Barack Obama before He Was a Rising Political Star

• Published in: The Journal of blacks in higher education no. 45; pp. 99 - 101
• Main Authors: Mack, Kenneth W., Chen, Jim
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 01.10.2004; BruCon Publishing Company
• Subjects: Academic degrees; African Americans; Attitudes; Attorneys; Black culture; Black people; Civil Rights; Colleges & universities; Conservatism; Culture; Editing; Education; Elections; Empathy; Graduate studies; Higher education; Knowledge; Language Usage; Law; Law Schools; Law students; Minority & ethnic groups; Neighborhood Improvement; Obama, Barack; Political attitudes; Political candidates; Political elections; Political speeches; Politics; Racial Factors; Speech; Students; Television; United States history; United States Senate; United States > US
• ISSN: 1077-3711; 2326-6023

There was one professor in particular, with whom most of the section seemed uncomfortable. [Barack Obama] and I were part of the few who actually seemed to bond with him -- my bond was intellectual but Barack's seemed to be something deeper. It was customary for the section to give each professor a gift at the end of the semester. This professor presented a problem in this regard since few students could interact easily with him. Our section, not surprisingly, selected Barack to give him his gift. The next year, I would get to see Barack work his magic on a larger stage -- the editorial staff of the Harvard Law Review. I spent the following summer doing human rights work in South Africa and thus arrived several weeks late to the law review editors' training session, and by the time I returned to Cambridge, Barack had already made an impression on both the second- and third-year student editors. If I remember properly, he had already participated in a committee that would plan the annual issue devoted to some new development in law, and was also holding forth in the forum where impressions were formed quickly among the staff -- the editors' lounge. The lounge was a place to relax on the law review -- it had a television, copies of The New York Times, our mailboxes, and bagels in the morning -- but it was also the place where impressions and assessments quickly took root among a group of very ambitious people. Barack had already made a quite good impression there, as I recall, with a worldly-wise way of talking about everything from current events to theories of law. Like all of us, he was ambitious, but he never seemed that way. This was an attitude that many editors failed to internalize but it was, of course, a key to winning election to the presidency of the review. I remember vividly a moment during the presidential election when a conservative editor whom I had never known to support a black editor or a black author rose to pledge his firm support behind Barack, who everyone knew was a liberal-progressive. Barack, of course, won the election handily with an incredibly broad range of supporters. It was a moment of triumph that crossed racial and political lines, as well as about every demographic line among the editors. When Barack walked into the room where the election took place to accept the results, I was the first to greet him and the two of us hugged one another for what seemed like an eternity. Tears rolled down both of our faces, as well as those of many in attendance. I was, of course, among the large group of candidates whom Barack had trounced in the election, and I believe that had our positions been reversed, the empathy that I had seen so often would have induced Barack to do the same thing for me.