‘I believe that you all will go out there and help us to save our rights, to save our community, and even though we’re tired, we are going to save this damn democracy for this country whether they want us to or not. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say we are about to see unleashed upon us an America that we have not had to live in. We have to win this battle, and we need all of our sharpest minds.’
Editor’s note: As we celebrate Juneteenth 2025, we reprint here excerpts from a speech given by Nikole Hannah-Jones on May 27 at Harvard University. Hannah-Jones is the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the groundbreaking 1619 Project, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, and the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, where she founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy. She spoke at Harvard’s Black Graduation, one of the affinity graduation ceremonies traditionally held there. In April, under pressure from the Trump administration’s assault on DEI initiatives, Harvard stopped funding and hosting affinity celebrations, so the Black Graduation celebration was organized independently by students and the Harvard Black Alumni Society and held off-campus.
…I want to say that when I look out at the sea of graduates and loving families, I feel really a great pride and admiration because I do know all that it took to get you to this day. Your story is my own story. I came from a working class family from Waterloo, Iowa, by way of a cotton plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi, where my father was born, where my grandmother was born, where my great-grandmother was born. And none of them could have imagined I would walk across the stage like I did. The same way many of your families poured into you for a dream that they weren’t able to realize on their own. So we know, after all it took for you to obtain your degrees from this most elite academic institution, you deserve better than the capitulation of those in power here that would force you with very little notice to hold this graduation off campus and with no university support. But as we know, courage in these days is in short supply.
So the truth is, I almost never accept invitations to speak at commencement ceremonies….I usually say no to these things because it’s a stressful thing to give commencement remarks. This is a day that your families and you have been working towards your entire lives. And so there’s the stress of trying to send a message that won’t be boring, won’t be too long, will inspire you, and if it’s me, hopefully scare the hell out of you as well. It’s not something that I choose to do, and on the rare occasions that I do accept an invitation to give a commencement address, I never do it before elite predominantly white institutions because I always say in the limited time I have, I want to give a speech before an audience who I feel most reflects who my work is for.
In other words, Harvard would usually be an automatic ‘no.’ But when the Harvard Black Alumni Society reached out to me last year, I paused on that ‘no.’ I thought, here was a class who as high school students or as undergraduates, witnessed the murder of George Floyd and the so-called racial reckoning that lasted five minutes. And then shortly after that, after entering this institution, you had to watch lawyers argue before this nation’s highest court that because you are Black, you somehow had not earned your way into this elite institution that for most of its history, refused admission to students like you, no matter your intellect or your ability. And then you watched as that court determined affirmative action unfairly discriminated against white and Asian students, even, as we know, the single greatest admissions advantage that a student can receive at Harvard is to be a white child of an alum or a donor. I thought here was a class who saw the ascendancy of the first Black woman president in this institution’s history only to witness her forced out after just six months as she was made to pay the price for daring to break a color line that had stood for 388 years.
I thought about that and I thought about how immensely proud you and your families must have been on that day when you opened that acceptance letter to this institution that denies nearly everyone who applies, how you deserve better than to have that accomplishment smeared in such a way of people saying, you did not deserve this. And I thought of how even as the campaign was launched to tell you that somehow you didn’t earn it, you put your heads down and you did what you came here to do. And I decided that if on this moment of celebration, after everything you all have overcome and all you have accomplished that you had chosen me to stand before you on this important day, then there was no way I was going to say ‘no.’ So I’m here.
And of course I could not have predicted the moment we would be in as a people because this was before that fateful day in November. I couldn’t have predicted where we would be as institutions of higher learning or as a nation when I agreed to come here. So I can only believe that the ancestors nudged me a bit to say yes. Because in truth, when I sat in this room and I thought about all you had gone through and all that this institution stands for right now in this moment, there’s no class I would rather be addressing than you all. And that’s because it shouldn’t be lost on anyone in this room that the same [Harvard] administration that has been cast as heroic for standing up to Trump over academic freedom, caved almost immediately on issues of diversity and inclusion.
And in doing so and not standing up for y’all, it didn’t do one thing to stop Trump’s attacks on this university. They gave you up for cheap. And I hope one day you’ll make them pay for that, because despite the university withdrawing its support in the last minute for this event, the determination to hold this celebration of our people, of our history, of our particular struggle, of our inescapable Black joy in this moment is an act of resistance. Y’all doing this anyway in this room, which is not what you chose, on this day that you didn’t choose, that your families had to probably change their plane tickets in order to be able to attend was an act of resistance. And so we must stand in solidarity with every other Harvard community who had their celebrations forced from campus as well. And we must let them know that we see them and that we will be seen. And so against that backdrop of this capitulation, I’m of the mind that we gather here today, not in their tradition, but in ours.
Not in the tradition of people whose wealth was derived from the enslavement of our ancestors and helped found and sustain this institution, but in the tradition of Beverly Garnett Williams, a man born into slavery in 1830 who had become the first Black person accepted into Harvard. We gather in the tradition of Ella Louise Stokes Hunter, who in 1925 became the first Black woman to graduate from this institution. We gather here in the tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois, who became the first Black person to earn a PhD here, though what’s lesser known is that even though he was one of the most brilliant minds this nation ever produced, because he had matriculated from Fisk University, this institution made him enroll as an undergraduate and earn another bachelor’s degree before entering the graduate program. But we are DEI.
Every last one of us was raised understanding we have to work twice as hard to get half as far. And so he did that. He [Du Bois] earned his second bachelor’s degree, and he did so cum laude. We gather today in the tradition of our ancestors because our ancestors warned us about this moment that we’re in. But they also prepared us for it. As W.E.B. Du Bois said of his time here at Harvard, he was in Harvard, but not of it. I do not have to tell you these are not only dark times, but that we are facing some of the darkest times that most of us in this room have ever experienced. Most of us living today have never lived in the America that this administration is forming. We must be clear-eyed about this. We are in the midst of the broadest assault on our civil rights, and therefore democracy, that we have experienced in a century.
We are witnessing the gutting of the civil rights enforcement infrastructure, and the Civil Rights Acts that our ancestors bled and died for are being weaponized against us and any efforts to achieve equality. This administration is threatening to criminalize institutions that try to integrate, to strip their funds if they try to be diverse and address racial disparities. And it is redefining white Americans as the primary victims of racism in this country. The administration is doing so in an attempt to reinstate what Trump calls the golden age of America. Now, some of y’all are not history majors, but if we are students of history, we know the era that Trump calls the golden Age holds a different moniker for us who are Black. We know the same period as the nadir. That was the term coined by the historian Rayford Logan to describe the lowest point for Black Americans since slavery, a period after the turn of the 20th century where Black Americans were systematically stripped of our rights and forced into segregation.
This is why the administration, while embracing the language of civil rights, is simultaneously banning the books, the curricula and the commemorations that tell us the true story of America. So let’s be clear, they erase our history so that they can erase our rights. They did not want us to make the connection that the golden era for America was the pre-civil rights, pre-women’s rights, pre-disability rights, pre-migration rights and pre-gay rights America. In other words, in order to go back to America’s golden age, they have to repeal the 1960s, which means a repeal of everything that made our lives in this room possible.
In that America meritocracy did not, and in fact could not exist, because if they believed truly that we couldn’t compete with them, they wouldn’t need to put up a single obstacle in our way and we would fail on our own. So the fact that they do what they do reveals the lie, and the fact that despite all of those obstacles, you can come into this most elite institution and conquer it, you are the epitome of their greatest fear. Because the America that Trump wants to bring about, that is the America that Du Bois described for Black people as living beneath the veil. I’ve read about that America, we all have, but we’ve never lived in it before.
But we are here. So what do we do in this moment? Well, the thing that makes gatherings such as this so dangerous is that they remind us that we are a part of a tradition. That we did not simply gain entry into places such as Harvard merely to advance ourselves, but that we are connected to each other. We are connected not just to those who also went to elite institutions who sit in rooms like this. We are connected to all our folks back home, all our folks in communities who dreamed this day for us but could never get here. They know that we owe something to the communities and the struggles before us that made our lives possible. That we are part of these elite spaces, but we are not of them. That we have an obligation to use all of this learning and knowledge and access and connections that you come to Harvard to get, not just to secure a job and financial benefits for ourselves, though I hope you do that too, but to secure the freedom of our people. Because if you’re not working on that, why are you here?
Because that, honestly, that belief in community, that you owe more to yourself than a paycheck, that is something that they try to educate out of you at a place like this. That is the opposite of the intent of a place like this. These places pluck the brightest, some of the brightest – we got quite a few at Howard too, to be sure – these places took some of the brightest amongst us with the intention of subverting you, of separating you from the larger struggles of Black America and African-descended people across the globe to make you chase money and not justice. And I can say to you that we cannot gather here in our kente stoles, evoking African traditions and collective remembering, and then leave here afraid to do the work that is required.
You did have to put your heads down, you did have to come here to get what you came to get. But I hope you also put your head down to gather the master’s tools. And now that you’ve acquired them, you must use them for justice and not security. As I wrote in the 1619 Project, the work of journalism that had the most powerful man in the world shook, that inspired legislation to keep it from spreading and corrupting young minds, that spawned an entire presidential commission to refute its power – now I’m a bad chick, y’all – as I wrote in that allegedly dangerous text, we are the greatest freedom fighters that this nation has ever produced.
Why did you come here in the moment when our very freedoms are at stake if you don’t use what you gained here to save this democracy and build the world our ancestors fought for? I remember a few years ago there was this popular meme going around where people declared, “I am not my ancestors.” And they thought that was cute, but I really felt a deep sadness that they had been so miseducated as to believe that we ever came from a people who just took it. That they were so miseducated that they didn’t know that we came from a people like my grandmother, Arlena Tillman, who had a fourth grade education, had to leave schooling to go into that cotton field and work, and yet got on a train with her three children as a single woman with nothing but a bag of fried chicken and a single suitcase, determined that her own children would not pick cotton in the south. She had every dream that anybody in this room had, but she was born a Black woman in 1924 in apartheid Mississippi. But that seed she planted gave birth to me.
Leaving was her act of resistance. Living was her act of resistance. Ensuring she didn’t have the education, but her children would and her grandchildren would, was her act resistance. So when people say, I’m not my ancestors, you’re right, because we got a lot more work to do if we would ever compare to the people who built us.
But I also say, when I look out at your faces, when I saw you coming across the stage, when I saw the excitement of your families, I also saw the most profound testament to what our ancestors bore and what our ancestors built. Because they didn’t want you to have to work as hard as they did. They didn’t want you to have to struggle like they did, but they also didn’t want you to turn your back on the struggle either, because how dare we lose the things that they fought so hard for us to receive? Because y’all, we are a small minority in this country, but we are not helpless. Courage, I must remind you, is not the absence of fear, but the determination to act in spite of it.
So let us all resolve as we leave here tonight to to be ourselves worthy ancestors one day. You came here to get what you came here to get. Now it’s time for you to go on out there and stand on our business, stand on our people’s business, because this is the fight you must now wage. And this is a fight that we cannot afford to lose. And I know and I believe that you all will go out there and you will help us to save our rights, to save our community, and even though we’re tired, we are going to save this damn democracy for this country whether they want us to or not. Y’all, this is a fight that we must not lose and that we cannot lose. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say we are about to see unleashed upon us an America that we have not had to live in. And we have to win this battle, and we need all of our sharpest minds. My weapon is the pen and your weapons are whatever it is, the brilliant intellect, the brilliant degree that you have received, that you will use as your weapons as well. So I thank you for your attention tonight. It is my great honor to address you and I’m looking forward to being in battle and serving on the battlefield with you all. Thank you.
