For more than a decade before arriving in Nairobi in 1957, Betty Mooney had worked closely with world-renowned literacy advocate Frank Laubach, whose “each one teach one” method had helped millions across the globe learn to read. Mooney had spent eight years in India before moving to Baltimore to oversee the training of additional literacy teachers at the Laubach-sponsored Koinonia Foundation. In Nairobi, she quickly won the active support of Tom Mboya, who introduced her to a large crowd at one of his weekly political rallies. Then, in the summer of 1958, she and Helen Roberts, another American literacy teacher, began preparing a series of elementary instructional readers in Swahili, Luo, and Kamba.
In September 1958, Mooney hired the young Barack Obama as her secretary and clerk and paid him the handsome sum of $100 monthly. Before long Obama was taking a lead role in the writing of two Luo readers Mooney’s team was producing. Laubach himself visited Nairobi in November 1958; a photo published in the monthly newsletter Mooney had just launched pictured her, Laubach, and “Mr. B. O’Bama.”
This was a great opportunity for Obama to perfect his own English literacy, and Mooney quickly became impressed by his abilities. “Barack is a whiz and types so fast that I have a hard time keeping ahead of him,” she wrote Laubach. “I think I better bring him along and let him be your secretary in the USA.” Indeed, getting to the U.S. was Obama’s express goal, and by early 1959, even without a diploma from a secondary school and with only some UK correspondence courses on his record, he wrote to several dozen U.S. colleges and universities seeking undergraduate admission for fall 1959. He had read about one of them in the Saturday Evening Post, a weekly U.S. pictorial magazine, in Mooney’s office. The University of Hawaii was described as being a “Colorful Campus of the Islands.” The article praised the “multi-racial make-up” of the university’s student body and emphasized that Hawaii was “one of the few spots on earth where there is little racial prejudice.”
In early March, Barack Obama received notice of his acceptance from the University of Hawaii, plus a certificate to show U.S. consular officials in order to obtain a student entry visa. Classes would begin on September 21. Betty Mooney was overjoyed, and quickly wrote Frank Laubach to request his help. Barack “is extremely intelligent and his English is excellent, so I have no doubt that he will do well.” Mooney wanted to pay both Obama’s tuition and half of his estimated $800 annual room and board, but she wanted Kenyan officials—and apparently Barack too—to view these funds as a scholarship rather than a personal gift, and Laubach agreed to help. “I remember him very well, and agree that he is unusually smart. I have no doubt that he will do a very good job.” Enclosed with his reply to Mooney was a copy of a letter addressed to the University of Hawaii, which stated that the Laubach Literacy and Mission Fund had granted Obama $400 toward his first year of studies.
Barack worked to complete the Luo primers and also advertised in Kenya’s Luo language newspaper, Ramogi, for contributions toward his upcoming expenses in Hawaii. Gordon Hagberg, an American whose family had employed Hussein Onyango Obama while they resided in Nairobi, asked his employer, the African-American Institute (AAI), to assist with Obama’s airfare, explaining that Obama “is what could be called a self-made man.” In late July the U.S. consul general formally issued Barack’s nonimmigrant student visa, and AAI booked and paid for his flights. Obama wrote to Frank Laubach, thanking him “for all that you have done for me to make my ways for further studies possible,” including the essential $400 that actually came from Betty Mooney. Barack hoped to see Laubach during the three weeks that Betty had arranged for him to stay at Koinonia, outside Baltimore, before going to Hawaii. On Sunday morning, August 9, 1959, Barack Hussein Obama arrived on a British Overseas Airways Corporation Comet 4 at New York’s Idlewild Airport and was granted entry to the United States.2
Even before Obama registered for his fall semester courses on September 21, one of Honolulu’s two daily newspapers, the Star-Bulletin, ran a photo of the twenty-five-year-old freshman in an article entitled “Young Men From Kenya, Jordan and Iran Here to Study at U.H.” Obama had secured a room at the Atherton YMCA, just across University Avenue from the campus, but he told the newspaper he was already surprised by the high cost of living. He enrolled in a roster of unsurprising freshman courses—English Composition, World Civilization, Introduction to Government, Business Calculations—and as the first and only African student on campus, and perhaps the only student always wearing dark slacks and dress shirts rather than casual Hawaiian clothing, Obama was immediately a standout presence at UH.
Obama frequented a campus snack bar with lower prices than the main cafeteria, and he soon fell in with a band of friends. Neil Abercrombie was a newly arrived graduate student in sociology from Buffalo, New York; undergraduates Andy “Pake” Zane and Ed Hasegawa had grown up on Oahu—Hawaii’s commercial hub—and the Big Island—Hawaii’s most rural isle—respectively. Abercrombie recalled Obama as “an unforgettable presence” with a “James Earl Jones voice. It was resonant, deep, booming and rich. It carried authority. He spoke in sentences and paragraphs.” Zane agreed. It was “a simply amazing voice,” sometimes “mesmerizing.”
But Abercrombie remembered Obama for more than just his voice. “He was always the center of attention because he had an opinion on everything and was quite willing to state it…. He had this tremendous smile, a pipe in his mouth, dark-rimmed glasses with bright eyes. He was incandescent.” Abercrombie told journalist Sally Jacobs how Obama “talked about ambition, his ambition for independence in Africa in general, and his own personal ambition to participate in the emerging nationalism in Kenya … it was the central focus of his life. He was full of such energy and purpose.” Obama’s brimming self-confidence was usually engaging rather than off-putting. “He thought he was the smartest guy in the room, I think, and with good reason … everybody else thought so too,” Abercrombie recalled. “I could easily call him the smartest person I’ve ever met.”3
Just two weeks into the fall semester, the UH student newspaper, Ka Leo O Hawaii, published a story on Obama, in which he said he chose UH over other acceptances from San Francisco State College and Morgan State College in Baltimore but again referred to Honolulu’s high cost of living. He spoke of his homeland’s desire for independence from Britain, saying, “Kenyans are tired of exploitation.” Several weeks later, Ka Leo O Hawaii ran a photograph on its front page of Obama talking with university president Laurence H. Snyder about UH’s newly proposed trans-Pacific East-West Center. In late November, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin printed its second story on Obama, under the headline “Isle Inter-Racial Attitude Impresses Kenya Student.” This time Obama was quoted as saying he was surprised that “no one seems to be conscious of color” in Hawaii, adding that “people are very nice around here, very friendly.” He hoped to finish his degree in three years and hoped to take up some type of government work when he returned to Kenya.
Sometime in November, Betty Mooney, returning to the U.S. via Asia and the Pacific, stopped in Hawaii for several days and was “much impressed” with how well Obama was doing. So was Frank Laubach when he passed through Honolulu several weeks later. In early December Obama sought permission from U.S. immigration officials to work part-time, citing the “high cost of meals,” and he was approved for up to twenty-five hours weekly. Once the 1960 spring semester began, Obama participated in a model United Nations exercise that debated race, and in early June, he submitted a strongly worded letter to the editor criticizing a Star-Bulletin editorial that had denounced “Terror in the Congo.” “Speaking as one who has been in the Congo,” he wrote, Africa needed to throw off “the yoke of colonialism” as “the time for exploitation, special prerogatives and privileges is over.”
By midsummer, Obama had moved first to an apartment on Tenth Avenue east of the university, then to one on Eleventh Avenue, and finally westward to a neighborhood just north of the Punahou School. In late July 1960, he submitted a routine request to extend his student visa, noting that he was earning $5 a day as a dishwasher