"Stormed..to the campus housing office..demanded Donnelly be moved..The reason:black roommate(MObama)

Pirate Smile

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Mon Apr-14-08 12:23 AM
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"Stormed..to the campus housing office..demanded Donnelly be moved..The reason:black roommate(MObama...

Edited on Mon Apr-14-08 12:39 AM by Pirate Smile

Georgian recalls rooming with Michelle Obama

By BRIAN FEAGANS

Published on: 04/13/08

She walked into the historic Nassau Inn that evening and delivered the news to her mother, Alice Brown. "I was horrified," recalled Brown, who had driven her daughter up from New Orleans. Brown stormed down to the campus housing office and demanded Donnelly be moved to another room.
The reason: One of her roommates was black.
"I told them we weren't used to living with black people — Catherine is from the South," Brown said. "They probably thought I was crazy."

-snip-
But their willingness to talk isn't a response to the candidate born to a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya. It's more about Obama's wife, Michelle.
She's that roommate from a quarter century ago.

-snip-
Brown's first call was to her own mother. Her suggestion: yank Donnelly out of school.

Girl was likable, but black

-snip-
Quick-witted and nearly 6 feet tall, Michelle Robinson had no problem filling the room, Donnelly recalls. The future Michelle Obama, from Chicago's Southside, would playfully tease the third roommate, who was white. Obama's long fingers still narrate stories in Donnelly's mind. "From the minute we met," she says, "I liked her."

-snip-
In the introduction, Obama wrote that Princeton made her more aware of her "Blackness" than ever before. "No matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong," she wrote. "Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second."

-snip-
Donnelly said she and Obama had established separate circles of friends by second semester. That's when another room – the one her mother had requested – opened up. By then, it just made sense to trade cramped quarters for roomier ones.
Donnelly doesn't remember having another meaningful exchange with Obama. She graduated with a psychology major in 1985 and forgot all about that tall roommate from Chicago.

-snip-
...The friends had stayed up that night calling everyone they knew with a connection to the university, hoping to get Catherine moved. "We thought this is so ironic," Brown says. "(Obama) could be the first lady, and here we wanted to get my child out of her influence."

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/2008/04/12/roommate_0413.html

People have been treating Michelle Obama like she was crazy for not feeling particularly welcome at Princeton. This may put a new spin on that although the roommate says she doesn't think Michelle had any idea of all the activity going on behind the scenes to try to get Donnelly moved. Call me crazy but I doubt Michelle was clueless.