JFK Really Did Bring Obama’s Dad to AmericaPaul Hogarthbyline‚ Mar. 06‚ 2007At his March 4th speech in Alabama to commemorate the Anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, Barack Obama confronted the allegation that he is “not black” by connecting his family history to the civil rights movement. Some of what he said in the speech was technically untrue, but Obama was not trying to mislead the audience. While he implied that the 1965 Selma March – which occurred when he was four years old – caused his parents to first meet, Obama later explained that he meant to say “the civil rights movement as a whole.” But a more puzzling part of the speech was Obama’s assertion that President John F. Kennedy – egged on by the civil rights movement – helped pay for his father’s trip to America through a scholarship. Barack Obama Senior emigrated from Kenya in 1959 and Kennedy was not President until 1961 – but it was JFK the presidential candidate who helped pay for the airfare, as a means of shoring up his credentials in the black community. Now that black voters have rallied behind Obama’s candidacy, the media should put to rest the ridiculous notion that the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother is somehow “not black” enough to become the first black President. |