The day Obama learned he liked speaking

Obama at Occidental

By Margot Mifflin

October 3, 2012

On February 18, 1981, a student at Occidental College, Barack Obama, delivered his first public speech. As the opening speaker at a rally protesting Occidental’s 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.

Photograph by Thomas Grauman

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.

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On February 18, 1981, a student at Occidental College, Barack Obama, delivered his first public speech. As the opening speaker at a rally protesting Occidental’s 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 Communications, a selection of which can be seen in the slide show above. Many of Grauman's photographs documented formative events and influential people in Obama’s life at that time, including Obama’s 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 Obama’s 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 he’d 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.

Video From The New Yorker

The Eightysomethings Launching Standup-Comedy CareerIn 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 Occidental’s investment in South Africa and Occidental’s lack of investment in multicultural education,” Obama said, before he was carried off. Though the rally had no effect on the former (the college didn’t divest), Occidental’s 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 Lennon’s 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 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.”

Why does Classic FM hire ex-BBC presenters?

 I was delighted when John Humphrys stopped doing BBC Radio 4 Today programme when he was so obviously way past his best.

But why Global’s Classic FM management thinks he knows enough about classical music to present for them escapes me. Or maybe the automated selection of “the world’s favourite music” doesn’t require any expert knowledge.

Yet quite a lot of their regulars do know what they are talking about - so how do I get a job with Classic FM???

TONIGHT IS MISCHIEF NIGHT

Growing up in Yorkshire meant that there was a lot happening before snd during bonfire night. 

Apart from the fact that Fawkes and some of the other plotters were old boys of my old school (St Peter's School, York), all Yorkshire children knew that the night before the 5th  of November was when Guy was sitting on barrels of gunpowder underneath parliament.  So the evening of 4th November was time for some childish and sometimes dangerous fun, like putting lighted fireworks through people's letterboxes.

More  childish but easy enough in the days when phone-boxes were everywhere and calls only cost a few old pence to make was to phone people up whom you'd never met. For example if you knew that "Smellie" was a real surname, you could find plenty of targets in a phone directory. Friends could then cram into a phone-box and dial a carefully selected number. When someone answered, the dialogue would go more like this:

    Answerer: "Hello.'

    Caller: "Are you Smellie?"

    Answerer: "Yes, who are you and what do you want?"

    Caller: "Just phoning to say we think it's time you had a bath."  CHILD PUTS DOWN PHONE

    All in phone-box: Loud laughing and giggling.

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Mischief-night on 4th November was a tradition throughout the North of England. But, on going down  South 200 miles to Reading University, I was surprised to learn that most of the other students had never heard of it. 

Was this because people didn't do that kind of thing in southern England or because young adults wouldn't admit to such daft behaviour?

My research suggests it was a real North-South difference, but a remaining question is whether the American obsession with Halloween has become so entrenched here that 4th and 5th November have become much less significant than they once were?