College and Graduate School
In 1959, Obama received a scholarship in economics through a program organized by the nationalist leader Tom Mboya. The program offered education in the West to outstanding Kenyan students. Initial financial supporters of the program included Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Jackie Robinson, and Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, a literacy advocate who provided most of the financial support for Obama's early years in the United States. Funds provided the next year by John F. Kennedy's family paid off old debts of the project and subsidized student stipends, indirectly benefiting Obama and other members of the 1959 group of scholarship holders. When Obama left for America, he left behind his young wife, Kezia, and their baby son, Malik. Kezia was also pregnant, and their daughter, Auma, was born while her father was in Hawaii.
Read more about this topic: Barack Obama, Sr.
Famous quotes containing the words graduate school, college, graduate and/or school:
“1946: I go to graduate school at Tulane in order to get distance from a “possessive” mother. I see a lot of a red-haired girl named Maude-Ellen. My mother asks one day: “Does Maude-Ellen have warts? Every girl I’ve known named Maude-Ellen has had warts.” Right: Maude-Ellen had warts.”
—Bill Bouke (20th century)
“We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me
why American men think that success is everything
when they know that eighty percent of them are not
going to succeed more than to just keep going and why
if they are not why do they not keep on being
interested in the things that interested them when
they were college men and why American men different
from English men do not get more interesting as they
get older.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“1946: I go to graduate school at Tulane in order to get distance from a “possessive” mother. I see a lot of a red-haired girl named Maude-Ellen. My mother asks one day: “Does Maude-Ellen have warts? Every girl I’ve known named Maude-Ellen has had warts.” Right: Maude-Ellen had warts.”
—Bill Bouke (20th century)
“It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”
—Advertisement. Poster in a school near Irving Place, New York City (1983)