For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
May 19, 2003
NSC Advisor's Remarks at Mississippi College Law Commencement
First Baptist Church
431 North State Street
Jackson, Mississippi
May 16, 2003
To All of You: a Sincere Congratulations for a Job Well Done! I will always remember my own commencement. I remember the pride written
across the faces of my family members. I remember looking at my
classmates and wondering if I would ever again find such close friends.
I also remember wanting the whole thing to be over with. I do not
remember a single word the speaker said. You won't either.
So my duty today is not to say something you will find profound 20
years from now. It is to say something you find interesting for the
next 20 minutes. Anything beyond that is a bonus.
I am neither a lawyer nor a Baptist. But I feel very at home
before you. Because I am a strong believer in the transforming power
of both education and faith. And I believe that as this school has
minted you into lawyers it has endowed you with enormous opportunities and enormous responsibilities.
First, as educated people and people who may be called upon in
the administration of justice you have an obligation to be open
minded. You have learned how to ask questions, assess evidence, and
draw conclusions. You have learned the value of reasoned debate the
role of doubt in reaching a conclusion and that it often helps to
seek out those who do not think like you do. An "Amen" chorus is
satisfying in the short term, but it is not edifying in the long term.
By being open to rethinking ideas you once held sacrosanct you will be
better attorneys and better citizens.
Second, you have the responsibility to be optimistic. You have a
degree that will create opportunities for you and the learning to help
you seize them. Many people just as talented and smart as you did not
get to where you are today often through no fault of their own. So
never ask why someone else has been given more; ask why you have been
given so much.
I first learned this lesson from hearing stories about my paternal
grandfather. Grandfather Rice was a poor farmer's son in Ewtah,
Alabama. One day, he decided to get book-learning. And so he asked,
in the language of the day, where a colored man could go to school.
They said that a little Presbyterian school, Stillman College, was only
about 50 miles away.
So he saved up his cotton to pay for the first year's tuition.
After the first year, he ran out of cotton and he needed a way to pay.
My grandfather asked the school administrators how those other boys
were staying in school, and he was told that they had what was called a
scholarship. And, they said, "If you want to be a Presbyterian
minister, you could have a scholarship too." My grandfather said,
"That's just what I had in mind."
What my grandfather found, and what I experienced years later, is
that it matters not whether you enter college or graduate school poor
or rich, minority or majority, urban or rural, foreign or American.
You emerge as a graduate and a different person. Some of you may
come from a long line of attorneys. Yet there is also the first female
member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw [CHOK-taw] Indians to be
admitted to the state bar. Another member of your class was born in a
slum in Jamaica. Today, you all leave with the same degree and the
same opportunities. You embody the truth that education is a great
equalizer and that here in America it is not about where you are coming
from, but where you are going.
Your third obligation as educated people is to affirm that values
matter and that the law can be, and should be, an instrument for
protecting the universal values of freedom that unite people across all
cultures.
Here, you have a leg up on many of your colleagues graduating from
other schools because your education has been grounded in faith.
Faith provides comfort and hope in times of difficulty and can open
the door to understanding of what is important in life.
Throughout my life I have never doubted the existence of God, but,
like most people, I have had some ups and downs in practicing my
faith. After I moved to California in 1981 to join the faculty at
Stanford, there were a lot of years when I was not attending church
regularly. I was traveling a great deal, always in a different time
zone, and church too often fell by the wayside.
Then one Sunday morning I was approached at the supermarket by a
man buying some things for his church picnic. He asked me, "Do you
play the piano by any chance?" I said, "Yes." And he said his
congregation was looking for someone to play the piano at their
church. It was a small African-American church in the center of Palo
Alto and I started playing there every Sunday. And I thought to
myself, "My goodness, God has a long reach all the way to the spice
section of a supermarket on a Sunday morning."
The only problem was, it was a Baptist church and I don't play
gospel very well. I play Brahms. At this church the minister would
start with a song and the musicians had to pick it up. I had no idea
what I was doing. So I called my mother, who had played for Baptist
churches, to ask for advice. She said, "Honey, just play in C and
they'll come back to you." And that's true. If you play in C, the
foundational key in music, people will come back. Perhaps God plays in
C, and that's why we always seem to find our way back to Him, sometimes
in spite of ourselves.
I know there are many outstanding attorneys for whom faith plays
little or no role in their lives. But I am confident that by combining
your understanding of the law with your understanding of God's ways you
will broaden your perspective and multiply your accomplishments and
good works.
In Matthew, Jesus warned against the kind of lawyer who knows the
law but not its ultimate purposes, saying "woe to you, teachers of the
law and Pharisees [who] give a tenth of your spices mint, dill and
cumin [b]ut neglect the more important matters of the law [which
are] justice, mercy and faithfulness."
This message has particular resonance in Jackson, Mississippi a
place that has been the site of so many key events in America's
long-running struggle to define the meaning of justice. This is the
city where the Tougaloo Nine and the Freedom Riders were arrested and
where Medgar Evers was cut down by an assassin's bullet. It was a
focal point of the Freedom Summer of 1964 and it was James Meredith's
destination in his 1966 March Against Fear.
The civil rights struggle was America's chance to resolve the
contradictions inherent in its birth. And at its roots, it was a legal
struggle, pitting the natural law that underpins our Constitution and
Declaration of Independence against unjust laws on the books that fell
far short of that ideal. The Founding Fathers didn't mean me when they
wrote the Bill of Rights. But by their terms, those rights were
universal in theory, and you can trace the history of the civil rights
era in the court filings of lawyers arguing that they should be
universal in fact. The civil rights struggle was in a very real way
America's second founding.
It also made real one of America's greatest gifts to the world:
the promise of multi-ethnic democracy. We live in an age where too
often difference is still seen as a license to kill. That's what
terrorism is grounded in whether it be terrorism in the Middle East
or here in America. Growing up in Birmingham, I lived with the
home-grown terrorism of that era. And I remember the bombing 40 years
ago of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that took the lives of four
young girls, including my friend, Denise McNair. Acts of terror are
calculated to propel old fears into the next generation.
America's diversity is a powerful rejoinder to that state of mind.
Can the world forge a common future based not on ethnicity but on a
commitment to an ideal, a commitment to democracy A future where
people get ahead based on ability not on circumstances of birth.
In America, we say, "yes we can."
Our democracy is still a work in progress, not a finished product.
The hard work begins anew each day. Yes, we practice what we preach but 225 years after the fact we are still practicing; practicing each
day to get it right. And by doing so we strengthen America's moral
authority and the currency of these values across the world.
We must always remember that while America cherishes the ideals of
equality, justice, and the rule of law, we do not own them. As
President Bush has said, the values of freedom are not America's gift
to the world but God's gift to humanity. People everywhere share the
most basic yearnings for liberty to create, speak, and worship in
freedom.
When these values are under attack, we must not ? and we will not spare any effort in their defense. When freedom is being sought by
brave people living under tyranny, we must stand on their side. And
when newly free people are seeking to build the institutions of law and
democracy, we have an obligation if asked to help.
And we are. This summer in Afghanistan a working draft of a new
democratic constitution will be presented at town hall meetings across
the country. In Iraq, leaders from every province and ethnic group
have declared their commitment to a democratic future for their
country. And last week, President Bush announced an important
initiative for working in partnership with the people of the Middle
East to bring more economic opportunity, better education, and more
freedom to the region. The United States will help countries seeking
to reform their judiciaries, provide training for the growing number of
women seeking elective office, establish media law projects, and
support new parliamentarians and civil society organizations.
This enterprise will be long, not short. Often, progress will come
in small, quiet steps, less dramatic than the toppling of statues.
Occasional setbacks are inevitable. But these efforts are vitally
important and they are an essential element of the war on global
terror. President Bush is fully committed to their success both as
an American, and as a person of faith. As he said last week, "[W]e are
determined to help build a Middle East that grows in hope instead of
resentment."
My own hope is that some of you have the opportunity to contribute
to these efforts directly or that you find other ways to serve.
Because I believe that every American has an obligation to help make
the world a better place. As an educated person and as an attorney you will have obligations that are weightier than most. Remember that
you were admitted to this school less on the basis of your past
achievements than on your potential to continually improve yourself and
to contribute to the world once you leave. I urge you to give some of
your time, or even part of your career, to give back to a world that
has given you so much.
Finally, keep close to your hearts the advice of one of
Mississippi's most famous sons, William Faulkner, who said, "Always
dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to
be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better
than yourself."
God bless this Class of 2003 today and every day through the rest
of your lives.
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