When Joe Biden, now frontrunner in the race to pick a Democratic candidate to compete with Donald Trump, came to the atrium of the science building at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas to campaign last Monday, his introduction was made by a female student, Adunola Osinuga.
“We saw in South Carolina the power that voters of color have. We have the power to swing this entire race for the candidate that can beat Donald Trump in the fall. We had that power in South Carolina, and we most definitely have that power here in Texas,” the beaming student, known as Adunola Osinuga said.
“Help me give a big TSU welcome to the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden,” Osinuga added as Biden came on to the stage.
Osinuga, whose full name is Adunola Rachel Oladoyin Osinuga was born in Chicago to a Nigerian father and a South Side mother. They met at the Hertz counter at the airport where he was arriving and she was working.
Osinuga got a degree in funeral services from the University of Arkansas at Hope before transferring to Texas Southern in 2017.
She is Miss Texas Southern for the 2019-20 school year. “That’s the queen of the school,” Osinuga told me when I spoke to her Thursday.
When Biden came to Texas Southern for the Democratic debate in September, back when there were 10 candidates on the stage, and stayed another day to meet with students, she was his guide.
“Mr. Kamau Marshall reached out to me,” Adunola Osinuga said.
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Marshall, Biden’s director of strategic communication, “is actually a TSU alum, and we stick together.”
She is in Alpha Kappa Alpha, sister sorority to Alpha Phi Alpha, Marshall’s fraternity.
She became a co-chair of HBCU Students for Biden.
When Osinuga and Biden greeted each other Monday, “it was just a great conversation. We caught up. It was honestly just like, ‘How you feeling? You feeling OK?’ And I said, ‘I’m feeling OK. How you feeling?’ ”
Of her introduction, she said, “I don’t think I had to persuade anyone in that room, but I think I was honestly communicating.”
“She did great,” Mitchell said to Holbert when Osinuga finished. They agreed she also looked great.
It was an inspiring scene, but nothing compared with what transpired the next day as students and others waited five or six hours or more to vote at the historically black college campus, all the way past 1 in the morning, after the state had been called for Biden. Too few voting machines and other snafus.
Osinuga, who had voted early, was proud of her fellow students.
“We’re serious about the vote. We’re serious about people understanding the magnitude of even one vote,” she said.
“As a young individual, I tell many of my peers, ‘If you want to talk about change, see change, create change, it starts with you.’ That wait was just a testament to that”.
AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK
