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The African American Students Foundation was an organization founded to raise funding to bring students to the United States for schooling. It operated from 1959 until 1963.

Background
The African American Students Foundation (AASF) was founded in 1959. In April 1959, prior to Kenyan independence, trade unionist Tom Mboya visited the U.S. at the invitation of the American Committee on Africa; Mboya talked on many college campuses and was given scholarships from many colleges. The AASF was set up to raise money and bring students from East Africa to the U.S. to use these scholarships. Although based in New York, AASF had a national focus. Baseball star Jackie Robinson and performers Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier led the initial fundraising. AASF raised an initial $39,000 and as a result organized the first of several "airlifts" of East African students, mostly from Kenya, to the U.S. in September 1959. In 1960 the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation gave $100,000 to AASF. As a result in 1960 three planes were chartered bringing 222 students from east and central Africa.

These students would be brought to the United States as a result of the Kennedy Airlift. It was arranged by Tom Mboya and Senator John F. Kennedy.These students would be settled in various universities in the United States and Canada.The airlifts were opposed by Britain. Kenya was Britain's colony and Britain did not want America meddling with any of its colonies. British officials spread propaganda amongst top Kenyan students that American education was inferior to British education.

Origin
AASF was founded by Tom Mboya, (age 28) labor leader and rising political star in Kenya’s political movement, businessman William X. Scheinman who served on the board, Frank Montero who served as President of the AASFand Ted Kheel who was  also a board member of AASF. Cora Weiss was Executive Director and student adviser. AASF sponsoring organizations included the American Committee on Africa and the Phelps Stokes Fund.

Tom Mboya, expunged on a personal quest to secure  dozens of scholarships from American and Canadian institutions. He also attracted a number of key supporters, including former baseball star Jackie Robinson (insert Link)  singer Harry Belafonte, (Insert Link) and actor Sidney Poitier (insert Link). Scheinman and Montero, unable to decide which of three African-American “entertainers”—singer Harry Belafonte, baseball player Jackie Robinson, or actor Sidney Poitier—should be asked to sign a letter requesting donations for the airlift, opted to ask all three. They agreed to sign together; this was a triumph, Scheinman wrote Mboya, because “they rarely, if ever, allow their names to be used for fundraising purposes.” The letter brought in enough money to charter the plane. Robinson, retired from baseball, also agreed to underwrite the expenses of several Kenyans, and to have the AASF administer those scholarships. Martin Luther King Jr. and groups in New York City, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Berkeley pledged to provide room and board for groups of students during their stays in the United States.Along with several others, they created the African American Students Foundation (AASF), which raised funds for travel and living expenses. Their fundraising supplemented money raised by African students' families and tribal groups.

At the end of the tour Mboya had promises for over 40 scholarships. Shortly after Mboya returned to Kenya the African American Students Foundation (AASF) was established to raise money to bring the students to the United States. The AASF raised an initial $39,000 and the first 81 students arrived in September 1959.

At the time, he was on a speaking tour of North America seeking scholarships for Kenyan and other East African students whose opportunities for higher education under colonial rule were severely limited. Senator Kennedy expressed interest in Mboya's initiative.

As a result of Senator Kennedy’s financial pledge, in September 1960, three planeloads of students flew to the US. Okatcha, Gethoi, Ms Kiilu and Ms Chege boarded the last flight to depart Nairobi. On board were students from Uganda, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (present day Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.)  The students stayed at the New Yorker Hotel in New York city during their orientation, which included tours and welcome parties. They were awed by television, hot dogs and white waiters in restaurants.

As the 1960-61 academic year drew closer, the situation was growing desperate. Appeals to the Department of State for help with transportation were rebuffed. Jackie Robinson (Link) approached Vice President Nixon on behalf of AASF and Nixon agreed to contact the State Department—again to no avail.

1960 Presidential Election
With the future of the project in jeopardy, Tom Mboya returned to the United States. On July 26, he flew to Cape Cod for a meeting with Senator Kennedy. Accompanying Mboya were his brother Alphonse (who was studying at Antioch College), William Scheinman, and Frank Montero, president of AASF.

Scheinman provided a thorough briefing about the situation of the East African students and asked the senator if he would take up their cause with the State Department. Kennedy doubted that he would have any more success on this front than Nixon. He discussed the options for private funding and promised a donation of $5,000 from the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation as long as the AASF promised not to publicize his involvement.

Senator Kennedy followed up with a call to his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, executive director of the Kennedy Foundation, asking him to find out if other private foundations would make contributions. Shriver's contacts over the next few days yielded no additional support.

JFK then recommended that the Kennedy Foundation contribute the entire amount needed for the 1960 airlift. In addition to this initial $100,000 contribution, the foundation would pledge up to $100,000 more to assist students with basic living expenses in the United States.

In that summer’s fiercely fought campaign for president of the United States, both

candidates—John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon—sought the black vote, and both worried about alienating white southern voters. The “solid South” no longer seemed so solidly Democratic, in no small measure due to the pressures the civil rights movement put on the long-standing structure of white rule in the region. In this extraordinarily close contest, some of Kennedy’s advisers feared that explicit support for civil rights could cost them the election, while Nixon’s strategists hoped they might win as many as six southern states. The campaigns needed ways to appeal to black voters without alienating the increasingly unsolid South.

Election Controversy
The AASF was informed about this decision on August 10 and reminded again not to publicize the donation. Word did leak out, however, and the Nixon campaign learned that the Kennedy Foundation was financing the airlift. A Nixon campaign staff member then went back to the State Department, which promptly reversed its previous decisions and offered to provide $100,000 for the project. The AASF board ultimately accepted the Kennedy Foundation's support and urged the State Department to make its funding available to other needy African students.

When the AASF appealed to the U.S. State Department for help, officials consistently rejected their pleas. Yet when the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation pledged the funds needed to get the students to the United States, Senator Hugh Scott, a Pennsylvania Republican, strode onto the Senate floor to accuse “the long arm” of the Kennedy family of attempting to “take over the function of the Government in advance of an election.”

Facing many attacks from political opponents, JFK fought back by detailing the sequence of events that led to pledging financial support for the African airlift. He concluded his rebuttal of Senator Scott with an assertion that "the Kennedy Foundation went into this quite reluctantly... It was not a matter in which we sought to be involved. Nevertheless, Mr. Mboya came to see us and asked for help, when none of the other foundations could give it, when the Federal Government had turned it down quite precisely. We felt something ought to be done. To waste 250 scholarships in this country, to waste $200,000 these people had raised, to disappoint 250 students who hoped to come to this country, it certainly seemed to me, would be most unfortunate, and so we went ahead."

Other senators, from both sides of the aisle, came out in support of Kennedy. Vice President Nixon also appeared to distance himself from Scott's accusations. Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, subsequently attacked the State Department's apparent surrender to partisan politics and sent a letter to Secretary of State Christian Herter demanding answers to a series of questions regarding his department's involvement in the affair.

The controversy received a good deal of attention in the press over the next few weeks. Commentary in African American newspapers was especially critical. A writer in The Pittsburgh Courier editorialized: "One of Nixon's henchmen showed State the deep point that the Kennedy gift would be worth a lot of Negro votes, which it would be best for Nixon to have in a tight contest, so all of a sudden State recalled that it had been for the project from the beginning!"

JFK's slim margin of victory in the 1960 presidential election could not be credited to any single group of supporters. But winning 68 percent of the African American vote was significant, amounting to a 7 percent increase compared with the previous election.

Kennedy's decision to support the effort became an issue in the election and possibly a factor in his narrow victory.

Impact
The airlifts ended in 1963. Since then, thousands of schools and universities have been established in East Africa. Owino Okong’o, an airlift student who went on to become a professor of medical physiology, later described the airlift as having “transformed the elite culture of Kenyans from the British model to the American model in which performance is more important than where you went to school.”

Most of the graduates from American and Canadian colleges and universities went back to help build the newly independent Kenya. Some were employed even before they graduated. They were mainly employed in the public administration sector as district and provincial officers. While men found it easy to get jobs they qualified for, women faced a tougher challenge. Many were offered secretarial duties despite being better qualified than most male officers in the same departments.

Beneficiaries
The African Airlift brought over 770 students from 10 East African Countries, 85 percent from Kenya. Some of the notable beneficiaries are: Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, who attended Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas; Kenya’s best-known columnist, Philip Ochieng, who received his BA from Roosevelt University in Chicago; and Perez Olindo, the first African head of Kenya’s national parks, who studied at Central Missouri State. President Obama’s father was not technically part of the airlift, since he had private funding for his travel to the University of Hawaii, but he and other African students who went to the United States at that time were regarded as members of the “airlift generation.” See pages of other recipients:


 * Pamela Odede Mboya
 * Wangari Maathai
 * Prof Reuben Olembo
 * Perez Olindo
 * Phillip Ochieng
 * Owino Okongo