Yesterday marked the 6th year anniversary of the Anti-Obama Carnival held on the campus of Texas A&M University. Back then I was a freelance photographer for our school’s Marketing and Communications Department. My job was simple–in between my classes, walk around and take photos of daily campus life. It was a nice job too…I set my own hours, got paid really well for a student worker, and got in a whole lot of practice. But on this day in October, I was walking around campus and saw that a student organization decided to have an egg toss. They put Obama’s face on a poster and mounted it to a board, allowing students to throw eggs at it if they gave a donation. Now this was the type of stuff I couldn’t give to my bosses for them to post on the Aggie Daily site, but I was so shocked by it that I kept on taking photos.
As classes started to let out, the crowd got bigger and bigger.
Eventually one of the football players showed up and stood in the way, daring anyone to throw another egg at Obama’s face.
An hour or so later I decided to go home and upload the photos to my site. This was before Twitter so it took some time for the photos to be seen, but eventually it spread and the photo above was used for several newspapers across the nation and on various cable news websites such as CNN.com. For the next few weeks I got emails from a lot of hateful people who thought I had an agenda and some calls for interviews.
The original album I posted is now down, but you can search for other photos by typing in “Anti Obama Egg Toss” on Google.
Photos taken 10/29/08.
