Commencement Address at St. George's University, [Grenada?], 2000 May 12 (Doc 1 of 2)

St. George's University 2000 Commencement May 12, 2000 Copyright 2000 by Julian Bond

Chancellor, members of the faculty, administrators, parents, family members -- and most importantly, graduates -- it is a high honor to have been asked to speak here today.

Ceremonies like this one inevitably call to mind my own graduation from high school many years ago. The man who delivered the commencement address spoke -- without notes -- for almost three hours. Sitting in the hot afternoon sun, I thought, "Someday I'll get a chance to do that."

Luckily for you, this isn't it.

It is, however, the occasion for congratulations to you and for reflections from me. And it is the occasion for you to think back on what you have learned here, and how that learning will carry you forward from this place and time.

Your curriculum has been varied ,but I trust you have learned to avoid what Ghandi called the seven sins - wealth without works, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle.

These are lessons which ought to guide us all as our world grows smaller and distant neighbors become closer friends.

If we were to shrink the world's population to a village of 100 people, with existing ratios remaining the same, that village would look like this:

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-- there would be 57 Asians, 21 Euopeans, 14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south, and 8 Africans;

-- 52 would be female and 48 male, 70 nonwhite and 30 white, 70 non-Christian and 30 Christian;

-- 6 of the 100 people would own 59% of all the wealth in the world and all 6 would be from the United States;

-- 80 of the 100 would live in substandard housing,

-- 70 would be unable to read, 50 would suffer from malnutrition;

-- one would have a college education.

This not only gives new meaning to the concept of a small world, it also gives a sense of your importance in it and to it as you officially join an elite within the globe -- the community of educated women and men. As you go forward from this place, I hope that you will do well, but I also hope that you will do good.

More than half a century ago last month, in April, 1945, the West Indies National Council issued an appeal to the founding conference of the United Nations.

On behalf of "the Caribbean peoples" they asked for "the adoption at last of those democratic principles and the establishment of effective means of enforcement which will enable them to realize their long-sought goal and inalienable human rights to freedom, security, and self-government with all the

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liberty-loving nations of the world."¹

These are the rights, they said, of people everywhere.

As we honor you graduates today for what you have achieved, so should we honor those who have gone before you to make the world a better place.

Those who saw a need and took action, who saw a lack of humanity but never lost their own, who persevered in the face of great obstacles, who understood the importance of hope.

Those who have promoted peace in Northern Ireland, who have battled for the rights of indigenous peoples, who have sought to ban landmines, who have worked on behalf of democracy. Those who have dedicated themselves to enhancing human freedom and advancing human rights.

These are the ancestors we must honor; these are the present day heroines and heroes we must celebrate.

You graduate at an auspicious time.

The year I was set to graduate from college, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35th President of the United States. It was a time of hope and optimism, a time when all things seemed possible, when a bright young President promised the nation would go anywhere, fight any foe and bear any burden in freedom's name.

A generation much like yours believed that President's injunction and helped to organize a massive nonviolent movement that saw an end to American apartheid, giving life to other movements of oppressed in the United States and across the world.

There had been protests before against this evil system, in

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the courts and in the streets, but in the 1960s the protests swelled into a collective force. When the United States Supreme Court struck a blow against segregation's legality, a vast army of nonviolent protesters rose up to challenge its morality as well.

Students like yourselves began accepting jail without bail when they sat down at lunch counters to stand up for their human rights.

They attacked segregated travel on busses with their bodies and segregated ballot boxes across the South as well.

From the first, it was a people's movement.

A voteless people had voted with their bodies and their feet and had paved the way for other social protest. The anti-war movement of the 1960s drew its earliest soldiers from the southern freedom army. The reborn movement for women's rights took many of its cues and much of its momentum from the southern movement for civil rights.

Your own Mary King - my colleague in the movement - was an architect of both those struggles; the battle against segregation in the Southern United States and the battle for women's liberation which took inspiration from the black freedom struggle. While that movement sought an end to American apartheid, it did not ignore the world beyond the borders of the United States. As Martin Luther King wrote at the time, "Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites of Negroes if it

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means equality in a world society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war."²

"The United States Negro," King continued, "with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers in Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, ... is moving with a great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice."³

If Martin Luther King was alive today, Mary King would remind him that sisters fight beside their brothers too.

Today, the struggle for liberty goes on -- here in the Caribbean, in every part of the United States, across the surface of the earth.

You are leaving this university as members of the class of 2000 -- on the brink of a new century, a time of great hope and promise.

There is today a sense of new possibilities, however overwhelming the world's problems may appear or however grim the headlines may read.

Wherever you go from here -- if there are hungry minds or bodies nearby, you can feed them. If there is a wealth gap, you can close it. If there is racial injustice, you can attack and destroy it.

An early attempt at eliminating illiteracy in the southern United States developed a slogan that was also their method -- "Each One Teach One" until all could read.

Perhaps as our world shrinks, we can adopt the slogan and method -- "Each One Reach One."

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