Helen M. Roberts

Helen Marguerite (Emery) Roberts (January 20, 1896 – June 22, 1983) was an American writer, photographer, and multilingual educator. From 1958 to 1975, she battled illiteracy in Africa, teaching reading, writing, health and Christian religion to thousands of illiterate adults. In the course of her African work, she mentored and sponsored many promising young Africans, encouraging them to pursue higher education, including Barack H. Obama, the father of President of the United States Barack Obama. In 1916, she married Jewell Roberts (1893–1952). From 1916 to 1927, they lived in Porterville, Bakersfield, Sacramento, Oregon, and Fresno, and during this time had four children: Howard, Kenneth, Muriel, and Donald. While living in Fresno, Helen entered Fresno State University to resume her college education. She practiced teaching in the adult education program, helping Mexican women to read, write and speak English, through practical situations. She also pursued photography and had her own dark room for her enlargements. She wrote several articles and illustrated them with her photographs in Peninsula Life and other magazines.

African literacy missionary

In 1953, she began her pursuit of battling illiteracy, which resulted in an assignment to help in the Migrant Ministry in California. For the next few years, Helen applied herself as a volunteer to help Santa Clara Valley migrant camp adults and children. She held worship services, and taught the children and the mothers who weren't working by holding classes on sewing, crafts, reading and writing. Helen wrote, photographed and recorded a filmstrip which the migrant ministry used as training in other places. In 1957, Helen met Dr. Frank C. Laubach, who at the time was nicknamed the "Apostle of Literacy". Dr. Laubach was a Methodist teacher and writer, who developed a method of teaching people of remote cultures how to read and write in their own language. The program was called "Each One, Teach One", which has influenced a worldwide literacy movement over many decades. Her meeting with Dr. Laubach ultimately resulted in her assignment to a new 2 year Laubach Literacy program in Africa. During her early years in Kenya, Helen wrote Dr. Laubach's biography entitled Champion of the Silent Billion.

In 1959, students traveled to the US in a coordinated "airlift", substantially sponsored by Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson, Sidney Poitier, and Senator John F. Kennedy's family foundation. According to Shachtman, subsequent airlifts coordinated by a nonprofit entity known as the African American Students Foundation would send hundreds of East African students to the US. These students would achieve a remarkable record of accomplishment, many of whom returned to Africa, to significant positions in government and society. One member was Wangari Maathai,

In 1960, Helen was contacted by two women, Stella Greenway and Margaret Carmody, who had been seeking to establish a literacy program in Rhodesia. Helen in Kenya and Louise d'Oliveira in the Congo, visited Harara (then Salisbury) and provided charts, copies of primers and the encouragement to form the Adult Literacy Organization (ALO). This provided a turning point in Rhodesia's literacy movement, as Helen provided the essential know-how for the early campaign. In 1963, Helen moved to Salisbury with her friend, Alice Sanderson, and provided the fledgling ALO with material and training for volunteer tutors. By 1965, they had trained 715 volunteer teachers in Rhodesia. By the 1970s, ALO was renamed Adult Literacy Organization of Rhodesia (ALOR) and in 1980 following Helen's return to America, it was renamed the Adult Literacy Organization of Zimbabwe. Alice Sanderson had resigned as director in 1974, but remained a literacy consultant until the late 1980s.

Helen spent 12 years in Rhodesia, teaching, writing, and training volunteer workers and teachers. While In Rhodesia, she wrote their first Shona language primer, and published African Scenes and Symbols, a book of forty meditations and forty full page photographs of African Scenes. She published two additional books entitled Search for Love and If You Only Knew. She also wrote a variety of religious novels, meditations, and prayers, many of which were eventually published.

Mentor to Barack Obama Sr.

In the course of her teachings and writings in Kenya and Rhodesia, Roberts and her literacy associate Elizabeth "Betty" Mooney Kirk would cross paths with many inspired and gifted Africans, in whom they saw great promise. Helen and Betty were instrumental in coordinating passage for many of these students to America to further their education, with the hopes that they would return to Africa to aid in the literacy cause and improve African leadership. They coordinated first the completion of his correspondence school certificate, and later his American college applications which culminated in his acceptance to the University of Hawaii. When he missed the first airlift to America, Helen and Betty stepped in and raised money for him to travel on a parallel flight. Betty paid his entire first year tuition. Helen committed herself to watching over and financially supporting the family that he had left behind, for as long as she remained in Nairobi.

Helen is also referenced in Barack Obama's Dreams from my Father. Her participation in Obama Sr's mentoring was further mentioned in Mike Seccombe's Unlikely Events Recall Story of This President.

Final years

In 1975 at the age of 79, Roberts returned to Los Angeles, where she retired to Leisure World. She joined a writing group that wrote and produced television plays. At 85 years old, she wrote a series of books relating to religious themes, wherein each book contained a collection of images that she painted, based on her many photographs taken while abroad.

In 1982, Helen began her final project; her autobiography. This 305-page project, The Unfolding Trail, was completed shortly before her death in 1983.