Alma J. Powell Remarks - Kentucky State Commencement
May 8, 2010
Thank you for that gracious introduction.
It is a great privilege to be with you for this milestone event. It is invigorating to address an audience of young people who have prepared to fulfill the great promise, within each of you, that is suggested by the earning of a degree.
Every year it seems that commencement speakers try to outdo each other with flowery words or ideas that they somehow imagine have never been expressed before.
I will aim today to avoid that futile competition. I doubt that anyone will ever give a commencement address that offered better advice, or was so succinct, as one delivered by Winston Churchill during the worst of the Second World War.
He was invited to speak at his alma mater — the school he nearly once flunked out of. He was a fine writer and a wonderful speaker, and the audience settled in eagerly to listen.
But instead of the 45-minute address they expected, Churchill spoke less than 45 words. Here is the first and most famous half of his speech: “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in.”
Mr. Churchill’s speech reminds me of some of our family’s West Indian relatives. When they thought a speaker was running on too long, they would call out, “Brevity, brother, brevity!” So while I won’t attempt to raise the bar that Churchill set for economy, I will at least strive not to exceed the bounds of brevity.
You all may not be aware that I have a personal connection to Kentucky State.
I am doubly proud to be here today… not only because Kentucky State is my mother’s alma mater…but because this school began as a land-grant teacher’s college.
I come from a family of educators. My forebears recognized that education is how we make a way for ourselves.
My grandfather was born into slavery. My grandmother was born a year after slavery ended. But both of them went on to college. And their education opened a pathway for future generations of our family. Education was our Great Emancipator.
And that was also the founding rationale for Kentucky State — to train African-American teachers who could help provide a way forward for the larger community.
No matter what profession you pursue, I challenge you to carry on the spirit of that founding mission.
Just as it was for my grandparents’ generation, education is still the great emancipator. It emancipates you from a future of limited opportunities and narrowed possibilities.
It has become the fashion these days to think of education only as a personal prize — an attitude of “I got mine and whether you get yours is not my concern.”
The legacy handed down to you through Kentucky State is that your degree is not ONLY about your advancement but about the betterment of the community.
“Enter to learn. Go out to serve.” It is clear from your own service to your neighbors that those are not just words inscribed on Carver Hall. As the prophet Jeremiah wrote so long ago, you have inscribed them on your hearts.
You have shown it in so many ways:
- your involvement in mentoring — especially to children with an incarcerated parent…
- your adopting a highway…
- the work of your nursing students to increase the number of minority donors to the bone marrow registry…
- your efforts to promote reading…
- the care packages you donated and sent to our troops in Afghanistan…
- your participation in soup kitchens and women’s shelters through the United Way which is one of our Alliance partners…
- and in the way all freshmen here are involved in service as an integral part of their education.
Given all that you give, it was not surprising to me to learn that the Corporation for National and Community Service — which, by the way, is one of the founding partners of America’s Promise Alliance — named Kentucky State to its President’s Honor Roll for the second straight year.
Well deserved!
Through your service you affirm that this school that began as a teachers’ college has never stopped being a college of teachers — graduates who teach by example what it means to be a citizen and steward of our common-wealth.
I hope you will view service not as a resumé-builder but as a launching pad… a prelude to the next chapter of your life…. because we need teachers from Kentucky State, in every liberating sense of what that word means — people who prepare the next generation and who lead by example.
Many people have described education as the civil rights issue of our time. It’s true — because education is the passport to participation in the American Dream.
And yet for millions of our young people today, the dream is being overrun by a frightening reality.
Today, one in three of our students fails to graduate high school. Put another way, we lose the equivalent of an entire graduating class every three years.
For students of color, the odds of graduating from high school are just 1 in 2.
If, by accident of geography, you come up through the main public school system in one of our 50 largest cities, the chances that you’ll graduate on time are no better than the flip of a coin.
We all have a direct stake because we ALL pay an awful price when young people fail to graduate.
If the dropouts who would have been part of the Class of 2009 had stayed in school and graduated, they’d generate an additional $319 billion in wages, taxes, and productivity over their working lives.
We would save another $174 billion in healthcare costs. That’s because young people who drop out are more likely to suffer health problems and have shorter life expectancies.
If the graduation rate for just male students increased by just 5 percent, we would gain $7.7 billion in crime-related savings.
And if you STILL don’t think you have a stake in this, the other day my husband Colin showed me an article in The Economist magazine. It pointed out that the percentage of women of color who are married fell from 62% in 1970 to just 33% today.
And why is that? One big reason is that, today, one in nine MEN of color is behind bars. Close to two-thirds of the inmates of our prisons are high school dropouts.
We are ALL affected when our young people fail to graduate. It affects our ability as a nation to compete. It affects our social fabric and our common future. And it especially affects the African-American community.
That’s one reason I’m so pleased to learn about the program here at Kentucky State to get college dropouts to come back and finish their degrees. Even 20 years later, getting that degree can have a life-changing impact.
Did you know that Kentucky State originally included a high school? It was a response to a time when most students had only an eighth-grade education. Obviously, a college cannot succeed without students who are equipped to learn. Nor can a community or a country succeed when millions are left behind. We are all in this together.
For this reason, America’s Promise Alliance has embarked on the most ambitious undertaking in our history — a campaign called Grad Nation to mobilize America to end the dropout crisis.
We know that just 2,000 high schools produce roughly 50% of the dropouts in this country. For that reason, we are focusing special effort on these low-performing schools and their surrounding neighborhoods.
The job starts with better schools. But many of the roots of the dropout crisis lie in a shortage of the building block resources that children need.
We have always called these resources the Five Promises: caring adults, safe places, a healthy start, effective education, and opportunities to help others and learn the value of service.
Just 2,000 high schools — 12% of the total — account for 50% of the dropouts. So through our 400 national partners and their local affiliates, we are bringing unprecedented support to these schools and neighborhoods, in ways that change the odds, change lives and change futures.
Kentucky has already played a leading role.
When we started a national competition for the 100 Best Communities for Young People, no state had more communities represented than the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
In Louisville, we’re seeing the kind of community collaboration we’re working to build across the country. It involves the public, private and nonprofit sectors: the mayor’s office, the public schools, the United Way, the Chamber of Commerce and America’s Promise Alliance.
Together, we’re working to increase the supports students need, create multiple pathways to graduation, and provide life readiness and ongoing education. Our goal is to cut the dropout rate in half by 2020, and I believe we will get there.
There are roles for you and every member of the community. Every time you mentor a child… every time you tutor a young person after school… every time you teach someone the value of serving… every time you act as a caring adult… you become a ripple of hope and change.
It is through such individual acts that the history of this graduating class will be written. And it is through these ripples joining together into powerful currents that we will throw back the tide of failure and become a Grad Nation.
In closing, I want to come back to my mother — and your mother. I am told that it is not uncommon still to hear students and alumni refer to this school as “mother.” That’s how we refer to our old school — mostly without realizing it — when we talk of our alma mater… our loving mother.
Like a loving mother, this school has nurtured you and prepared you for the way you should go. It prepared my mother over 80 years ago, and what she gained here helped her nurture and prepare me.
And now it is your turn to pass on this marvelous legacy of Kentucky State.
If you accept that challenge, you will find that you are not leaving your alma mater behind today. You are BECOMING your alma mater. For you are called to be a loving mother — whether you’re male or female — and whether those you nurture are your own children or the children who are our common-wealth, our common future, and our common responsibility.
The story goes that Albert Einstein once was riding on a train. When the conductor came by his compartment, the great scientist — who was notoriously absent-minded — searched his pockets but couldn’t produce his ticket.
“It’s all right, Mr. Einstein,” said the train conductor. “Please don’t trouble yourself.” And he continued on down the corridor.
A while later, the conductor walked back by and noticed that Einstein was on his hands and knees, still looking for the misplaced ticket. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Einstein,” the conductor repeated. “I am sure you bought a ticket.”
“You don’t understand,” Einstein replied. “I have to find that ticket because I don’t remember where I’m going!”
Fortunately, you graduates of Kentucky State don’t have that problem. You may not yet know what’s in store for you next, or where your career will take you. But you have a loving mother who has trained you in the way you should go. The highest honor you can give her is to do the same for others.
Like Abraham the patriarch, you have been blessed so that you can be a blessing. Go be that blessing now.
Be that caring adult to the community.
Be an alma mater.
Thank you, good luck, and God bless you all.