McCarthy-era political activism and the triumph of law-and-order rhetoric--limited the nature and extent of progress.

Archival information, much of it newly available, supports Dudziak's argument that civil rights was Cold War policy. But the story is also one of people: an African-American veteran of World War II lynched in Georgia; an attorney general flooded by civil rights petitions from abroad; the teenagers who desegregated Little Rock's Central High; African diplomats denied restaurant service; black artists living in Europe and supporting the civil rights movement from overseas; conservative politicians viewing desegregation as a communist plot; and civil rights leaders who saw their struggle eclipsed by Vietnam.

Never before has any scholar so directly connected civil rights and the Cold War. Contributing mightily to our understanding of both, Dudziak advances--in clear and lively prose--a new wave of scholarship that corrects isolationist tendencies in American history by applying an international perspective to domestic affairs.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6924.html

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