President Barack Obama said in a commencement speech on Saturday that US race relations have improved over the last three decades, but that significant work still needs to be done.
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“When I was a graduate, the main black hero on TV was Mr T. Rap and hip-hop were counter-culture”, he said.
He added that the country “also happens to be better off than when I took office, but that’s a longer story”. “Change requires more than righteous anger – it requires change and it requires a program and it requires organizing”, he said, noting the growth of young activist movements including “black Twitter” and Black Lives Matter.
Under overcast sky and the constant threat of rain, Obama told the graduates and their families that there were no black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and few black judges when he received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1983. “No, my election did not create a post-racial society”.
The president reminded graduates that their blackness gives them unique insight into the struggle against inequality and racial injustice.
Many issues still require the attention and work of the class of 2016, the president said.
Piksel provided fully redundant encoding and delivery paths, its live streaming video platform, and hosted the video and landing page for Howard University. Obama’s speech marked a significant moment for a school founded just after the Civil War and steeped in the long history of the drive for civil rights for African Americans. He will speak to students at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, later in May; and he will speak at the US Air Force Academy in June.
The crowd at Howard greeted Obama with a warm embrace.
The 54-year-old president also told graduates that a lot of them were just starting high school when he was first elected to the White House.
Later, the president expanded on the responsibility that comes with growing up black in the United States. “Even when you are 100 percent right, this is hard to explain sometimes, you can be completely right and you are still going to engage folks who disagree with you”.
Michelle Obama said the country saw “how swiftly progress can hurdle backwards” when Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed a sweeping religious freedom law that critics contend allows anti-LGBT discrimination. “There is no one way to be Black…There is no straight jacket, there is no litmus test for authenticity”.
The president praised Howard alum, author and Atlantic national correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates, who won the National Book Award for “Between the World and Me”, an epistolary memoir about being black in America, and wrote a 2016 series of Marvel’s comic Black Panther.
He added that the late musical artist Prince “blew up categories”. People didn’t know what Prince was doing.
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President Barak Obama is the sixth sitting president to deliver the keynote address at Howard University.
