Hearing Martin Luther King shaped Maathai’s intersectional environmentalism

Evidence

In 1960 Maathai became one of 600 Kenyans airlifted to the United States under the Kennedy program. (When she published her memoir she couldn’t have foreseen how consequential that 1960 program would be: accompanying her on that airlift was a young Kenyan named Barack Obama on scholarship to the University of Hawaii.) As a beneficiary of the Kennedy airlift, Maathai got to study at a small college in Kansas; she proceeded for her graduate work to the University of Pittsburgh and, while there, was energized by listening to Martin Luther King at the height of his powers, an experience that contributed to her intersectional attitude to movement politics, whereby she would envisage environmentalism as one wing of a broader civil rights campaign. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 399

Categorization

• CANDY: The airlift coincidence — Maathai and Obama’s father flown on the same 1960 scholarship program — is a genuinely fun fact for conversation.
• XREF: connects to: US foreign policy supported Kenya’s Moi while its movements inspired Maathai — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 398; Vilification and marginality powered Carson and Maathai’s original environmental visions — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 405

Broader Connections

• Vilification and marginality powered Carson and Maathai’s original environmental visions #expands (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 405