Amid growing discontent about America funding Israel’s bombing of Gaza, President Joe Biden is set to give the commencement speech at Morehouse College on May 19. Morehouse, a 157-year-old historically Black college in Atlanta, extended the invitation to Biden in September, the month before Hamas launched a deadly attack in Israel and took hostages. But news of the president’s scheduled address wasn’t announced until last week, when anti-war protesters on college campuses across the country were demonstrating against Israel’s brutal response in Gaza. Morehouse’s announcement that Biden would be giving the school’s commencement address justifiably ignited anger among students, staff and alumni.
Morehouse’s announcement that Biden would be giving the school’s commencement address justifiably ignited anger among students, staff and alumni.
As reported by Capital B Atlanta, during an April 23 town hall with Morehouse President David Thomas, students expressed concern about Biden not only being the speaker, but also receiving an honorary degree from the institution. “How are you going to justify what you’re going to bestow on [Biden] on our behalf when he’s basically a war criminal at this point?” one student asked in reference to the honorary degree.
“I want to know if you’ve been paid to provide Biden a platform to address the student body,” another student asked, a claim Thomas forcefully denied. “I have not been paid. I have not been bought,” Thomas responded. “That question is an insult, but because you are a student here, I owe you the opportunity to do it. But I’m going to call it out.”
This country’s historically Black colleges and universities have long been bastions of protest. For decades, HBCU students have risked everything from expulsion to incarceration to fight for social justice and to stand for the oppressed. Many Black Americans, these Morehouse students included, see a clear connection between Black people’s plight in the United States and the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza. That makes Thomas’ vow not to replace Biden as the commencement speaker even more upsetting.
“I’ve spoken with several faculty members who say under no conditions are they going to sit on a stage with Joe Biden,” Andrew Douglas, a political science professor at Morehouse, told NBC News. “It’s on everybody’s mind,” he said. Douglas, who’s been at Morehouse for 13 years, joined 14 other members of the faculty council in writing a letter to Thomas expressing their disappointment at the school’s choice to bring Biden to campus at such a fraught moment.
In a separate letter to Thomas, obtained by The Associated Press, some Morehouse alumni refer to Martin Luther King Jr., a Nobel Peace Prize-winning alumnus of Morehouse. “In inviting President Biden to campus,” those alumni wrote, “the college affirms a cruel standard that complicity in genocide merits no sanction from the institution that produced one of the towering advocates for nonviolence of the twentieth century.” King, who embraced nonviolence as a political strategy, won the award in 1964 for his civil rights advocacy, but he said winning the peace prize was “a commission” that compelled him to oppose the Vietnam War in particular and “militarism” generally.
“If the college cannot affirm this noble tradition of justice by rescinding its invitation to President Biden, then the college should reconsider its attachment to Dr. King,” those alumni wrote.
Some current students agree, with one telling The Guardian it’s “absolutely unacceptable” for an HBCU that “prides itself on social justice” to invite a president whose administration supports, to an extent, the war in Gaza, to their campus. However, Provost Kendrick Brown told NBC News that having Biden speak “is something that is in line with Morehouse’s mission and also with this objective of being a place that allows for engagement of social justice issues and moral concerns.”
Morehouse’s attempt to connect this invitation to the college’s storied history of encouraging protest is both bewildering and disingenuous.
He added, “We certainly encourage our students, our faculty, our staff, to form strong opinions and to come together peacefully and engage in that. So the way I see this is, this is certainly an opportunity … for our community to engage with the president to express the range of views that exist on the present issues, certainly in Israel and Gaza.”
One hopes Biden will be open to hearing concerns about Gaza from Black students, a constituency essential to his re-election campaign. But Morehouse’s attempt to connect this invitation to the college’s storied history of encouraging protest is both bewildering and disingenuous. Holding on to the choice of Biden as speaker also defies the will of some students — many of whom attend college to better understand their place in the world — and some faculty, who are tasked with guiding those students toward that understanding and toward their purpose.
In the 1960s, students at multiple HBCUs, including Morehouse, were integral to the fight to desegregate public and private facilities and increase access to the ballot box. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a historic collective of activists, was formed at a conference at Shaw University, while students from Bennett College (my HBCU) and North Carolina A&T were the architects of a sit-in movement that spread to colleges across the country.
That spirit of protest hasn’t died; in fact, as multiple social issues have presented themselves, HBCU students have risen to the occasion. As the #MeToo movement gained prominence, students at Spelman College, which shares the Atlanta University Center campus with Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse, protested the school’s treatment of sexual assault survivors, leading to the formation of an anti-assault task force. After a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer fatally shot Michael Brown in 2014, HBCU students across the country, Atlanta students included, protested the killing and a grand jury’s decision not to indict that officer.
Of course HBCU students, who believe it is important to face injustice head on, would be organizing pro-Palestinian marches. In fact, doing so aligns with what HBCU students, myself included, have been taught: You don’t just need to find a career, as the late Howard University graduate Chadwick Boseman said during his commencement speech there in 2018; you should find a purpose, one that transcends a paycheck.
If that purpose includes fighting for social justice — as it should and as so many HBCU students and alumni pride themselves on — then why would Morehouse students stay quiet when their school’s administration invites Biden to step into their sacred space and deliver a commencement speech right now?
Why would Morehouse students stay quiet when their school’s administration invites Biden to step into their sacred space and deliver a commencement speech right now?
Ziora Ajeroh, a student at North Carolina A&T who started the school’s first chapter of Dissenters, an anti-war youth organization, told Reckon, “As Black people, we aren’t new to violence. We’ve experienced violence our whole lives and for generations. So when other people are experiencing violence, we feel it’s our duty to stand in solidarity with them and not because they have also stood in solidarity with us, but because it’s the right thing to do.”
There are Dissenters chapters on other HBCU campuses, including Hampton University and Xavier University of Louisiana, demanding that their college presidents issue statements calling for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. Thus far, no HBCU has risen to that challenge, but with a tradition that includes training activists to change the literal course of history, I am hopeful that Morehouse and other colleges will heed that call.
While the aggrieved Morehouse students, faculty and alumni have not made such a public demand — the goal is that the invitation to Biden be rescinded — may the president respond to their discontent by standing up for innocent people in Gaza and refusing to fund the bombs that are killing them.