The 20-year-old video of Obama protesting at Harvard

(Image credit: Screen shot, Buzzfeed)

last updated 8 January 2015

The video: On Wednesday, BuzzFeed posted a 1990 video of Harvard law student Barack Obama, 29, wading into the diversity fight then roiling the Ivy League campus. (Watch it below.) Obama, the Harvard Law Review's first black president, introduces Professor Derrick Bell, Harvard's first black tenured professor, at a rally supporting Bell's protest against Harvard's dearth of black and female tenured law faculty. Though PBS's Frontline first aired the video in mid-October 2008, it's getting renewed attention now. After BuzzFeed released its clip, the late Andrew Breitbart's site aired a longer, supposedly more damning version on Fox News' Hannity, claiming that Bell is the "Jeremiah Wright of academia." Obama "always gravitates towards the most radical people," Fox's Sean Hannity said.

The reaction: Treating this footage as a political scandal is "lame" and "ridiculous," says Michael Brendan Dougherty at Business Insider. But it's interesting to watch it as a historical document, seeing "Obama as a law-student involving himself in the racial politics of academia." What I find remarkable is "how the guy in this video from 20 years ago appears to be pretty much the exact same guy now sitting in the Oval Office," says Brad Friedman at The Brad Blog. Indeed, says Meenal Vamburkar at Mediaite. You'll immediately "recognize his mannerisms and tone (and tendency to make little jokes)." Check it out: