St. Louis and Harris-Stowe State University welcomed John Silvanus Wilson to town and campus for the university’s 2010 Commencement Ceremony, held Tuesday at Powell Symphony Hall. Wilson occupies an important position in the administration of President Barack Obama, as executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Wilson is no stranger to Harris-Stowe or its chief executive, President Henry Givens Jr. Wilson leads the HBCU Capital Finance Program – a program that enabled Harris-Stowe to open its first-ever residence hall four years ago and is presently engaged in funding additional improvements to the Midtown campus. Like Givens, Wilson devotes his considerable acumen and expertise to improving the educational opportunities at institutions of higher learning that continue to serve, primarily, African Americans.
Our nation’s first black president did not create Wilson’s important role. That honor belongs to President Jimmy Carter, who created the initiative by executive order in 1980; yet it is Obama who renewed the initiative with a pledge of an additional $1 billion of incremental funding over the next 10 years. This past weekend, however, the Obamas may have set a presidential family first when both Barack and Michelle Obama delivered speeches at HBCU commencement ceremonies. All told, 11 HBCUs will receive commencement addresses from senior Obama administration officials this year, which surely sets a new standard of respect for these institutions that have unique value for the black community.
President Obama reminded the 2010 class of Hampton University that they have been studying on a site where escaped slaves once received tutelage in defiance of the slavery-upholding law of the South. But he quickly moved from the painful past to the promise of the future, reminding the students that the founders of their university “recognized, as Frederick Douglass once put it, that ‘education means emancipation.’”
Speaking at Harris-Stowe, Obama’s liaison for all our nation’s HBCUs put the emphasis squarely on the future and what the new graduates strive to make of it. “Will you be rich?” Wilson asked them. “You are not poor, but if you think you are poor then you’ll never be rich.” These stern words about wealth came from a Morehouse man with graduate degrees from Harvard University who helped to lead two major capital campaigns at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that raised an unprecedented combined total of nearly $3 billion.
Like the historic president who appointed him, Wilson insisted on good, old-fashioned hard work as the essential key to success, regardless of whatever obstacles the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow – and remaining institutional racism and prejudice – throw in the path of African Americans. Wilson issued a challenge to the 2010 graduates of Harris-Stowe: “Will you be great? If you think you worked hard, then work harder.”
Accepting Obama and Wilson’s challenges will not guarantee success, but ignoring them almost certainly will guarantee failure.
