At Harvard, Obama Dived Into Diversity Fight

In this video, not previously available online but licensed by BuzzFeed from a Boston television station, the future president speaks at a 1991 campus protest organized to demand tenure for minority and female law professors.

Andrew Kaczynski
BuzzFeed Staff

Posted Mar 7, 2012 11:34am EST

It was perhaps Barack Obama's most intense immersion in the charged campus racial politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s: As President of the Harvard Law Review in the spring of his final year there, 1991, he aligned himself with Professor Derrick Bell's dramatic protest for diversity on the faculty of Harvard Law School.

Bell was the first black tenured professor at the school, and a pioneer of "critical race theory," which insisted, controversially, on reading issues of race and power into legal scholarship. His protest that spring was occasioned by Harvard's denial of tenure to a black woman professor, Regina Austin, at a time when only three of the law school's professors were black and only five women. He told Harvard he would take a leave of absence — a kind of academic strike — "until a woman of color is offered and accepted a tenured position on this faculty," and he launched a hunger strike to dramatize his point.
Obama was a major figure on campus, the first black president of the Law Review. Some friends, in a prescient joke, just referred to him as "the first black president." He had a reputation as a conciliatory figure, not a confrontational one like Bell.
""How Obama would react to Derrick Bell's protest was a matter of some interest," New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote in his exploration of Obama and race, The Bridge.
It was a situation in which clear lines had been drawn, and Obama sided with Bell. In a speech before the law school's Harkness Commons — and sounding very much like his future presidential self — he described Bell as "the Rosa Parks of legal education."
Obama's stand provided a major boost to the protests, Keith Boykin, one of their organizers, later recalled.

Barack was always supportive and sympathetic to our campaign for faculty diversity. He spoke about it at one of our rallies. But he was not actively involved in the protest movement. Nor did he need to be. As I said, his presence alone made the case. And even if he agreed with the cause of the movement, he didn't need to be involved in the more radical protests we launched because our tactics were controversial on campus.

In video, licensed by Buzzfeed from the WGBH Boston television station's Media Library and Archives, now available online at BuzzFeed in it's entirety, Obama praised the "excellence of his scholarship."