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.”
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“[B]y going to the College [William and Mary] I shall get a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable to me; and I suppose I can pursue my Studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here, and likewise learn something of the Mathematics.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“In the United States, it is now possible for a person eighteen years of age, female as well as male, to graduate from high school, college, or university without ever having cared for, or even held, a baby; without ever having comforted or assisted another human being who really needed help. . . . No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations, and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.”
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“It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates.
And Mabbie was all of seven.
And Mabbie was cut from a chocolate bar.
And Mabbie thought life was heaven.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)