Good day, and congratulations to the Harvard University class of 2021.

Let me say that it is a singular honor to be invited to address you on this important milestone occasion.

To all completing their studies today, I offer my best wishes as you undertake the next exciting phase of your lives.

That you've succeeded so well during such a time as this is commendable and it augers well for the years to come when the world will greatly rely on your knowledge, your discernment and your empathy for those less fortunate than you.

When first approached about delivering this commencement address, I must say I was taken aback.

I didn't immediately feel up to the task, recalling occasions when I sat in Tercentenary Theater, looking across the expanse of graduates to the steps of Widener library,

I couldn't picture myself confidently delivering remarks from a dais where so many more eminent figures had stood and indeed had made history.

Growing up on a constant Jim Crow diet that offered assertions of my inferiority, I'm always that same little black girl trying to believe in and demonstrate her worthiness.

Further, I thought about the challenge of what I might impart in such a pivotal national moment when social gains seem more like losses, when clarity gives way so easily to confusion, and when much heralded progress recedes like a total lie that was never really real.

I extend greetings from the faculty, administration and students of our 145 year old institution, Prairie View A&M University.

And though I have not been anointed to do so, I also bring greetings from the collection of historically black and minority serving institutions that have the weight and privilege of advancing success, equity and opportunity for so many communities across our world.

Our university, like many HBCUs, was founded at the end of Reconstruction, when blacks were thought to be unable to perform the highest level of academic study.

I speak to you, in fact, from the Prairie View campus, whose 1,500 acres were once the site of the Alta Vista Plantation.

That plantation, before being sold to the State of Texas, was the site where 400 human beings were held in slavery.

Thus our very steps, as they daily tread upon vestiges of the suffering of our ancestors, call to us constantly to do our full duty as citizens.

Painful as such memories are they, are a powerful force that calls us to action when challenges arise.

During the 145 years following our 1876 founding, it would take many years for most universities in our nation to grant access to Blacks.

So universities like Prairie View, designed with limited resources, serve the state and nation by admitting students to whom full access to the fruits of Liberty was intentionally blocked.

We're therefore proud of our legacy of endurance, and even prouder of the fact that we converted an assertion of the inferiority of African Americans into a triumph of human capacity.

Like other HBCUs, we made a place to empower rather than to disparage, to open minds rather than imprison them, to create pathways to promise rather than to stifle opportunity.