- So beloved seniors,
it's kinda interesting.
Sometimes people ask me what I like about my job
and what makes me happy about my job.
And the answer's pretty simple.
It's you.
Anyone who teaches, anyone who's in student affairs,
anyone anywhere who works on a college campus
is here 'cause we have a hope.
We have hope that the future
is gonna be better than the past.
We have hoped the future's gonna be better than the present.
And we have that hope because of you.
(audience applause)
It's my job and it's my privilege today
to lay on you a charge.
To give you words
I hope that if you can bear them in your heart,
they might help you live up to your dreams
and your potential and to do what's on the gates
to bear and trust your added riches for all.
Today I'm going to tell you what hope I have for all of us
because of you.
And I hope that you will hear in what I say
something you find to be true about yourselves.
So to do that,
I want you to go back in time with me a little bit.
55 years, in fact.
This is before you were born, obviously,
before I was born, perhaps not so obviously,
but on this campus 55 years ago,
there was a woman who walked across the stage
to get her diploma and you've heard her name already today
it was Myrlie Evers-Williams.
It was a class of 1968.
Before she came here,
as you heard from Professor Eiffel was the formative moments
of the American Civil Rights Movement.
And when she and her husband Medgar were young,
when they were in their twenties,
they decided that they had a calling to justice.
So they started organizing in Mississippi,
they organized voter registration drives,
they fought for equal access to education,
they organized boycotts to highlight discrimination,
and because of their work,
because of their commitment to justice,
death threats were a part of their daily existence.
And one day in June, 1963,
just hours after President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
addressed the nation proposing what would become
the landmark Civil Rights Act,
Myrlie Evers saw her husband shot to death in her driveway
in front of her and in front of her children.
But despite her devastating loss,
she did not succumb to despair.
The fire that burned in her heart did not dim.
She realized she had to lead with love
and she realized she had to answer hate
and destruction with something far greater.
Now, shortly before her husband was killed,
in bed one night he said to her, he said, Myrlie when I die,
and he was in his twenties, but he knew he was going to die,
he was gonna be killed for what he was doing.
He said, when I die, I want you to take the children
to California and I want you to make a life for yourself.
And she did.
She was a young widow, three children, no money.
She came from Mississippi to California
to make a life for herself and her kids.
And she came to Pomona in search of the kind of education
that would enable her to have a future.
And in doing so, she made life better for every one of you.
She took it upon herself in her twenties and her thirties
and her forties and her fifties, her sixties,
her seventies, her eighties, and now in her nineties,
she took on the obligation to make the world
a more just place.
And on her 90th birthday this year,
right behind me in Big Bridges we had a big party for her,
which was great.
And there was a film crew here
that was doing a documentary about her life
and they asked me what I thought it was like for her
then to come to Pomona.
And they asked me, you know,
it was predominantly white campus in Southern California,
she was far from everyone she knew,
she came all the way here to live
and learn and what do you think that was like?
And so I thought for a few minutes and then I realized,
okay, no place for her was safe.
There was no place on this earth
that woman could find safety.
Not after what had happened in front of her eyes,
in front of her children, in front of her house.
But she also knew that
while her husband was senselessly murdered,
he didn't senselessly live.
He lived purposefully and he lived for something.
And what he was living for in part happened in two years,
1964 and 1965.
And in those two years,
the United States collectively made a series of decisions.
And these were democratic decisions.
Some of the most consequential decisions
in the history of the United States.
The Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.
In all of these ways, again and again,
America had made a choice.
And that choice was that we as a country
were going to try to live together.
We are still wrestling with
the consequences of that choice today.
And if we tell it truthfully, US history,
like all human history, has moments that reveal
the very worst of humanity.
But US history, like all human history,
has moments that reveal the very best of humanity.
But the test of humanity is how we wrestle with
what we have done
so that what we will do moves us forward
toward a future of peace and justice
and what Myrlie hoped was a future of love.
Her husband had died for that future
and she wanted to make sure her children could inherit it.
And you here on Marston Quad have inherited that world.
It's not a perfect world, it's not a fully just world,
but it is a world that as Martin Luther King Jr.
quoting Theodore Parker, cite your sources,
as he said, he said the arc of the moral universe
bends towards justice.
But it's my belief that that bending,
that turning of human life to a greater purpose,
that has to be the work of human hands.
Doesn't come if we wish for it,
and it doesn't come if we hope for it,
it comes if we work for it.
And so the work of each generation
and the work of you today is to make it bend,
to make it more just, to make it more loving,
to make it more beautiful.
And I think the work of each generation
it's kinda like a weaver sitting at a loom.
And if we sit at this loom
where we're just weaving the collective fabric
of natures of cultures, if we sit at that loom
and we don't just give the pattern over to fate
or we just don't give the pattern
and weave the same warp and woof that others before us wove,
if we commit to making something
whole and beautiful together,
we can weave a whole new world on that loom.
This is what we must do.
We have to.
We have to weave it together.
We have to entwine our lives with each others
and from that common thread, make something great.
I've gotten to talk to Myrlie many times.
And she says to me that
every time she comes onto this campus,
she feels what she first felt then 55 years ago.
She said when she walked on this campus,
she felt this was the first place she could feel safe again.
And what she felt here was a kind of a peace
and she felt a kind of strength welling up into the ground,
a sense of security and a sense of trust
and the strength to do what needed to be done.
It is that strength to build and weave
and work to make the world a better place.
And I'll tell you, I want you to mark my words on this.
I will tell you there are people
who wanna undo that weaving,
that careful fabric of hope and justice.
And what they do, they start off by saying
that students on these campuses,
just like the students in 1968 were too radical.
They don't really love justice.
They don't really wanna listen to anybody else.
They just wanna tear things down.
They don't wanna build them up.
But that's not what I've seen from you.
That's not what I've seen from you
these years you've been at Pomona.
That's not what I expect from you in the years to come.
Now, just before I took this job,
the president of another college told me
and several other people in a quiet room
that soon American higher education
was gonna be public enemy number one.
And people would decry what we were teaching
and they would decry who we were teaching it to
and they would pile on young people
and say the world was going down the drain.
They didn't say why this would happen, but it's happened.
And I think I know why.
It's because people who have had the privilege
of a deep and a broad education don't sit quietly
when they see things that are wrong.
They tend to stand up for what's right.
In the time I've been a Pomona, five years ago,
there was a Pomona parent speaking at at family weekend
and he was a special envoy for the United Nations
and he asked an interesting question.
He asked, why is it that authoritarian regimes
around the world attack girls' education?
Why does tyranny begin by trying to intimidate
and silence little girls?
And he said, it's because women who are educated
don't sit quietly.
And you, all of you are beloved sage hens.
You've not sat here quietly.
And let me tell you, there are people around this world
who are afraid of you.
They're afraid of who you are
and they're afraid of who you will become.
Pomona students don't just build a new world,
Pomona students question it.
You ask why the world is the way it is.
And then you ask what it is you can do with your minds
and your hearts and your hands to make it better.
And over the next, God willing, many, many long years
in which you bless this earth,
I know you will make it better
in ways big and small.
From your hands a more beautiful, a more just,
and a more loving world will be born.
And it is with this that I charge you.
Believe in yourselves and believe in each other,
believe in your power to make this world shine bright
and see the world around you and the people in it
with affection and with respect.
Class of 2023, I love you.
We all love you and we'll miss you.
Congratulations.
(audience cheering and applause)
(upbeat music)