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

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Each one reach one until all are receiving an education.

Each one reach one until all are productive citizens of their countries and our world.

Each one reach one until the weak are strong and the sick are healed.

Each one reach one until your problem is mine, until mine is yours.

Just as it is not enough to ignore evil, it is not enough to just do good. It is not enough to feed the hungry and house the homeless, commendable as these acts are; we must seek to eradicate the causes of hunger and homelessness.

It may be helpful to think of it like this.

Two men sitting by a river see, to their great surprise, a helpless baby floating by. They rescue the child, and to their horror, another baby soon comes floating down the stream. When that child is pulled to safety, another baby comes along. As one man dives in the river a third time, the other rushes upstream.

"Come back," yells the man in the water. "We must save this baby!"

"You save it," the other yells back. "I'm going to find out who is throwing babies in the river and make them stop."

In days past, miners used to carry canaries to warn them when the underground air was becoming too toxic to breathe.

Today too many people want to put gas masks on the canaries instead of eliminating the poison in the air.

Too many want to put life preservers on the babies instead

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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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tuition -- a steer -- to a rope and walked 100 miles across the state of Kentucky to Berea College, and Berea took him in. Sixteen years later he graduated, and the college asked him to deliver the commencement address.

He said then:

The pessimist from his corner looks out on the world of wickedness and sin and blinded by all that is good or hopeful in the condition and progress of the human race, bewails the present state of affairs and predicts woeful things for the future.

In every cloud he beholds a destructive storm, in every flash of lightning an omen of evil, and in every shadow that falls across his path a lurking foe.

He forgets that the clouds also bring life and hope, that the lightning purifies the atmosphere, that shadow and darkness prepare for sunshine and growth, and that hardships and adversity nerve the race, as the individual, for greater efforts and grander victories.5

"Greater efforts and grander victories." That was the promise made by a former slave more than 100 years ago. That is the promise you must seek to honor as you leave this institution and these ceremonies and enter the world beyond these grounds.

We wish you the best.

-0-

(Julian Bond has been Chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors since February, 1998. He is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Government at American University in Washington, DC and a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia.)

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1. "Appeal to the United Nations Found Meeting on Behalf of the Caribbean Peoples", The West Indies National Council, including representatives from the West Indies and the Guianas and British Honduras, New York, (April, 1945).

2. King, Martin Luther Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? at 167 (1967).

3. Id. at 170

4. Id. at 89-90

5. Bond, James, Commencement Address, Berea College (1892).

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Graduation?

"Young people, you stand tonight as a way-station on the road to freedom. Behind you are generations of people ... who have fought the god good fight ..."

-"The Road To Freedom", commencement address at Washington Parish Training College, Star Creek, La (May 5, 1935).

H. M. Bond

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