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'.
He attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania then joined the United States Air Force at age 17 when he could no longer afford tuition.
In the mid to late 1960s Kenyatta was an organizer for the Head Start Program that provided early childhood education and health services to impoverished children and their families.
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 of Jack Greenberg, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as co-instructor of the class "Racial Discrimination and Civil Rights."
[6] Students had hoped the Law School administration would add a minority faculty member to its 58-man, one-woman, one-Black tenured staff.
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".
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.
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 the Black Mafia drug ring in the city.
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.