![]() "Before he could say much, he was carried off by two students pretending to be oppressive Afrikaners. "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 28 years later," she wrote. Writing in The New Yorker in 2012, Margot Mifflin '83 recalled witnessing Obama's first public speech outside the Arthur G. Coons Administrative Center on Feb. "President Obama had a broad vision, and Oxy may have helped to bring him some of that vision." "I think that was probably a very important factor for anybody like him, coming from a smaller place-Hawai'i-where everybody knew each other, and getting a sense of the role of the college in the community, that it doesn't exist as a thing apart," she adds. "Here you are in Los Angeles, even then such a vibrant city, and there's no way that you can exist as a student without also existing as a citizen of the larger city, which I suspect that Barack, who has ambition, curiosity, and a sense of his own role, did," says Patt Morrison '74, a Los Angeles Times columnist and former Occidental trustee. Raised in Hawai'i, but also having lived in Kansas and Indonesia, he felt at one with all of his classmates' backgrounds, but particularly with international students, friends say. "But I was still just going through the motions, as indifferent toward college as toward most everything else."īefore his political awakening, Obama was a guy named Barry, serving coffee and busing tables at the Tiger Cooler. "I had graduated without mishap, was accepted into several respectable schools, and settled on Occidental College in Los Angeles mainly because I'd met a girl from Brentwood while she was vacationing in Hawai'i with her family," Obama wrote in his 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father. Obama's Oxy story begins in 1979, when the mixed-race son of a single mother enrolled at the College from Punahou School in Honolulu to be near his girlfriend. citizenship-and more than once addressing the question "How can you call Obama an alumnus when he transferred to Columbia after two years?" To which we reply: Well, he is. Oxy found itself at ground zero in the "birther" debate, with opponents challenging his U.S. But so is his impact on the College-in everything from a bump in admission applications to sales of Obama-related merchandise at the College bookstore. ![]() I don't think we would have elected a man with a name that sounds like a soft fruit!"Īs Obama's eight years in the White House came to an end in January, Occidental's influences are writ large on the president's development and legacy. I like to think that I helped him free his mind. I said I would only call him Barack, because it was a strong African name. "He always went by Barry, for simplicity and as an accommodation to Anglo society. "I was the first person outside his family to only call him Barack," he says. "It was spontaneous, a candid moment-I think I was the only guy who had a camera," recalls Moore, a diplomacy and world affairs and economics double major and one of a small number of African American students enrolled at Occidental at the time.īut Moore-an Oxy trustee and principal in the Los Angeles office of Avison Young, a global commercial real estate firm-claims another role in the evolution of the man who would be president. ![]()
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