Inside the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, an archivist found a box full of letters written by President Barack Obama’s father. The letters written from 1958 to 1964 tell stories of Mr. Obama’s struggles as a young man striving to make a better life for himself and his future family.
This is just one of nearly two dozen.
In the letter above, a young Barack Obama Sr. wrote to relay his ambitions of an American education. He wrote several of these letters, which eventually helped him receive scholarships that would allow him to leave Kenya and travel to the United States for school.
Back in 2013, when the letters were first discovered, the Schomburg Center invited the President to come and take a look at his father’s written words. Three years later, the center is still waiting for his answer. A senior White House official is reported in the New York Times saying that President Obama is interested in seeing the letters after his time in office and was not “made aware of the collection of writing until recently.”
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center, hopes to personally help the President when he is ready to read the letters. “The papers are rich; they tell a fascinating, traditional, self-made man’s story…There’s a reason to bear witness to the personal legacy that is here,” Muhammad said.
The President has spoken candidly about how the absence of his father shaped his early years and future decisions, particularly in his memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964, when the future President was just three years old only to return when he was 10 years old for just a month. He later died in a car crash.
