Representative Malcolm Kenyatta Contact information

Malcolm Kenyatta, born on July 30, 1990, is an American politician hailing from North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Democratic Party and has been serving as the Pennsylvania State Representative for the 181st district since 2019.

Kenyatta was born to Kelly Kenyatta and Malcolm J. Kenyatta, at Temple University Hospital in North Central Philadelphia. He has three adopted siblings. Kenyatta is the grandson of the civil rights activist Muhammad I. Kenyatta.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in strategic communication from Temple University and a Master of Science in public communication from Drexel University. During college, Kenyatta organized student protests against proposed education budget cuts by then-Governor Tom Corbett. He was also an avid poet and performer. In 2008, with the help of theater professor Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, he founded the award-winning poetry collective Babel, which has twice won the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational.

Kenyatta completed a Harvard Kennedy School of Government three-week executive education program, Senior Executives in State and Local Government, as a David Bohnett Fellow in 2019.

Kenyatta has been engaged in community affairs and politics since he was eleven years old, serving as the junior block captain with the Philadelphia Streets program. He has worked as a community activist, specifically around issues of poverty, which he has called “the moral and economic issue of our generation.” He worked as a political consultant on multiple state and local races, most notably as the campaign manager for lawyer and activist Sherrie Cohen, the daughter of longtime city councilman David Cohen, in her 2015 bid for the Philadelphia City Council.

Kenyatta backed Joe Biden in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries and has been critical of Bernie Sanders. He does not support an immediate transition to Medicare for All, noting that he would support interim bipartisan measures instead. Kenyatta supports abolishing the United States Senate filibuster. In 2016 and 2020, he was elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. He was selected as one of seventeen speakers to jointly deliver the keynote address at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. This made him, Sam Park, and Robert Garcia the first openly-gay speakers in a keynote slot at a Democratic National Convention.

Kenyatta was one of 20 electors selected by the Pennsylvania Democratic Party to vote in the Electoral College for Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris in 2020 United States presidential election.