catherine Donnelly

Sometimes the Conscience has a humorous interplay with our lives. It was 24 years ago that a white family decided that their little girl couldn’t and wouldn’t room with a black girl. Little did they know that that black girl would grow up to become the first-lady in the White house. The Conscience is irony in action.

Reported on 4/12/08
www.AJC.com

Michelle Obama speaks last week at Winston-Salem State University. When Catherine Donnelly saw her on TV news reports, she thought she looked familiar. 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.

Today both Donnelly, an Atlanta attorney, and Brown, a retired schoolteacher living in the North Carolina mountains, look back at that time with regret. Like many Americans, they’ve built new perceptions of race on top of a foundation cracked by prejudices past — and present. Yet they rarely speak of the subject.

Barack Obama’s run for president changed that. When the Democratic senator from Illinois invited more dialogue on race last month, Shock to the stereotype. The acceptance letter from the Ivy Leagues was really the culmination of two peoples’ hard work. “My mother was thrilled,” Donnelly jokes, that she got into Princeton. Donnelly, now 44, captained the basketball and volleyball teams. She was the homecoming queen. And she racked up science and math awards, often with the help of her mother.

But the “Three R’s” weren’t the only thing Donnelly learned from an early age. There was a fourth one. Her mother and grandmother filled her head with racist stereotypes, portraying African-Americans as prone to crime, uneducated and, at times, people to be feared. Brown, 71, explains that she was raised to think that way.

She recalls hearing her grandfather, a sheriff in the North Carolina Mountains, brag about running black visitors out of the county before nightfall. And Brown’s parents held on to the n-word like a family heirloom. In fact, upon learning that her daughter had a black roommate at Princeton, Brown’s first call was to her own mother. Her suggestion: yank Donnelly out of school. alive and well on a prestigious campus in the Northeast. The university’s private eating clubs, host to frat-style parties, were largely white. The social scene for many minority students, including Obama, revolved around an activity building called the Third World Center. ‘I was inspired …. I was envious’ When Donnelly first saw Obama’s wife on TV, she was struck by how tall and graceful she looked. Then she studied her more closely. Michelle Obama looked so familiar, down to those long fingers. Could that be Michelle Robinson? A Google search gave Donnelly the answer. Obama was far more than a first-lady hopeful. She had gone to Harvard Law School, had been an associate dean at the University of Chicago and rose to vice president at the University of Chicago Hospitals and was making over $500,000.00 at the Chicago Hospital plus receiving $51,000 as a director of Wal-Mart and the associate dean salary was unknown.

“I was inspired,” she says. “I was amazed. And I was envious of all she had accomplished.”

Donnelly called her mother, who in turn phoned the friend who had traveled with her to Princeton all those years ago. The friends had stayed up that night calling everyone they knew with a connection to the university, hoping to get Catherine moved out of the room.

“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.”

Some empathy for lingering anger Living as a gay woman has made Donnelly far more aware of what it’s like to be judged by a trait beyond your control. “Being gay is such a small part of who I am.” Now she wishes she had reached across racial lines at Princeton. “I don’t think I ever set foot in the Third World Center,” she says of the popular hangout for minority students. “It’s like this mystical place.” When Brown heard about Barack Obama’s former pastor — his angry rants against white America — she didn’t like it. But she understood. “If I had been treated the same way blacks have been treated,” she says, “I’d be resentful, too.”

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