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of stopping them from being thrown into a deep river.

Martin Luther King sent the same message in 1967:

... the Negro needs not only love but also justice. It is not enough to say, "We love Negroes, we have many Negro friends." ... Love that does not satisfy justice is not love at all. It is merely a sentimental affection, little more than what one would have for a pet.⁴

As you go forward from here, you must be prepared to offer not only love but justice, not gas masks but pure air, not swimming lessons, but an end to deliberately throwing babies away.

This is not easy work, but you know what hard work is -- that is why you are here today.

I urge you to continue to do and be your best -- and to apply your talents not just to bettering yourselves, but to bettering your world. Not just to doing social service, but to bringing about social justice.

I am the grandson of a slave.

My grandfather was born in Kentucky in 1863, and because of this, freedom didn't come for him until slavery was outlawed in 1865.

His slave mother had been given away as a wedding present to a new bride, and when that bride became pregnant, her husband -- that's my great-grandmother's owner and master -- exercised his right to take his wife's slave as his mistress. That union produced two children -- one of them my grandfather.

At age 15, barely able to read and write, he hitched his

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