King and Mboya
Today, two talks. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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U. C. Berkeley. Academic year: nineteen fifty six and seven. I went to two special lectures. One by Martin Luther King Jr. One by Tom Mboya – each roughly my age. Each about to change human history. And neither would reach the age of forty.
Tom Mboya and Martin Luther King Jr.
You might be unfamiliar with Mboya. So: a word about him. His African country, Kenya, was a British colony. And Kenyans chafed at British rule. Now, just twenty-three years old, Mboya was already a deft political figure, founder of the Kenya Local Government Workers’ Union. And, about when I heard him speak, he was elected to Kenya’s Legislative Council. Trade unions were his main base in his work toward Kenyan independence.
I won’t try to describe his tortuous path to creating – then sustaining – Kenyan independence. But he worked tirelessly. Then, he was assassinated a scant fifteen months after King had also been murdered. Kenya then honored him as having been a key architect of its independence.
No need to recount King’s history here. It’s woven into the very fabric of our American story. But now: I’d heard each as they set out on their journeys toward human freedom. And each had touched me deeply. I remember pressing to the front to shake Mboya’s hand. And I now regret that I didn’t join the crowd-crush surrounding King.
So did they ever cross paths? They did indeed. When Mboya visited America, King greeted him at the Atlanta Airport. Then off to speak at an Africa Freedom Dinner there.
Mboya pursued another goal here. He’d helped to organize an airlift of eighty-one Kenyan students to American universities. Then he continued the work. The next year – off to Hyannis Port to ask then-Senator John F. Kennedy for help. Kennedy contributed a hundred thousand dollars to support it. So it was now the Kennedy Airlift. And King was one of its supporters. (By the way, Barack Obama’s father was one student in that initial airlift.)
John F. Kennedy and Tom Mboya
So: I had heard two talks – each cutting to my core. Two young men – Mboya just two days older than me. King just over a year. King telling us – telling me – that if his mission was not to free Whites as well as Blacks from their entanglement in a corrupt system, then he’d fail.
And Mboya ... for years thereafter, I’d looked to possible teaching at Kenya’s Royal Technical College of East Africa. That never came to pass. But his intensity, his conviction, and his downright goodness were that contagious.
The decades have blinked by, since then. A free Kenya today. Here, we still beat back those remnants of racial inequity that’ve survived Martin Luther King Jr.. But, for me, so much dramatic change remains encapsulated in two remarkable talks.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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Some very complete Wikipedia Sources
The Kennedy Airlift - Wikipedia
All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
This Episode first aired October 6, 2026.