From Nicholas W. Raballa
Author: Raballa, Nicholas W.
Date: December 20, 1961
Location: Westport, Conn.
Genre: Letter
Details
A Kenyan exchange student financially supported by King and SCLC asks King for money and comments on his experience living in the North.1 Raballa later thanked King for sending fifty dollars.2
Dear Rev. King Jr.
I hope this letter finds at home. I was wondering if it would be possible for you to send me some more money as I have exhausted the $50 you sent last including my savings from earnings in summer. I do get some assistance in the neighbourhood like rides apart from the board and lodging and this is why things have not been so extreme with me.
It provides deep experience living in this apparently exclussively sophisticated community but nonetheless our differences are imminent although we do hold them to a simmering ebb and dare not drive them to an obvious division.
I am following the trend of events there with much interest and deep concern. That certain legislations should be operative locally and not statewide or nationwide is [word illegible] of the hipocrisy inherent in this democratic nation.
Wishing you and every one nice Christmas and happy new year
Yours sincerely
[signed] N. W. Raballa
1. At the request of Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya, King arranged in 1959 for Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and SCLC to support Raballa, who was one of a group of eighty-one Kenyan students flown to the United States to attend American colleges and universities (see King to Tom Mboya, 8 July 1959, in Papers 5:242–243). By 1961 King was no longer paying for Raballa’s tuition, but promised to send funds “from time to time” (Dora E. McDonald to Raballa, 14 November 1961). Nicholas Wandia Raballa (1931–1996), born in Samia, Kenya, attended local Catholic mission schools. Raballa enrolled at Tuskegee Institute in 1959, and in the fall of 1961, he transferred to the University of Bridgeport. Raballa graduated from Hope College in 1965 with a B.A. in political science and became a lawyer in Kenya in 1977.
2. Raballa to King, 30 January 1962, pp. 376–377 in this volume.
Source: MLKJP-GAMK, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers (Series I–IV), Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc., Atlanta, Ga.