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Muhammad Kenyatta | |
|---|---|
| Born | Donald Brooks Jackson (1944-03-03)March 3, 1944 Chester, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | January 3, 1992(1992-01-03) (aged 47) Buffalo, New York, U.S. |
| Education | |
| Occupations |
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| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse | Mary Kenyatta |
| Children | 3 |
| Relatives | Malcolm Kenyatta (grandson) |
Muhammad I. Kenyatta (bornDonald Brooks Jackson; March 3, 1944 – January 3, 1992), was an Americanprofessor,civil rights leader, and international human rights advocate.
In the 1960s, he worked for theMississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the denial of voting rights to African Americans inMississippi. In 1969 he was elected national vice-president of the Black Economic Development Conference and President of the Greater Philadelphia branch of the organization which was focused on ending poverty in communities of color which they outlined in a revolutionary document referred to as the 'Black Manifesto'.[1] In 1975, Kenyatta had an unsuccessful run for Democratic nomination for mayor ofPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania againstFrank Rizzo.[2]
Kenyatta was a fellow in theHarvard Divinity School andHarvard Law School and led a boycott against minority hiring practices at Harvard. He was also active in international human rights education and advocacy through theUnited Nations andTransAfrica organizations.
Kenyatta was born and raised inChester, Pennsylvania. He was ordained a minister in theCalvary Baptist Church in Chester at the age of 14. He attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania then joined the United States Air Force at age 17 when he could no longer afford tuition.[3] Jackson changed his name in the early 1970s to Muhammad Kenyatta.[4]
In 1981, Kenyatta received his bachelor's degree fromWilliams College.[5] Kenyatta attendedHarvard Divinity School, where he was a Merrill Fellow (1973–74). He earned hisJuris Doctor degree three years later fromHarvard Law School and was a Harvard fellow in public interest law in 1984-85 for the Pan African Project.
In the mid to late 1960s Kenyatta was an organizer for theHead Start Program that provided early childhood education and health services to impoverished children and their families. In the 1970's, he supported the occupation of a building owned byQuakers demanding they payreparations.[6]Although the Quakers were some of the earliest slaveholders, they were also the earliest abolitionists.[7]
He also worked for theMississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a group that challenged the denial of voting right to African Americans inMississippi. It was at this time that he received a letter found to have been forged by three F.B.I. agents working in theCOINTELPRO program that was aimed at disrupting and discrediting people considered dangerously radical. The letter threatened Kenyatta with warnings to stay away fromTougaloo College in Mississippi, where he had been a student. He left Mississippi, but later sued the Government for violating his constitutional right to free speech. A university spokesman, Arthur Page, said the suit finally came to trial inJackson, Mississippi, in 1985, but the jury did not decide in his favor.[4]
Back in Philadelphia Kenyatta continued his activism. In 1969 he was elected as national Vice President of theBlack Economic Development Conference which set as its guiding document the Black Manifesto which among many things called for reparations for black people.
Kenyatta gained prominence in the Harvard community as an organizer of a nationally controversial boycott of a Law School civil rights course. The boycott protested the assignment ofJack Greenberg, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as co-instructor of the class "Racial Discrimination and Civil Rights." The course had previously been offered byDerrick Bell, one of the few black members of the law faculty, who left Harvard in 1981 to become dean of theUniversity of Oregon Law School.[6] Students had hoped the Law School administration would add a minority faculty member to its 58-man, one-woman, one-Black tenured staff. Instead, Harvard appointed a white professor, Greenberg, and J. Levonne Chambers, Black president of the NAACP fund.[8]
As the president of theBlack Law Students Association (BLSA), Kenyatta was an active spokesman for the boycott both inside and outside Harvard. Minority groups chose him to write a letter explaining the boycott to Greenberg and Chambers. Law School DeanJames Vorenberg sent a copy of that letter, along with a draft containing his own anti-boycott stance, to law students. The national media quoted from it in articles about the boycott, most of which criticized the boycotting student for what one columnist called "banal ethnocentrism."
Kenyatta was angry about what he saw as indifference to minority concerns at the Law School and had reservations about the teachers that "represent civil rights strategies from the 1950s".
Kenyatta thought the affirmative action controversy at the Law School was only a part of a national problem. He felt economic issues were the most important concern for Blacks in America at the time and that affirmative action was "a key concept" to help Blacks escape poverty.
Kenyatta ran for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Philadelphia in 1975. At the time,Frank L. Rizzo—whom Kenyatta called "the George Wallace of the North"—was up for reelection and being challenged by a white liberal state senator,Louis G. Hill, for the party's nomination. Hill was counting on support from the city's Black population to beat Rizzo.
Kenyatta did not support Hill and ran for the Democratic nomination himself. The Philadelphia media paid a great deal of attention to his candidacy, in part because he had just completed a highly publicized citizens' campaign against theBlack Mafia drug ring in the city. Although Kenyatta said he entered the race because he did not think Hill was any better than Rizzo, critics have accused him of deliberately splitting the Black vote so Rizzo would win. Kenyatta denied that he made any deals with Rizzo in exchange for his protest candidacy, however the charges of collusion were supported by the fact that two of his close friends were appointed patronage positions in the Rizzo administration.[2]
Kenyatta was vice chairman of the Pan African Skills Project, an international education program including the United States,Tanzania andGhana and was a permanent representative to theUnited Nations nongovernmental organizations section. He helped to organize the Western New York Chapter ofTransAfrica, a Washington-based lobbying group for African and Caribbean interests.[4]
Kenyatta was a visiting professor at theUniversity at Buffalo School of Law from 1988 until his death on January 3, 1992, at age 47. He had long been in ill health, said university officials, who added that the professor had suffered complications from diabetes and was hospitalized at the time of his death.[4]
Kenyatta was survived by his wife, Mary Kenyatta of Buffalo and a daughter, Luana, of Buffalo. He had two sons, Malcolm, of Philadelphia, and Muhammad Santiago, of Virginia, three brothers and three sisters.[4]
Kenyatta's grandson,Malcolm Kenyatta, is an active community and LGBT advocate in Philadelphia,[9] and won election toDistrict 181 of thePennsylvania House of Representatives in2018, and is a Vice Chair of theDemocratic National Committee.[10] He was a candidate in the 2022 Democratic primary for Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring U.S. SenatorPat Toomey.[11]