On Saturday, President Biden will become the seventh sitting U.S. president to deliver a Howard University commencement address. I was present for one of them: Barack Obama’s in 2016. Lyndon B. Johnson also delivered the keynote address to my 1961 Howard graduating class when he was vice president. Which is to say, Biden will be speaking to an audience accustomed to hearing commencement speeches that touch on the country’s racial progress and that tout the federal commitment to eliminating the evils of injustice and inequality.
This year’s graduates are ending one chapter and beginning a new phase of their lives. The president needs to talk candidly to the Class of 2023 about what comes next for them and the country.
It won’t be easy. Biden’s appearance comes at a time of great division. Yes, this will be a moment to note progress. This country today is not like the United States in which my classmates and I lived, when in ’61 we first heard Johnson speak. That was a time when doors of opportunity were locked. There were no Voting Rights or Civil Rights acts. The freedom to share fully and equally in America — that stage of the battle for civil rights — was being fought for but remained far from realized.
So, yes, the country has come some distance. That needs to be acknowledged.
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But today, parts of the nation are also embroiled in strife, with damaging hatred over race and blatant bigotry over sexual orientation and gender identity — with transgender people mercilessly demonized. And the pursuit of justice is slowing. Look no further than voter suppression strategies being pursued in states bent on hindering and discouraging racial minorities, young people and poor people from voting. Where is the nation’s conscience on the gaps — economic, educational, social and political — that divide the country? It falls to Biden to tell graduates, forcefully, on which side the nation belongs.
That includes also saying where the country should stand on a former president and leading candidate for his party’s presidential nomination, who continues to make false claims about the 2020 election; who embraces the Jan. 6, 2021, criminals who stormed and defaced the U.S. Capitol; and who promises to pardon insurrectionists once he regains the White House. What should they think of a former president who boasts of producing a Supreme Court that voted to overturn Roe v. Wade? Who won’t say he supports Ukraine in its war against President Vladimir Putin’s invading Russian army?
Those stances by Donald Trump cry out for a presidential response because of the appalling reaction they received at the CNN town hall Wednesday evening in New Hampshire. Applause and laughter? Is that where America stands? Biden must speak to the graduates and the rest of the nation about that sore on the body politic.
Johnson used his last address to a Howard audience to lay out a vision beyond the historic legislative civil rights victories he would sign into law. He discussed other fronts on which his administration would work to achieve his chief goal, which was “to shatter forever not only the barriers of law and public practice but the walls which bound the condition of many by the color of his skin.” He tried, but died with that goal unfulfilled.
Obama’s 2016 message to Howard’s graduates was a call to civic action and responsibility. His commencement address was delivered at a time of heated political rhetoric and debate on race, fueled by a Trump-dominated Republican presidential primary.
Obama’s advice to graduates on dealing with expected critics: “Rebut them. Teach them. Beat them on the battlefield of ideas. And you might as well start practicing now, because one thing I can guarantee you — you will have to deal with ignorance, hatred, racism, foolishness, trifling folks. I promise you, you will have to deal with all that at every stage of your life. That may not seem fair, but life has never been completely fair. And if you want to make life fair, then you’ve got to start with the world as it is.” That was then.
Biden’s service as Howard commencement orator comes seven years later, at a time of national political, social and racial reckoning.
My class didn’t enter a nation of perfection when we graduated more than 50 years ago. And America is not one now. I hope Biden will tell graduates about to step into the world what he believes the nation is striving to become. And express to them just how, and on which side of the action, they belong.