Letters from Obama’s father found in Harlem

An archivist stumbled upon them at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in Harlem.

He was ambitious and impetuous, a 22-year-old clerk who could type 75 words a minute and translate English into Swahili. But he had no money for college. So he pounded away on a typewriter in Nairobi, pleading for financial aid from universities and foundations across the Atlantic.

His letters would help change the course of American history.

“It has been my long cherished ambition to further my studies in America,” he wrote in 1958. His name was Barack Hussein Obama, and his dispatches helped unleash a stream of scholarship money that carried him from Kenya to the United States. There, he fathered the child who would become the nation’s first black president, only to vanish from his son’s life a few years after his birth…

As president, Mr. Obama has spoken openly and repeatedly about the void his father left in his life. Barack Obama Sr. went home to Kenya in 1964, when Mr. Obama was 3 years old, and returned to visit his son only once, for a month, when Mr. Obama was 10. In an interview with The New York Times last month, the president said his father’s absence had left him struggling as a teenager to figure out “what it meant to be a man.”

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.