- Because it was illegal for them to practice religion.
Slaves would use a traditional kettle to pray.
Prayers for freedom were often whispered into the kettles
which were kept underneath the floorboards of slave cabins
to keep them out of sight of their masters.
Every time I walk through Wadsworth gate
and see the plaque of those four lone enslaved
that lived here at Harvard I'm gobsmacked.
I am thunder struck
at what it means to be a scion of that living
of that horror, of that opportunity
for each and every one of us to make them proud.
I wipe their names clean with my fingers
because they're my entry point to this place.
And I honor them as forefathers and foremothers
and forebearers that helped you
from the sorted debris of our collective history,
they establish this magical place.
But as I see them there on that wall, I'm without words.
What do you say to them, right?
To these fighters of battles long dead?
What do I say to you?
Who prayed for me with whip flesh
as I am left to hold down the fort of this history
in your name.
I imagine that in these cast iron kettles in the ground
that they answer us back.
I imagine that they say to us
that we the living stand under a unique duty
to the deceased
that we say as much every time we pledge allegiance
to a flag or honor our veterans homecoming.
We stand under a unique duty to bring their bodies
back out from yonder,
back out from the torrential rain of history's long night
and finally under the eaves of justice,
their mere existence on this campus
should let each and every one of us know
that in every profession at every school
we have a moral lecture to clear
and something to make right
from the disregarding of Henrietta Lacks' rights
in the field of medicine to the law,
failing Fred Korematsu to the clergy,
giving Richard Fuller a platform.
We the living are lucky,
if we got a chance to take down those legacies
and dismantle them.
We are lucky if we happened upon careers
and an institution that lends our voices,
and unrivaled strength to call to account
those who would seek to deny and seek to delay justice
to the children of the dispossessed.
We do well to remember that in 1973,
it was doctors from this university
that led the charge in declassifying homosexuality
as a mental illness.
That it was a social scientist from this university
that coined the term intersectionality
because we are home to the first school of public health
in the history of this nation
and this country's oldest urban planning program.
So make no mistake.
Harvard has always been an intrepid project
in the business of doing new things
as well as hard ones.
Hold my hand.
It'll be difficult.
But as James Baldwin says,
if we do not falter in our duty now,
we may be able handful that we are
to end the racial nightmare and finally achieve our country.
But as he admonishes a few lines later
if we do not know there everything.
Everything, then the fulfillment of that prophecy
recreated in a song of a slave is upon us.
My directive to you
on this beautiful morning is simple.
Place the force of your intellect
somewhere where it might disrupt a system
and shake more fairness loose.
We need you!
I need you to forego this spirit of disempowerment.
The work we have to do in this decade
is too precious for your timidity.
The mountains we have to climb
and this our moment of history
are too steep for soft shoes.
The Titans we have to shout down in this moment
have grown too loud for quiet voices.
Now it's the time for which you have been made
in all your earth staggering brilliance.
Now was the time for which your ancestors, black, white
and neither laid down their deeds,
knowing they could do no more,
so that you might do better.
The foreign slaved Bilhah, Venus, Titus and Juba
live lives worthy of their service
live lives that make right the sin of their bondage.
Because if you love this place,
my God, if you love this place,
you have to, live lives that carry the name of Harvard,
like a benevolent torch into the next century.
That we may not only be the bearers of great privilege
but the breakers of powerful yolks as well.