President Colley, members of the faculty and staff,  family and friends and the distinguished graduates of the Berry College class of 2005;

I am honored to be your guest and to celebrate with this years graduates as they reach the latest academic milestone in their lives.

I am very passionate about issues that impact women. So it is a true honor for me to speak on a campus founded by a woman more than one hundred years ago. I will try to contain my excitement.

The power of Martha Berry’s commitment and dedication is in the promise willed to those of you who are ready to embark on new and uncharted ground.  What courage and determination it must have taken for her to establish this school in rural Georgia at a time when she would not have even been permitted to attend or when women were not allowed to vote.

So once again I am honored to join you today.

Berry College might have been Georgia’s best kept secret had it not made U.S. News & World Report magazine’s 2005 list of America’s Best Colleges and of course its ranking as among the South’s best comprehensive colleges. But that secret has been out for awhile, since this was the 18th year that Berry has made the list. 

Congratulations to the graduates who should be proud of the legacy of excellence that Berry and its graduates continue.

As a woman who goes to work every day with the intention and expectation that I will try to make a difference in the lives of those who make Atlanta their home, I can only imagine how difficult it was for Martha Berry to do something that had never been done before.  She probably had her share of detractors and skeptics who thought she couldn’t do it simply because she was a woman.

More than one hundred years later, we stand on the shoulders of Martha Berry and women and men like her who chose to do the unthinkable, to chart a new and different course in history.

We seek to model our lives as worthy of President Roosevelt’s heroes…..
"It is not the critic who counts;
not the person who points out how the strong man (woman) stumbles
or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the person
who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,
who strives valiantly,
who errs and comes up short again and again,
because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms,
the great devotions,
who spends himself for a worthy cause;
who, at the best, knows, in the end,
the triumph of high achievement,
and who, at the worst, if he fails,
at least he fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those cold and
timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

In our time very few professions or career choices have room for timid souls. Leadership and citizenship in these times requires boldness and audacious acts of courage.
You, the 2005 graduating class, are challenged to get to “know the great enthusiasms; the great devotions”…..
You the 2005 graduating class of Berry College are challenged to commit yourselves to worthy causes of the day, the rigors of high achievement.
Berry College has risen from humble and meager beginnings and emerged as best in class because the college fully embraces and encourages students to do more and be more. That is more than a slogan,
….. to do more and be more….. is an instruction for success in life.

In 1968 at my undergraduate commencement ceremony at Howard University, I vividly remember thinking that this was the beginning of the rest of my life. I was looking forward to the unknown and the undiscovered. Proof of my age and naivety — no doubt.

I suspect that many of you feel the same anticipation and anxiety about your future.

1968 was a tumultuous time in our nation’s history. The Vietnam War was ravishing the lives of our young men; Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were tragically gunned down, Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley opened the Democratic National Convention amidst anti-war demonstrations, the Summer Olympic Games were boycotted in Mexico City and Apollo 8 began the first US mission to orbit the moon.

Amid all that turmoil and conflict, as young people, I think we saw hope and possibility. It was a very different time but we, my classmates and I, like you and your classmates are shaped by the world around us.  Many students then in 1968 and many now in 2005 and right here at Berry College seek   ‘common good’ activism in our work and lives.

I didn’t have all the answers as I suspect some of you don’t. I didn’t have much of a plan.
Looking back I wouldn’t have believed it if someone had foretold my life in politics and as mayor of Atlanta.

I’d never even visited the South.

As true as all that is…… I like hundreds of other students at the time …. was determined to focus my life’s work on a core belief that people should take care of their neighbors, that the forgotten should have a voice, that the underserved should be provided for, that the homeless should be respected and that the elderly should be honored.  

Not for any other reason than it is simply the right thing to do. It is a universal sense of the common good. My dear friend, Dr. Johnnetta Cole says that, “The more we pull together toward a common future, the less it matters what pushed us apart in the past.”

The common good for a common future-it seems so simple.
One academician describes common good as: “when individual citizens have the commitment and motivation--that they accept their obligation--to promote the welfare of the community and to work together with other members for the greater benefit of all.”
As 2005 graduates of the distinguished and reknowned Berry College…..A college founded by a visionary woman who could understand the needs of hundreds she’d never met.

I ask you to care about your community in the tradition of Mother Theresa,

To dream the impossible dream in the tradition of Martha Berry,

To practice non violence in your lives like Mahatma Gandi and Martin Luther King,  Jr.

To fight injustice and then promote truth and reconciliation like Nelson Mandela

These are men and women who practiced common good activism, they made a difference that benefits you and me and the world.

The challenges of our time call for more than talk… they call for common good activism.

Our success as a community, as a world, calls out for those who will work to eliminate poverty, hatred, hopelessness and war.

In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny.
Whatever effects one directly effects ALL directly.”

Or perhaps you prefer the words of Robert Frost
“Two roads diverged in the yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by, and
 that has made all the difference”

Or perhaps the Bible says it best, “The men of Israel understood the times and knew what they must do.”

SO my friends, the class of 2005……
I challenge you to be the Martin, Gandi, Nelson,
Teresa and Martha Berry for this time….to work for the common good.

If not you, Who?

Congratulations and go with the knowledge that this is your time!!!!!

Congratulations!