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Commencement Remarks by Ernie Green Managing Director Lehman Brothers Worcester Academy Worcester, Massachusetts June 3, 2006

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Commencement Remarks by Ernie Green Managing Director Lehman Brothers Worcester Academy Worcester, Massachusetts June 3, 2006 “Know Your Past … Shape your Future” Commencement Remarks By Ernie Green Managing Director Lehman Brothers Worcester Academy Worcester, Massachusetts June 3, 2006 Graduates of the class of 2006 – veterans of one of the toughest jobs you’ll ever have. Applying to college. I’m not just your speaker, today – but the parent of an eighteen year old. I watched my daughter and her friends work on those applications. Rewrite essays. Run to the Post Office to mail them at midnight on the last day. They had parents staying home waiting for letters – one of her friends applied to 14 schools. They got turned down. They got waitlisted. I know what you’ve been through. I know what your parents have been through. But I also know what it’s like to see an acceptance letter. We all deserve to celebrate today! Like all commencement speakers, I want to talk about your future, today. But first I want to talk about the past. Because when I went on your website, I learned something new about a story I’ve known for a long time. It’s about a black man in Atlanta, Georgia, who about eighty years ago decided he needed to go to college. He wanted to be a minister. He could preach. But he could barely read. Even though he was already an adult he taught himself to read and write – but not well enough. When he took the admission tests for the local college, the registrar handed him the results, and said, coldly, “Look, you’re just not college material.” He’d failed them all. He could have given up. Instead, he walked out, marched past a secretary into the office of the college President – and poured out his heart. He talked about how much he wanted an education. He talked about how hard he’d tried. “Give me a chance,” he said. The President just listened. Finally, the man gave up. He walked out in despair. But as he was leaving the campus the secretary came running up. She held out a note. “Take this to the registrar,” she said. And soon a disgusted registrar was reading a note ordering him to admit to Morehouse College, in Atlanta, Michael King – who would graduate, become a great minister -- and have a son we know as Martin Luther King. Now …I tell you this, not because of the King family – but partly because of the Morehouse President. His name was John Hope. Yes, he’s on your website. I’m sure many of you know that he began his studies here at Worcester Academy – and that exactly a hundred years ago this month, John 1 Hope became the first African-American President of Morehouse College – and a leader in the fight for equality. But those titles don’t tell you the chances he took to get there. And they don’t tell you something else. They don’t tell you how unusual his headmaster, was -- Dr. Daniel Webster Abercrombie. He’s not just someone whose name is on a plaque outside Dr. Morse’s house. He was someone with vision. He saw the promise in this young black man at Worcester at a time when few good schools would educate African-Americans, north or south. Daniel Abercrombie defied the customs of his time to see that John Hope got the education he deserved. So I’m here to tell you that you graduate not just from a fine school – but from one that’s changed history. I’m here to tell you that like John Hope who was studying here 120 years ago – what you learn here can help you change history, too. Now – Neal’s right. I don’t go around talking about the old days all the time. But I can’t expect you to understand why I feel so passionately about being here today unless I talk about that, today. Because I didn’t learn about Jim Crow from a history book. I lived it. Let me paint a picture for you. I’m six years old. I’m in a store. It’s blisteringly hot. I need a drink. I head for the water fountain. But before I get there, a store attendant blocks my path. I had made a terrible mistake. Tried to drink at a “whites only” fountain. This grown up couldn’t let a six year old boy get a drink. A while later, my family goes out to hear a concert at a public park in Little Rock. A policeman stops us. “Off limits to colored people,” he barks. My Dad fought for this country in World War I. Turned away at a public park! Then there was the time my grandfather thought he would vote in the Democratic Primary. He had the nerve to show up at a polling place. Not only did the officials turn him away -- they pulled a gun on him. Oh – and education. There were those who argued we had a “separate but equal” system in Little Rock schools. We knew the truth. We drove by the new, white schools to our own battered buildings. We got textbooks only when they were too old for the white schools. We knew that to keep black people separate was to keep us behind. So we paid attention when that heroic Brown family in Topeka, Kansas, sued the school system to break it down. We celebrated when on May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court ruled segregation was unconstitutional. We knew the struggle wasn’t over. In the South, segregationists called May 17 “Black Monday.” They were bitter. They were bitter enough to bomb Martin Luther King’s house over in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott inspired by Rosa Parks. The Kings escaped injury. Emmett Till wasn’t so lucky. He was a young man from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi. He was fourteen -- my age! But he had said something to a white woman. “Hey babe,” he said. For that, a group of men kidnapped him, tortured him, and shot him. The killers were found. It took an all-white jury an hour to find them not guilty. 2 Did that scare me and my friends? You better believe it. But one day our NAACP President, a woman named Daisy Bates, knocked on my family’s door. She asked if I would be one of what Neal called “The Little Rock Nine.” I couldn’t say no. That was when I and the other kids found out first-hand how bitter those things could be. Historians have written about a lot of what we went through in Arkansas: how Governor Orville Faubus ordered the National Guard to block our way. How Governor Faubus predicted that if we were allowed into the school, “blood will run in the streets.” How angry white crowds stood outside the school each day to make sure we were kept out. How one night a rock crashed through Daisy Bates’ window with a note wrapped around it. “Stone this time. Dynamite next.” And finally: how President Eisenhower -- not a big fan of integration -- decided he had to put a thousand troops from the 101st Airborne in Little Rock to protect us. I’ll never forget that day. We were loaded into a station wagon. There were the jeeps in front of us and behind us filled with soldiers. I remember turning to one of my friends and saying, “I guess we’re going to get into school, today.” And they brought us past hundreds of screaming, spitting, swearing adults inside those school doors. But what about when the soldiers left? That was the toughest time for us. Some say, looking back at the nine of us, oh, how heroic. In fact, there wasn’t a morning when we didn’t wake up scared stiff. How could you not be scared? We got bomb threats, phone calls, letters that claimed we would be lynched. After gym class the white students would steam up the locker room so no one could see, and flick wet towels at me and my friend, Terrence. I’ll never forget one time in lunch line when a boy was calling out insult after insult to Minnijean Brown. I was going to suggest she tell him to stop. Minnijean had a better idea. Dumped a bowl of chili on his head. With the perspective of almost a half-century – I admire that. Now – let me make something clear. Most people in Little Rock did not want to see us hurt -- even most white people. They wanted us to fail. They wanted us to flunk. They wanted to be able to say, “That Ernie Green -- he couldn’t understand algebra.” We weren’t going to let that happen. Our families weren’t. Our community wasn’t. And we nine students especially weren’t. We had a lot of help. All the time those Jim Crow laws were trying to convince us we had no value, our black teachers, our churches, our Boy Scout leaders became a network of support. They let us know we were as good as anyone else. So if there was anything heroic about that time, it wasn’t just what people saw on TV. It was what went on each night when we opened our books. For when the TV cameras were off, we worked on. Do a math problem -- as well as anybody else. Write a paper -- as well as anybody else. Learn history -- as well as anybody else. 3 That’s what led to that day in June when, with Michael King’s son Martin sitting beside my family, I got set to get my diploma -- the first black person to graduate from Little Rock Central.
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