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President Obama Delivers Historic Howard University Commencement Address
WASHINGTON, D.C. — It seemed only fitting that the United States’ first black president, Barack Obama, delivered one of his final commencement speeches at one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious historically black colleges and universities, Howard University.
On an unseasonably chilly and wet May morning in Washington, President Obama addressed a crowd of 15,000, including about 2,300 graduates, in what was the first of three commencement addresses the president is scheduled to deliver before he departs office.
President Obama marked the occasion by outlining for the graduates the challenges that remain in the country for African Americans and how they can help meet those challenges. While noting the progress the country has made in the last 30 years in terms of education, crime, economics and race relations, Obama listed several challenges that remain for the country, including racism, gender inequality, and the mass incarceration of African Americans.
“We’ve still got a big racial gap in economic opportunity,” Obama said. “The overall unemployment rate is 5 percent, but the black unemployment rate is almost nine. We’ve still got an achievement gap when black boys and girls graduate high school and college at lower rates than white boys and white girls. Harriet Tubman may be going on the $20, but we’ve still got a gender gap when a black woman working full-time still earns just 66 percent of what a white man gets paid.”
He continued, “we’ve got a justice gap when too many black boys and girls pass through a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails,” adding that the prison system has gotten worse since he graduated from college in 1983. “When I was in college, about half a million people in America were behind bars. Today, there are about 2.2 million. Black men are about six times likelier to be in prison right now than white men.”
While the challenges mentioned by President Obama seem extremely difficult to curtail in the short-term, he said today’s graduates are more equipped than previous generations to address them.
“You’ve got plenty of work to do,” he said. “But as complicated and sometimes intractable as these challenges may seem, the truth is that your generation is better positioned than any before you to meet those challenges, to flip the script.”
President Obama went on to outline for the graduates how they can best reduced those challenges:
- Be confident in your heritage – He encouraged the graduates to be confident in their “blackness,” which he said should not be a problem for Howard’s graduates, who are known for the pride they take in their culture.“One of the great changes that’s occurred in our country since I was your age is the realization there’s no one way to be black,” he said. “Take it from somebody who’s seen both sides of debate about whether I’m black enough. In the past couple months, I’ve had lunch with the Queen of England and hosted (rapper) Kendrick Lamar in the Oval Office. There’s no straitjacket, there’s no constraints, there’s no litmus test for authenticity.”In making his point about having pride in your heritage and how to not fit into certain boxes created by society, President Obama invoked the names of Howard alum and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, and recently deceased music legend Prince.“You can go into politics, or run an organization that holds politicians accountable,” President Obama told the graduates. “You can write a book that wins the National Book Award, or you can write the new run of “Black Panther.” Or, like one of your alumni, Ta-Nehisi Coates, you can go ahead and just do both. You can create your own style, set your own standard of beauty, embrace your own sexuality. Think about an icon we just lost — Prince. He blew up categories. People didn’t know what Prince was doing. And folks loved him for it.”
- Don’t be ignorant of history – President Obama reminded the graduates that as African Americans many of them were bound by their family and ancestors’ history of experience injustice, unfairness and struggle.“We cannot sleepwalk through life,” he said. “We cannot be ignorant of history. We can’t meet the world with a sense of entitlement. We can’t walk by a homeless man without asking why a society as wealthy as ours allows that state of affairs to occur. We can’t just lock up a low-level dealer without asking why this boy, barely out of childhood, felt he had no other options. We have cousins and uncles and brothers and sisters who we remember were just as smart and just as talented as we were, but somehow got ground down by structures that are unfair and unjust.”
- You need a strategy for change, and that involves voting – President Obama highlighted the importance of voting and what type of change can be made when they vote. Though he recognized the awareness that has been raised by “Black Twitter” and Black Lives Matter, President Obama emphasized the importance of voting that the impact in could have on the issues most important to the graduates.“Your plan better include voting — not just some of the time, but all the time,” he said. “It is absolutely true that 50 years after the Voting Rights Act, there are still too many barriers in this country to vote. There are too many people trying to erect new barriers to voting. This is the only advanced democracy on Earth that goes out of its way to make it difficult for people to vote. And there’s a reason for that. There’s a legacy to that.”“So you got to vote all the time, not just when it’s cool, not just when it’s time to elect a president, not just when you’re inspired. It’s your duty,” President Obama said.
- Change requires more than just speaking out — it requires listening, as well – President Obama spoke about his experiences with making compromises as a state senator in Illinois and as president to achieve a broader goal.“You need allies in a democracy,” he said. “That’s just the way it is. It can be frustrating and it can be slow. But history teaches us that the alternative to democracy is always worse.”The President elaborated: “democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want.”
President Obama is the sixth sitting U.S. President to deliver the keynote address at a Howard University commencement, the first since President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 speech in which he focused on poverty in the black community, inequality and the right to vote.
This was third commencement address President Obama has delivered to a HBCU. He delivered the commencement address at Morehouse College in 2013 and at Hampton University in 2010.
It was also the first of three commencement addresses President Obama is scheduled to deliver before leaving office. He will speak at Rutgers University on May 15 and at the U.S. Air Force Academy commencement on June 2.
Joining President Obama at Howard was senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, whose father and grandfather were Howard graduates.
President Obama, who was introduced to speak by current Howard University President Wayne I. Frederick, received an honorary doctorate of science degree from Howard for his work in bringing health care to millions of uninsured Americans.
Howard also awarded honorary degrees to physician Dr. L.D. Britt, ambassador Horace Greeley Dawson Jr. and actress Cicely Tyson, who took time in her acceptance to commend Obama on his presidency.
In his closing remarks, President Obama encouraged the new Howard graduates to persevere through the challenging days ahead of them. “When your journey seems too hard, and when you run into a chorus of cynics who tell you that you’re being foolish to keep believing or that you can’t do something, or that you should just give up, or you should just settle — you might say to yourself a little phrase that I’ve found handy these last eight years: Yes, we can.”
Human Nature video of 2016 Howard University Commencement ceremony below
