Commencement Address at Morehouse College

"They believe -- and I believe -- that neither race nor class nor age nor geography -- should limit one’s participation. That’s why we say and Congress says that the poor should participate in the War Against Poverty. That’s why we send Negroes to Indian reservations and Appalachia – and whites to work in Negro slums."
Atlanta, GA • May 31, 1966

Last fall, Yale University announced a startling new approach to college education. Yale announced that students would have a voice in the selection and evaluation of the faculty. For the first time in Yale’s history — 250 years — student opinion would be sought by the University. This is no longer unique. It’s fast becoming commonplace but it signifies a most important new concept in American education — student participation. The lowest person in the academic world is being heard by the highest. Ph.D’s, LLD’s, MA’s, ‘college presidents, are listening to young students with no degrees at all.

And that concept of student participation in academic affairs is very much like our concept in the Peace Corps and in the War Against Poverty.

We want - and Congress wants - everyone to participate in the war against poverty, hunger, and disease - here at home and overseas.

  • That’s why Congress created the Peace Corps.
  • That’s why Congress created VISTA - our domestic Peace Corps operating here in the U.S.A.
  • That’s why last summer we called for volunteers for Project Head Start - 200,000 strong.
  • That’s why we are financing Project “Upward Bound” here at Morehouse.
  • That’s why we called for volunteers for Job Corps.
  • That’s why we say that the poor should participate in the War Against Poverty.

Many people have laughed and scoffed at the idea of asking the poor to participate in a War Against Poverty. The cynics say:

“Why ask the poor for their opinions about poverty? If the poor knew how to conquer poverty they wouldn’t be poor!”

Or as one man expressed it: “To invite the poor into the War Against Poverty is like asking a private to take over for General Westmoreland in Viet-Nam.”

Some of the trustees and faculty at Yale said the same thing. They said “What do mere students know about education?” “Students are not qualified to pass on the merits or demerits of professors.” “Students, like children, should be seen and not heard. They should study and learn. Like privates in the Army, they should do as they are told until they get their degrees and qualify to join the Faculty and Administration – the ‘Generals’ if you will, of the education world.”

Well, Yale said “no.” Students do have a genuine role to fulfill.., not of administration ... not of teaching ... not of fundraising ... not as trustees ... but as important participants in the world of education.

In the Peace Corps, in VISTA, in the Job Corps, in the Neighborhood Youth Corps, in Project Upward Bound, in the Community Action Neighborhood Centers here in Atlanta, we in the Federal Government are trying to say the same thing.

We want participants — volunteers — not draftees. We want Americans who are willing to help themselves and their fellowman advance into a better and safer world.

That’s why in the War Against Poverty we give no handouts - only a hand-up. That’s why our advertising for Job Corps - our slogan - says: “WORK, LEARN, EARN.” That’s why we have no “free-loaders” in the Peace Corps or in the War Against Poverty.

That’s why the Secretary of Defense, Bob McNamara, just ten days ago, called upon all Americans to serve their nation for two years - not sit and wait to be drafted.

That’s why we need you —

I realize, of course, how much we ask of you - When I say we need you now for the Peace Corps and for the War Against Poverty. I know you have excellent chances for good jobs, financial security, scholarships and fellowships. But Morehouse men today face an even greater challenge. Your choice — today — is not one between good and evil. The choice is not one between doing good and doing nothing.

The choice is more subtle. Because almost anything you do will constitute a contribution.

Almost with certainty, you will make some kind of breakthrough, personally and for your race!

You will integrate a profession, or a school, or an institution or business, or an agency.
You will be the first to be accepted in some club,
or the first to move into a certain neighborhood,
or the first to send your children to some school,
or the first to be invited to some social event.

You are specially blessed — and specially burdened — because you cannot help but make a contribution.

But the real choice you face is whether to be mostly a beneficiary of the battles of the past — the battle for integration, for equality, for civil rights - or whether to press beyond civil rights to demand the right to participate, the right to contribute to the common good, the right to share in the bad as well as the good in our American life, the right to have a voice, the right to assume common responsibilities.

Let me give you an example.

A Morehouse graduate, Albert Smith, from Atlanta, is working in Seffner, Florida. Smith is a VISTA Volunteer — working in the domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps — helping migrant agricultural workers.

With the help of some volunteer college students, Smith started a tutorial program for 100 children. His home is their classroom.

He has set up a recreation program and organized a youth council.

The council has launched a major clean-up drive to pick up accumulated trash. One of Smith’s latest achievements is to help collect garbage with a burrowed truck.

When Morehouse boasts about its noteworthy alumni, when you point out that one out of every eighteen Negroes with PhD’s went to Morehouse as undergraduates, you probably do not list — as an achievement — that one of your alumni is collecting garbage in Seffner, Florida. Too many Negroes have been doomed to collecting garbage for too long for Morehouse to brag about a college graduate collecting garbage today.

But I suggest that twenty years from now the college graduate who served in the Peace Corps or VISTA will be ahead of the ones who played it cool and safe.

The first Negro assigned to an Indian reservation was Wilease Fields, a graduate of Maryland State University from Elkridge, Maryland.

She is working with the Pima Maricopa Indians in Arizona. Wilease Fields has helped put a new roof on the community center, organized recreation clubs, secured the release of a teenage girl from jail and arranged for her to be readmitted to school, started a thrift shop run by elderly Indians, set up a pre-school program, and is now actively working with two gangs of young Indians in an attempt to curb juvenile delinquency.

When asked how she felt about being on a reservation, Wilease Fields replied “Just like the rest of the Indians, only a little darker.”

Bob Terry is another Negro VISTA Volunteer — he is a graduate of the University of Minnesota where he majored in Anthropology.

Terry is working in a mixed Negro and Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn. Every morning Terry travels through the community on a sanitation inspection trip, checking to see whether the garbage has been picked up, and whether the building and sanitary code is being enforced.

This is an area of New York, slated for demolition.

That means that no one will put any money into the slums there — the landlord just wants to get what he can, in income, and spend nothing — and the city wants to demolish the buildings.

But in the meantime, and the meantime can stretch on for many years, people must live there. So Terry organized block organizations that have begun a massive rat and roach extermination campaign.

Terry is also a Karate champion. He teacher Judo and Karate to men and boys and has started a special beauty culture program for women.

Terry could have had a big fellowship in cultural Anthropology — or he could be teaching at some college or university.

But instead, he is a Karate teacher and sanitation inspector. More important, he is helping to reshape a community. He is participating in the remaking of our society. He is an advocate for the poor.

The problem of what to do, of how to fulfill moral responsibilities – is framed most clearly in a letter from Henry Thompson, a Negro VISTA Volunteer from Fairfield, Alabama, who is now working in Appalachia.

Thompson writes:

“I had never been in a place where people hadn’t seen a Negro before. Those people have been isolated in the hollows for so long that they have never known racial prejudice. In fact, they didn’t even know much about their own race.”

You may say: What is a young Negro doing in Appalachia helping out a bunch of poor whites. He ought to be in Alabama!

If it’s any consolation — there are plenty of VISTA Volunteers in Alabama too. Some of them are living in Hobson City — an all Negro community. And these Volunteers are white.

You can call them just a bunch of neurotic, guilt-ridden white liberals, but I don’t agree. One girl, Ann Klein, from Burlington, Iowa, has organized a tutorial program and a pre-school program. She is teaching sharecroppers to read and write.

I don’t think she’s particularly neurotic when she writes:

“I didn’t mind the rats in my room. It was the rats in the piano that bothered me.”

Some of you might say she should be working in the white community in Appalachia — and Henry Thompson should be back down in Alabama. We say “no”. We say that both of them are responding to a call, a movement which goes beyond the issue of racial discrimination — a movement which calls for participation regardless of race, color, or creed – a movement which demands a chance to reshape American life. They applied to VISTA — they got assigned where the action is — without regard to race.

They don’t want to close their eyes to evil or injustice or disenfranchisement in any form.

They believe — and I believe — that neither race nor class nor age nor geography — should limit one’s participation.

That’s why we say and Congress says that the poor should participate in the War Against Poverty.

That’s why we send Negroes to Indian reservations and Appalachia – and whites to work in Negro slums.

That’s why in the Peace Corps we don’t just send Negroes to African nations, and Catholics to Catholic communities.

That’s why the Mothers of poor children are being hired as teacher aides in pre-school programs.

That’s why we’re running an Upward Bound program so that teenagers coming out of poverty can aspire to college.

That’s why you don’t have to have a college degree to get into VISTA or the Peace Corps. We don’t want to say to a person that because of his age, or race, or background that it is fit for him to contribute only in a certain way.

We’re not trying to turn Morehouse graduates into garbage collectors. We are not trying to turn all whites into civil rights workers. Or civil rights workers into middle class liberals!

Last month a Sioux Indian named, Clyde Warrior, asked this question about “Upward Bound": “Are you trying to wash students in white paint?”

We replied: “No.”

And we’re not trying to wash students in black paint either. We are trying to get rid of paint: Not lipstick for girls - but any paint which puts people into classes — into ghettos — into groups — with fewer rights, less equality than others.

Up until recently, the student — like the poor — and like minority groups of Indians, Mexican Americans, Negroes, poor whites — have been left out. Students have had no voice and until recently no role except to learn and to wait!

This is changing now, and changing rapidly. This summer 1,000 VISTA associates will work in Appalachia.

Today your Congressman announced a $261,000 Head Start grant to educate 2,300 children this summer in Atlanta. That program needs at least one thousand volunteers right here “next door” to this campus.

There’s no student — no adult in this audience too old or too young to volunteer.

Today your country says:

Give me Volunteers for the Peace Corps
Give me Volunteers for VISTA
Give me Volunteers for the Job Corps
Give me Volunteers for Head Start
Give me Volunteers for Democracy at home and abroad.

Without the Volunteer spirit, democracy is dead. With the Volunteer spirit democracy can overcome any foe, or any problem — even the oldest enemies of them all — race prejudice, poverty, hunger and disease.

  • 200 years ago, George Washington created a United States of America out of 13 separate and rival colonial possessions of Great Britain.
  • 100 years ago, Abraham Lincoln created a United Nation out of the warring states struggling to go their individual ways.
  • Today, we face an even greater problem and challenge.

Our job is to create a united people — out of whites, blacks, Hawaiians, Indians, Eskimos, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans.

Our job will not be finished till you with your black skin can look at me with my white skin — till I with my green eyes can look at you with your dark eyes — and say, honestly, and without hesitation:

“That man is my brother.”

The Christian can and should say: “My brother in Christ;"

The Jew can and should say: “My brother in Jehovah;"

The agnostic, the atheist, can and should say - at least: - “My brother in the family of man.”

God may be dead at Emory - But let it always be said that the brotherhood of all men - white and black, rich and poor, old and young, lives on at Morehouse.

Peace requires the simple but powerful recognition that what we have in common as human beings is more important and crucial than what divides us.
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Sargent Shriver
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