Obama at Occidental.
Obama at Occidental.
hmmmm who are the people with him?
interesting block...in befor all the sheriff Joe posts.
Does the guy above look familiar? Thanks to rising seniors Brittany Todd (Left) and Noah Kennedy, who were sifting through a photo box in the College archives while preparing exhibits for Alumni Weekend, this picture of Barack Obama '83 and friends was discovered in June and is published in The Occidental magazine for the first time. Although the back of the photo suggests that a cropped version (that would exclude the nation's 44th president-to-be) was considered for the 1980 La Encina, a check of the volume turns up nothing.
Chris from the Class of 1981
“I’m going to be President of the United States.”
It was in the spring of 1981 when Barack “Barry” Obama made this pronouncement to us. He, I and two others were part of a group of anti-apartheid student activists at Occidental College in Los Angeles. It was a real scorcher outside, and the four of us had sought shelter from the withering heat inside the air-conditioned confines of the campus canteen, appropriately known as the “Cooler.”
A couple of months earlier Barack’s roommate and I had organized an anti-apartheid protest in the face of the college board of trustees’ refusal to divest the college’s endowment fund from businesses involved in South Africa. Barack’s black heritage made him the natural choice to make a speech, perhaps one of his first public addresses, and a couple of us manhandled him in front of the thin crowd in a mock display of South African racial prejudice.
Inside the Cooler, Barack and I struck up a conversation, debating the various merits of gun control. He was tenacious in defending his point of view (restrict access) while I parried with the trite “guns don’t kill people, people with guns do.” We ultimately agreed to disagree. One of the other guys casually asked what we were planning on doing with our lives. He was planning on going to grad school, I had absolutely no clue, but Barack turned to the three of us and in a very matter of fact manner stated: “I’m going to be President of the United States.” I remember thinking to myself, “Good luck with that!” Reagan had just been elected, racial conflict in LA always lay barely dormant under the surface as the Watts riots would prove little more than a decade later, and it wasn’t as if Barack’s last name was “King” or “Jackson.” But here was this personable and to all intents and purposes realistic young black man quietly insisting that he would one day manage to convince the American electorate to choose him to lead what at the time was one of the world’s two superpowers. No, it just wasn’t going to happen.
And yet there was something in Barack’s demeanor and the way he said it that gave pause. He was not making some idle boast in an attempt to rouse us out of our heat-induced lethargy. But I didn’t really know Barack that well, even though we had spent more than a little time together on several occasions over the past few months and had the chance to talk politics. Apparently he was a hardcore party animal, but I never saw that we did not hang out “after hours.” My impression of him was someone who was circumspect, soft spoken and a keen observer. He was young, 19 at the time, and seemed to be searching for something, his life path perhaps. But it was clear at the time that Barack meant exactly what he said. It was almost as if he knew then what his destiny would be.