How Occidental fashioned a future leader

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By Margot Mifflin (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-22 07:45

When Barack Obama made his first public speech - on Feb 18, 1981, exhorting the trustees of Occidental College to divest from South Africa - he wasn't the only speaker. He wasn't the featured speaker. He wasn't even the best speaker.

But the event crystallized the key values Occidental promoted, which helped shape the man making history this week: critical thought and social justice. It also inspired the kind of social alchemy Obama later mastered on a national scale: bringing disparate groups together and making serious politics seriously fun.

The protest fell on the kind of sun-bleached winter day you see only in Southern California. The students gathered outside Coons Hall administration building, a glass-paneled monolith dubbed "the Chrysler showroom" because it clashed with the stunning Mediterranean Revival buildings on the rest of the well-manicured campus.

While the trustees met inside, the speakers - black, white, Hispanic and South African - delivered their pleas, starting with Obama, whose speech was cut short when two students hauled him away in a staged display of white suppression. After the rally, a pair of folk singers harmonized as we wandered off to class, feeling groovy.

In Dreams From My Father, Obama wrote that he didn't think the demonstration made any difference, but he was wrong. Though Occidental's 1991 divestment was shamefully belated, more than 300 students from every corner of the tiny campus came together that day: I saw geology and art majors, actors and athletes, international students and sandy-haired Californians, shoulder to shoulder, laughing and shouting back at the speakers with the kind of politically inspired camaraderie that also characterized Obama's 2008 campaign rallies.

Occidental is a fine liberal arts college in Eagle Rock, 16 km northeast of downtown Los Angeles, an intimate campus where we were taught above all to think critically and creatively - it was spelled out in the curriculum. The year before Barry (as we called him) arrived, the freshman "core program" was begun, requiring students to become globally literate through courses on international culture that raised questions like, "How have different societies defined justice, the sacred and the truth?"

The student body was international, although not nearly as racially diverse as it is now. But we were economically diverse, hailing from homes with swimming pools in wealthy Los Angeles suburbs like Brentwood, as well as from blue-collar towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

We swam in Santa Monica, bowled in Eagle Rock, camped in Mexico, hiked in Joshua Tree National Park and skated at Venice Beach - something that Barry occasionally did with his friend Hasan Chandoo.

We partied, but only after we studied. Our professors pushed us to apply for grants that took us around the globe, and worked community service into our course requirements. They wanted us to become citizens of the world.

For Barry, that meant moving on. A few months after the rally at Coons Hall, he left to finish his degree at Columbia, having decided to pursue public policy - in large part, he later said, because of his involvement in the divestment movement. His closest friends had just graduated. His activism had been ignited.

And as an aspiring writer, he'd immersed himself in literature with the kind of Talmudic dedication that, I'm convinced, ultimately made him a brilliant speaker. If Occidental's goal was to make us deep thinkers with a concern for justice and community, Barack Obama earned the degree.

The author is a professor of journalism at the City University of New York

The New York Times Syndicate

(China Daily 01/22/2009 page9)