For Judith A. Banks-Johnson ’79, Harvard was a land of dichotomies.

She was a black woman living in a white world. She was a preppy girl who let her hair down. And she was a dreamer who took the chance to pursue her passions before settling down with a more stable career and, eventually, a family.

“I enjoyed Harvard very much,” says Banks-Johnson, who recently married Carlos Johnson and added his last name to hers.

“I loved it,” she adds. “I look back on my years at Harvard as having been some of the most interesting, fun-filled years of my life.”

Today, a quarter century after receiving her Harvard diploma—a diploma she says she has not looked at in 25 years and thinks is at her mother’s residence—Banks-Johnson is the post-production producer of the hugely successful Oprah Winfrey Show.

Though Banks-Johnson enjoys the stability her life now provides, her friends who know her best describe the Harvard Judy as being more of a free spirit.

“Judy was kind of a dreamer type of a person,” says Lynee S. Gore ’79, who was Banks-Johnson’s first-year and sophomore roommate and to this day considers Banks-Johnson her best friend. “She wasn’t like a lot of people in our class at the time that were really, really goal-oriented and knew they wanted to go to grad school and that had their whole life planned out for them.”

B. Evette Porter-Lipscomb ’79-’81, who lived with Banks-Johnson and Gore in a Matthews Hall triple and then in Leverett House, also calls Banks-Johnson one of her closest friends. She says that Banks-Johnson was in many ways a college student looking to have fun and explore the world.

Porter-Lipscomb remembers Banks-Johnson as a preppy woman who “let her hair down” at Harvard.

“She just struck me as very preppy. She was very much a product of the kind of strict, New England attitude and approach which is very different from my own,” says Porter-Lipscomb, who is from the South.

“There’s the Judy who was my freshman college roommate and there’s the Judy who was a different person around her parents and was the ideal sort of daughter,” she recalls.

Porter-Lipscomb says she, Banks-Johnson and Gore often went to parties together, including many at the Fly Club.

“At the time it was legal to drink at 18, so we’d just party and have fun,” she says.

Before attending Harvard, Banks-Johnson, who was born in Boston, lived in the shadows of Cambridge for much of her life, calling Roxbury and then Needham home during her childhood. For the first two years of her life, she lived in married student housing at Harvard Law School, from which her father, Richard L. Banks ’51 graduated in 1958.

For Banks-Johnson, like so many others, studying at Harvard was her first time living away from home. She took the opportunity to “enjoy life and do all the things that your parents say you shouldn’t do, whatever that is,” Porter-Lipscomb says.