New Photos of Young Obama

New Photographs of Barack Obama, His Friends, and His Girlfriend, at ...
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/barack-obam...
Hobsbawm and the Bandits Main The Great Cartoon Debate October 3, 2012
Obama at Occidental
Posted by Margot Mifflin
The rally at Coons Hall, February 18, 1981. Obama is seated next to the loudspeaker at right. South African speaker Tim Ngubeni is at the podium.
Closeup: Organizers and speakers at the rally. Wahid Hamid and Barack Obama are seated at left. Hasan Chandoo is seated and Caroline Boss is standing at center. Sara-Etta Harris is standing at right. Laurent Delanney is in the white T-shirt, lower right.
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At left, Richard C. Gilman, Occidentals president from 1965 to 1988. When he entered Coons Hall for a meeting of the college trustees during the divestiture rally, students chanted President Gilman, whats the word? Oxys not Johannesburg!
Students from a wide range of social circles came together at the rally and chanted slogans like Freedom in, money out!
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The campus in 1981, with a view of Thorne Hall, the auditorium where Dick Gregory, Phyllis Schlafly, and Gloria Steinem had recently delivered speeches.
Obama in the fishbowl, a basement room of the library where he often studied.
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Photographer Tom Grauman. He and co-editor Alex McNear founded the literary journal Feast, in which Obamas poems Underground and Pop appeared. Photograph by Melody Malmberg.
Feast production manager Alan Dubinsky at work with Alex McNear.
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Alex McNears friendship with Obama deepened in New York during the summer of 1982, a year after he left Occidental, and they dated over the next year.
Senior Caroline Boss, Obamas friend and a leader in the campus movement for divestiture, who formed part of the composite character Regina in Dreams from My Father.
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Margot Mifflin with Obama. They were part of a group of writers who met in a poetry seminar.
Obamas friendship with Chuck Jensvold grew out of their shared literary ambition. Obama continued to send his work to Jensvold for critique after he left Occidental.
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Rebecca Rivera, who delivered a speech about racial problems on campus, and Obamas Ghanaian friend Kofi Manu, at a dinner thrown by a student group called Ujima in honor of Black History Month.
Obama with his friend and roommate Hasan Chandoo at the Ujima dinner. On February 18, 1981, a student at Occidental College, Barack Obama, delivered his first public speech. As the opening speaker at a rally protesting Occidentals investments in companies that were doing business in apartheid South Africa, he stood with one hand in his pocket, spoke in declarative spurts, and showed no sign of being the orator who would become President nearly twenty-eight years later. Before he could say much, he was carried off by two students pretending to be oppressive Afrikaners. I was a student at Occidental then, too. So was Tom Grauman, a sophomore who took thousands of photos for the Office of in the upper right Communications, a selection of which can be seen in the slide show above. (Click on the red arrows corner for a fullscreen view.) Many of Grauman's photographs documented formative events and influential people in Obamas life at that time, including Obamas friends and fellow-organizers Hasan Chandoo and Caroline Boss, his friends Wahid Hamid and Laurent Delanney, and two activists, Earl Chew and Sara-Etta Harris, who spoke at the rally and who later appeared in the composite characters Marcus and Regina in Dreams from My Father. Grauman also took pictures of Obamas writer friends, some of whom, including me, had met him in an electrifying poetry seminar in which we read Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, and Charles Bukowski. Others published, as he did, in the literary journal Feast, which Grauman founded that year with Alex McNear, whom Obama later dated. We were all at the rally, including his friend Chuck Jensvold, who wrote noir-inflected stories and talked a little like hed just stepped out of Double Indemnity. Jensvold and I videotaped the event for a class in video production. We later watched it over and over again, never quite resolving what story it told. In retrospect, one clear narrative emerges: The rally was not, as advertised, entirely about apartheid. It was about the racial issues smoldering on our own privileged, largely white campus, a subject some of the speakers passionately addressed. Students of color felt marginalized, and the faculty was not diverse. We call this rally today to bring attention to Occidentals investment in South Africa and Occidentals lack of investment in multicultural education, Obama said, before he was carried off. Though the rally had no effect on the former (the college didnt divest), Occidentals minority population, which is now over forty per cent, has since quadrupled. Culturally, the demonstration marked a curious moment in the evolution of campus activism. Two months earlier, John Lennons murder seemed to have snuffed the embers of the sixties once and for all. Three days later the Clash released Sandinista, an album that expressed a global political awareness through a fusion of world and punk music well suited to our multicultural moment. Yet our rally opened with folksingers doing Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child and
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referenced Kent State and Haight-Ashbury. Decades later, Obama would spur a new generation of students into political action, forging a connection between sixties radicals and media-savvy millennials. But in the winter of 1981, he was just testing his courage. I really wanted to stay up there, he wrote in Dreams from My Father. I had so much more to say. Keywords Barack Obama; Occidental College POSTED IN News Desk To get more of The New Yorker's signature mix of politics, culture and the arts: Subscribe Now Comments
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New Photos of Young Obama

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New Photographs of Barack Obama, His Friends, and His Girlfriend, at ...

Feast production manager Alan Dubinsky at work with Alex McNear.

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