Muhammad Kenyatta Muhammad Kenyatta Muhammad I. Kenyatta, born Donald Brooks Jackson (March 3, 1944 – January 6, 1992), was an American professor, civil rights leader and international human rights advocate. Jackson changed his name in the early 1970s to Muhammad Kenyatta to honor Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam and Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya. In the 1960s, he worked for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the denial of voting rights to African-Americans in Mississippi. In 1969 he was elected national Vice-President of the Black Economic Development Conference and President of the Greater Philadelphia branch of
Jomo Kenyatta manners" and a flexible attitude in adapting to urban situations dissimilar to the lands he had grown up in. A. R. Barlow, a member of the Church of Scotland Mission at Kikuyu, met with Kenyatta in Britain, later relating that he was impressed by how Kenyatta could "mix on equal terms with Europeans and to hold his end up in spite of his handicaps, educationally and socially." The South African Peter Abrahams met Kenyatta in London, noting that of all the black men involved in the city's Pan-Africanist movement, he was "the most relaxed, sophisticated and 'westernized' of the lot