In honor of the Juneteenth holiday, President Luke Robins will make the following statement at the college’s 60th annual commencement:
Juneteenth Graduation Statement
This is a special time not only because it’s graduation day for our students but because tomorrow is June 19th. This is the second year that Juneteenth has been recognized as a national holiday. As many of you know, June 19, 1865, was the day that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, received word that they had been freed – two years after that freedom was declared through the Emancipation Proclamation.
Juneteenth is thus a holiday that recognizes not only the end of slavery but also the long ongoing fight for social justice. It recognizes that the work is not done and that the dream has often been “deferred”. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. called the American ideal that all people “be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” a “promissory note” that has not been paid to African Americans – a “bad check” written with insufficient funds.
However, as Dr. King said, “We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. […] Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”
Juneteenth is a time to recognize the ongoing effects of history and the ongoing effort required to achieve real change. We believe the work of the college is the work of equity. We believe that within this shared educational space we can continue to think critically about our actions, our processes, and our assumptions in order to bring about positive change in our students’ lives and to be a model of equitable thought and action for others. We commit to this dream of equity in relationship with our communities and our students, and we ask you to join us in that commitment.
