search BFS site

WEEKS of JUNE 23 & 30, 2003
@BFS! archives

Brooklyn Friends School Commencement Speech
June 11, 2003

by David R. Jones

I’ve just gone through multiple graduations and graduation speeches over the past 12 months for my two children—my daughter Vanessa from high school and my son Russell from college. Because of that, I’ll try to avoid some—but probably not all - the mistakes of speakers who seem intent in making this experience somewhere on the continuum between root canal and an SAT review course.

My low point was a college graduation speech by our late beloved Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood who spoke to the graduating seniors of Dartmouth—and their parents—in 85-degree heat for over 40 minutes in the same voice he used for my children when they were four years old. It would have been effective torture in any “R” rated war movie.

So I promise to keep this short, and if I talk down to anyone here just throw things—but because of my age, make them something soft.

I want to thank all of you for inviting me here tonight. My address revolves around two themes that wouldn’t have occurred to me absent your invitation. The first around how one makes it through one’s childhood—hopefully to independence—and the second, the parallels between the societal challenges faced by my generation in the 60’s and yours.

At the outset, let me inform you that while not a graduate of Brooklyn Friends, I am an alumnus, having attended for about four years in the late 50’s and early 60’s. And trying to remember my years at the school really leads to my first topic.

When you reach serious middle age like me, you have a tendency to look back on your secondary education through a lens of what you accomplished. (You tend to leave out the setbacks in a kind of physic self-defense.) So 6th grade, high school, all are seen from the vantage point of hindsight and where you got to. Statements like, “In doing my senior orals in high school, I realized that I was destined to be a civil rights lawyer” come to mind. But if one pushes one’s memory a bit, I for one marvel that I survived the period at all.

I was a grade school teacher’s nightmare, unable to focus, always fidgeting (if my memory serves me well, tapping my foot incessantly and rocking back and forth while reading). I spent much of my time in the principal’s office either for academic or behavioral problems, or both, reaching a crescendo on a spring day like yesterday involving climbing out of a second floor classroom window and dropping down to a grassy strip outside and laying spread eagle on my back looking up at the sky.

After every parent-teacher conference, my mother used to take me to lunch on Fulton Street at Schraft’s. Now you graduates probably never heard of Schraft’s restaurant, but I’m throwing it in as a bit of Brooklyn nostalgia for your parents and relatives. Suffice to say, the wait staff wore white gloves and cut the crusts off sandwich bread. At the restaurant, my mother spent most of the time reassuring me that I could do the work and setting up a schedule for her and my father to help me with reading, math, and virtually every other subject.

It seems funny in retrospect—but of course it wasn’t at the time. And I believe one of the reasons that I’ve chosen what I do - as an advocate on behalf of the poor and people of color and the young - is a realization that my parents and this school fought for me despite problems that then and, more significantly, today, would have a child written off as hopeless.

And how many children in some of our failing public schools and particularly our special education classes—who have as great a potential as I had and you have—are lost because of lack of resources, no family members positioned to fight for them, or just plain bad luck.

I know most of us don’t feel special all the time, and things haven’t worked out perfectly for anyone here tonight, but I think as members of a privileged few—as we are—we have an obligation to do two things—both in the Quaker tradition: not to sneer at those who haven’t been as successful because they didn’t have our options and to try our damnedest to see that particularly children are given an even shot in our society.

The inequality of education is not accidental. We are the only first world country that allows rich communities to get better public education than poor ones. For example, in New York State, the difference in state funding for education for the richest and the poorest school districts can be more than $10,000 per student per year. Accidental? No, it’s the law.

In San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez, a 1973 case, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote a dissent to a decision where the majority of the Court decided that unequal funding of urban and suburban school districts, based upon their disparate tax bases, was constitutional. In his dissent, Marshall asserted: “The right of every American to an equal start in life” had been tossed out. It is one of the critical issues facing your generation, just as it did mine.

And that gets me to my second theme, which arises out of another Brooklyn Friends engagement. Everyone knows that Friends is unique among high schools in that it provides an education that develops intellectual abilities as well as ethical and social values to support a productive life. It is also unique in that it requires its commencement speakers to meet with members of the graduating class. After surviving that meeting, I think it should be a requirement for all commencement speakers. It should be viewed as a kind of trial marriage where both sides have the option to run out the door before the speaker makes a horse’s ass of him or her self.

Suffice to say that I spent 10 to 15 minutes trying to justify myself when I made the mistake of asserting that my generation had a different set of challenges than today’s. One of the class jumped down my throat saying I was absolutely wrong—that the challenges of the 60’s generation and today are very alike. She’s right.

My second theme is the extraordinary parallels between then and now and, in fact, that the struggles we were engaged in then are part and parcel of the same set of issues you are facing today. This is unfinished business.

I think you know them as well as I do.

In addition to the problems of educational inequality that I’ve mentioned, there are the questions of war and peace presented by Vietnam and the current conflicts in the Middle East—and American intervention.

The growing gap between the rich and the poor both in America and abroad. Despite the War on Poverty and the Peace Corps begun in the 60’s, we have higher levels of income inequality than ever before—40,000 homeless New Yorkers housed every night in city shelters.

The struggle against racism in America that really framed my adolescence, but still remains as a major obstacle to a just America—residential segregation by race is worse now than it was in 1954.

And, of course, on top of those issues your generation has ones we should have addressed involving discrimination against women and the destruction of our natural environment.

How or when you go about dealing with these issues, I can’t direct you; not even which one to focus on. Because the issue of what part of societal change you pursue is unique to the individual—like fingerprints. And the fire for it has to come from within—because you just can’t make it up.

What I can urge is you look for it—search for it—whether that’s a protest involving cleaning up a waste dump, or helping to feed the hungry, or circulating petitions against the war, or against sexism or racism—do it. It will have to fit into your priorities of college, meeting people, getting jobs, becoming self-sufficient, building a family.

But now, looking back over 40 years, what I remember most is not the courses in constitutional law, but rather the March on Washington; not how well I did in Geology 101 (I passed), but meeting Malcolm X; not even my first oral argument as a lawyer on behalf of Shell Oil, but kicking off Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign on college campuses in Connecticut, just before he was assassinated.

Everyone has these images of social action as some sort of glorious self-sacrifice, and that is part of it. But think of the very best rock concert or party you’ve ever attended. As many of you already know, when you take on social action for a righteous cause, it’s so much better. The feeling of not sitting back, but trying to bring about human good against resistance is one feeling you shouldn’t miss. It will last you a lifetime. I think the need must be hardwired into our DNA. It’s just that some manage to suppress it.

Let me close with this. In 1901, Mark Twain sent a card to the Young People’s Society of Greenpoint Presbyterian Church here in Brooklyn. If you haven’t already guessed, I’m a rabid Brooklynite. In it he wrote, “Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.” I think this class is going to astonish everyone. Best of luck. I look forward to joining all of you on the front lines for progressive social change in the years to come. Thank you.

back to @BFS!
@BFS! archives