helped change the course of U.S. history. But for the president, they may also revive old pain. NY Times
The archivist stumbled across the file in a stack of boxes on the second floor of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The yellowing letters inside dated back more than half a century, chronicling the dreams and struggles of a young man in Kenya.
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.
In 2013, the Schomburg Center invited President Obama to see the newly discovered documents, which included nearly two dozen of his father’s letters, his transcripts from the University of Hawaii and Harvard University, and references from professors, advisers and supporters. Nearly three years later, as Mr. Obama celebrates his last Father’s Day in the White House, the center is still waiting for a response.
The trove of documents, described publicly here for the first time, renders 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.
Read more at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/nyregion/letters-by-and-about-barack-obamas-father.html?_r=4
OBAMA'S biological father is Frank
Marshal Davis. His mother married Obama senior to give BHO his name.
Obama's grandfather (mom's dad) paid Senior so he could go to
Harvard...she divorced him about 2 yrs later. Senior agreed to it if
they left his name off birth certificate. Google Obama & Davis &
compare their photos. Somewhere there is a birth certificate with
father's name blank & BHO knows all this.