Riverdale was key to historic 'African airlift'

By Kevin Deutsch

They would become the political, economic and business leaders who helped shape East Africa. But before they were nation builders, they were Riverdalians.

Between 1959 and 1963, hundreds of African students were airlifted to America as part of an effort to prepare them for leadership roles in their native lands upon the fall of British colonialism. A number of those students stayed with families in Riverdale, getting their first tastes of America on the bucolic streets of Fieldston.

Several of the airlift’s organizers lived in Riverdale, too, and many of the donations that funded the project came from local families.

The airlift project eventually helped about 800 students, including Barack Obama Sr., to study at American colleges and universities. In the process, it turned Riverdale into an unlikely focal point of the African liberation and civil rights movements.

Fifty years after the first plane full of students arrived, a new book chronicling the airlift has been published, offering insights into Riverdale’s role in the historic undertaking.

Airlift to America, by Tom Shachtman, tells in part how a group of Riverdalians started the African American Students Foundation and helped facilitate the education of a generation of African leaders, mostly in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

The foundation’s leaders — including former Riverdale residents Cora and Peter Weiss, Ted Kheel and Frank Montero — used Riverdale as a base of operations, making decisions at Mr. Kheel’s breakfast table that would reverberate across the world.

“Ted, Cora, Frank and Peter got involved and put the arm on a lot of Riverdalians to take in kids for the summer,” said Mr. Schachtman. “There were a great many Riverdalians involved. I think the whole group showed a lot of vision, and Riverdale was certainly at the forefront of their efforts.”

Spurred by concern over who would staff the leadership positions in his native Kenya once the British left, Kenyan labor and independence leader Tom Mboya conceived of flying some of Africa’s most intelligent and eager students to study in America. His partner in the historic undertaking, entrepeneur William Scheinman, enlisted the help of the Riverdale residents, all of whom were already involved in issues pertaining to Africa, civil rights and labor. The group opened up their homes to airlifted students, and got many of their neighbors to do the same.

“Half of Fieldston took someone in,” said Cora Weiss, who served as executive director of the African-American Students’ Foundation. “There was tremendous support in the community.”

The airlift was seen as many things: a boon to the idea of American opportunity and education during the Cold War; a rejection of colonialism; a victory for African Americans in the struggle for equal opportunity and against segregation; and a boost for then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, whose support for the airlifts — the book theorizes— may have helped put him over the top in the 1960 election thanks to the large African-American vote he received.

Funds from the airlift program also helped Barack Obama Sr. study at the University of Hawaii, where he would meet and marry fellow student Ann Dunham, President Barack Obama’s mother.

“It was a visionary project,” said Haron Andima, who came from Kenya in the airlift and is now a professor at Bronx Community College. “It made a very big difference in my life. It helped a lot of students who had nowhere else to go.”

Now viewed as an overwhelming success, the airlift was deeply controversial upon its launch.

“We were pilloried by the establishment,” said Mrs. Weiss. “They accused us of diluting education standards by bringing this group of kids to study at colleges across the country. And look at what happened: they became the nation builders of East Africa and achieved amazing things.”

Former Riverdalians harbor fond memories of the African students they welcomed into their homes.

“I really got to know and enjoy all of the airlift students who passed through our house,” said Bob Levey, a former Washington Post columnist whose family hosted distance-running champion Stephen Machooka in their Riverdale home.

Mr. Levey recalled how Machooka left the house one day in running clothes. Before going, the student casually explained that he was going for a run in Van Cortlandt Park. The next morning, Mr. Levey, a teenager at the time, opened the New York Times and learned that Machooka had raced in and won a major collegiate race at the park.

“He was so modest about it,” said Mr. Levey, whose experiences with airlift students encouraged his lifelong passion for African studies.

Zachary Muburi-Muita, the Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations and current Riverdale resident, said he’s proud of the role Riverdale played in helping to shape his country’s leaders.

“They kept Kenya a Western-leaning country,” the ambassador said of the airlift students. “They had a very big impact.”

Airlift veterans include Boniface Odero, who studied at Manhattan College while living with singer Carly Simon’s family in Riverdale; Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai; and Perez Olindo, the first African to head Kenya’s national parks.

“It’s a remarkable story,” Mrs. Weiss said. “And Riverdale was the hub of it all.”