“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. Everybody’d been clapping as each white student walked across the stage. When I walked across, nobody clapped. Not one single person. I felt good, anyway. I’d cracked the wall. Others would come through it. That was what I was there to do. My father had died by that time. I wished he could have been there – along with all my ancestors – to see that day. And I wish they could have seen what happened over the next ten years. Brown v. Board of Education, and events like mine did more than integrate schools. They made us ask: “What else can we do? There were so many areas. Getting served in a restaurant. Attending a concert. Drinking from a water fountain. Getting hired for the good jobs. In the next ten years we chipped away. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a result. A while back, I heard a story from Dale Bumpers, the longtime Arkansas Senator. It’s also in a book he wrote. It made me realize how things had changed between those who wanted an education – and those who blocked the door. Governor Faubus? The one who predicted blood would “run in the streets?” He was an ex-governor. He desperately wanted some federal money for some project he had cooked up. One day he went to Bumpers and asked for help. Bumpers said, “Well – who’s in charge of that money?” Faubus looked very sad. He said, “Ernie Green.” I confess. I enjoyed hearing that. I felt like I’d dumped a bowl of chili on his head! But do moments like that mean the hard times are over? Not on your life. Not at a time when African Americans still lag 200 points behind white Americans on the SATs. Not at a time when African American families have 1/10th the amount of family wealth – property, savings – as white families. Not at a time when studies show African Americans still face discrimination when it comes to getting a house or getting a loan – all the things that matter when you’re trying to get ahead. We don’t erase the results of slavery and discrimination just by erasing laws from the books. But erase them we must. That’s a challenge for your time. And the challenges ahead aren’t limited to race. You face a more complex world than the one I faced in 1957. We had never even heard of a place like Darfur – but we see genocide there, and we cannot allow it. We’d never heard of the HIV virus but this tiny piece of DNA encased like a veggie wrap in protein has become the most terrible epidemic in history – and we have to fight it. We couldn’t imagine a world in which terrorists would fly planes into buildings – or where the government would secretly wiretap our phones – and we have to create a solution that preserves our safety – and the Constitution.

4 We couldn’t imagine the miracles surgeons perform everyday in our hospitals – or that 45 million Americans wouldn’t even have enough health insurance to take their kids to the doctor. We have to have a country where health cannot be determined by wealth. And here’s what might be the most complex issue of all. All the debate about immigration doesn’t change what the Census Bureau’s predicted. That by the time you are in your mid-fifties, the United States will be half non-white. That’s right. To look like America, Worcester Academy’s Class of 2050 should be about half Latino, African-American, and Asian. Black, brown, yellow, white – we share the challenges that lie ahead. And we must share the job of finding solutions. Can this country so divided by race and ethnicity finally work as a team? That’s where you come in. That’s why I’m so excited to be here, today. Because when I talk to Neal and when I walk around this school and talk to other alums, I see that Worcester is not like other schools. Yes, you have homework – but you also find time to walk across the street and tutor at Union Hill. Yes, you have track practice or biology lab – but you also find time to work with Habitat for Humanity and create a home for a family that could not have one without you. Yes, you have a school that emphasizes excellence. But you also have a school that emphasizes inclusion, not exclusion – that doesn’t shrink from diversity but embraces it. And you have learned that people don’t achieve things alone. We work together. Isn’t that how the math team won the New Englands this year? Isn’t that how the girls basketball team went undefeated in Class A? So I believe with your help we will be able to work as a team. I’ll tell you the truth. I didn’t always believe that... During the days of sit-ins and marches, I was out of high school. I went to Michigan State. In those days, there were some black students on campus. But they were there because they could throw, run, or tackle. I remember talking once with a puzzled football player. We were both black, but he sensed something different about me. “What do you do?” “I’m a student.” “No. What do you do? You’re too small for football. Too short for basketball. You look too slow for track. You must be here on a soccer scholarship.” He was wrong. I was there to learn. I was there for another reason. Some anonymous person paid my way. I used to wonder who it was. I used to wonder if he’d ever tell me. He never did. It certainly didn’t inhibit me as I would lead student demonstrations about one injustice or another, picketing outside the house of MSU’s President, John Hannah. In those days, I was mad as hell – especially at white people like him. Just a few years ago, though, I learned something. My anonymous benefactor seems to have been Hannah himself. Paid for it with his own money. I bet sometimes, looking out his window, he wanted his money back.

5 But he never objected. Never even gave me a hint of what he had done. He took a chance on that angry young black man outside his door because he had a vision of what America could become. And so, I’m here to ask you to take a chance. To figure out what your vision is for the America of your time – and begin to build it. There are some who think – oh, that’s for later. After college. After I’m a grownup. In Little Rock, almost a half-century ago, we couldn’t wait. We didn’t know how things would turn out. But we did know something that Dr. King once put this way: “The time is always right to do right.” You don’t have to wait. This time is right. And you are the right people to do right. Because you didn’t wait to build a house for a family that had none. You did it. You didn’t wait to help teach a kid to read. You did it. Wherever you find yourselves next fall, don’t doubt. Don’t delay. Go forward. There are those who say you can’t succeed. Don’t listen to the voice of despair. Go forward. There are times you’ll think you’re all alone. Listen to the people who march with you -- and go forward. When there’s a defeat -- and there will be defeats -- remember the victories you’ve won, pick yourself up ...and go forward. As you do, think of that Michigan State President willing to take a chance on me. Think of me as a skinny, scared, seventeen year old, inspired by Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks … taking a chance by walking into a classroom of white kids for the first time. Think about poor man taking a chance by striding into a college president’s office – and about that President taking a chance on him. And think about a headmaster sitting in his office a few yards away from where you sit now – and deciding he was going to take a chance on a young student who just might change history. Don’t doubt. Don’t delay. Don’t despair. Remember your past. Shape your future. Carry on a tradition molded at this school over a century ago by a man whose name we see on a building – and whose influence we feel in our lives.

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