Isabel Wilkerson delivered Wellesley’s 2025 commencement address
Good morning! Thank you, President Johnson, for your kind and generous welcome. Thank you to the board of trustees and to everyone who made this day possible. Congratulations to every parent, grandparent, stepparent, foster parent, godparent, aunt, uncle, sibling, and loved one, and every member of the faculty and staff gathered here to cheer on the graduates this morning. And most importantly, congratulations to the Wellesley class of 2025!
Here we are on this magnificent day. The sun came up in the East and it’s back out now. The sky is protecting us from above. The earth is firm beneath our feet. The songbirds are somewhere out there performing in the distance. And here you are, having completed the requirements to graduate from this legendary institution. Let us not take any of this for granted. Let us sit with the glory of this day.
I did my research on Wellesley traditions and discovered that your class color is green, my mother’s favorite. Thus I am wearing green slingbacks and green earrings in your honor. So before I say another word, I want you, the glorious green class of 2025, to give yourselves a hand!
You applied to Wellesley in the before-times, in the depths of the pandemic, and arrived on this campus in the waning last hours of masking and testing. Yet you set about your work despite the disruptions and the uncertainties of our era.
I am sure that many of us might secretly wish that our lives had intersected with a different timeline. Why did our trajectories have to collide with a global pandemic, with existential climate change, and with dystopian upheaval across the planet and in our own country? Why did all that we are seeing have to happen on our watch? Why now? And why us?
I would suggest that there is a reason why the things we are witnessing are happening in our exact time on this planet. Because we are the ones who are made for this moment.
We are not in the situation we’re facing because we can’t handle it. We are in the situation that we are facing precisely because we can. For some reason that only the universe knows, we are exactly where we are supposed to be in the flow of human existence. It will be up to each of us to figure out what we each uniquely can bring to this moment when the planet and the species need us most.
As we have seen so much of in our era, we may have thought that our freedoms we’re accustomed to were etched in granite and settled for all time. Yet history tells us otherwise.
We have seen that history is not a straight line of inevitability. History is a pendulum whose swings of progression require constant monitoring and vigilance and whose advancements require constant protection.
The question is, what do each of us do when we as individuals enter the erratic timeline of history?
What do we choose to do with the power that we individually and collectively have to make this a better world for ourselves and for those who follow behind us?
What will history say that we did when faced with the tests of our age?
History is not the long-ago actions of bold-faced names from centuries past. History is what each and every one of us did before the moment that we are in. History is what each of you—every single one of you—is destined to make.
Somewhere at this commencement is the woman who could forestall the next pandemic. Another who could lead us to cures for Alzheimer’s and cancers or help save a rapidly warming planet or heal a divided nation and species.
Every song ever written, every skyscraper ever built, every feat of engineering, every invention we now take for granted exists because someone imagined what, to that moment, had never existed. I ask that you imagine a world free of strife and division, a world of peace and belonging for all of humanity.
No pressure—but we all know that you leave this beautiful campus with the very highest of expectations given your legendary academic lineage.
Your soon-to-be alma mater has produced two secretaries of state, one who famously became the first woman to run for president as a major party candidate, multiple ambassadors, acclaimed journalists, judges, astronauts, physicians, lawyers, opera singers, artists, and composers.
I am convinced that every successful person arrives at their success because they discovered their singular gift to humanity, that their gift coincided with their unstoppable passions, and that both their gift and their passion intersected with the needs of the world. As with you, as you go out into the world, we will never know when we’ll be called to make history.
We may not recognize when history greets us. We may not anticipate the obstacles that the universe tests us with on our path to becoming who we were always meant to be.
I hope that you may take comfort in my own search to understand history. The book that you know me for,, The Warmth of Other Suns, might not have existed had I listened to the people who told me it couldn’t be done. It took me 15 years to complete that book. It took so long that I often say if that book were a human being, it would be in high school and dating. That is how long it took me to write that book.
It was exactly 30 years ago at this point that I began researching this great migration of 6 million Black southerners who fled the Jim Crow South for the rest of the country during much of the 20th century. They were proxies for someone in all of our families who crossed the Atlantic, crossed the Pacific Ocean, crossed the Rio Grande, in hopes that they might find a better place for themselves in a place that they’d never seen. They were defecting in the Great Migration. They were defecting a world so arcane that, in the Jim Crow South, it was against the law for a Black person and a white person to merely play checkers together in Birmingham. This was a world that was so arcane that there was actually a black Bible and an altogether separate white Bible to swear to tell the truth on in court. This is the world that they were fleeing. They were seeking political asylum from that world. I remember telling people back then what I was doing, and some people didn’t get it. They were saying, “Well, what is there to say? They left. What else is there to say?” But that only fueled my determination.
I told people that I was looking for seniors who left the South from World War I to the 1970s. Someone said to me, “You’ll never find anybody from World War I.” Proving them wrong became yet another part of my mission. I was going to prove them wrong.
I went to senior centers in Los Angeles, Mississippi clubs in Chicago, and Baptist churches in Brooklyn where everyone was from South Carolina. I was hoping to convince these elders to talk with me about their role in history, except that official-sounding language which I was using was not working. It turns out that history does not happen underneath these drawn lines of treaties and legislation. It begins in the agitated hearts of everyday souls like all of us here, yearning to breathe free. The people of this great migration have lessons for all of us, even now. The individual decisions that they made reshaped every city they fled to and put pressure on the South to eventually set aside the formal machinery of the caste system it had set up. This movement brought us jazz. It brought us Motown, R&B, and hip-hop. It produced some of the most recognizable names in American culture, from Toni Morrison and Aretha Franklin to Prince and John Coltrane.
Yet the people who had lived this did not see themselves as part of any grand history; they did not attach a name to their decision to leave all that they had known for places they had never seen in hopes of being free. They saw what they had done as merely the best among the limited options they had before them in their era.
This search then became a race against time. These people were approaching their 80s and 90s. It just so happened that, contrary to the naysayer I mentioned, I actually managed to find a World War I veteran in Chicago. He turned 100 years old shortly after I met him. I thought it would be nice to get him a birthday card and found one from Hallmark that said “Happy 100th! Talk about optimism!”
In those days, if I asked anybody if they were part of the Great Migration, no hands went up. But if I asked how many had come up from the South, how many had made that one decision, then every hand would go up, along with knowing laughter.
Sometimes you can’t see history when you’re making it.
They were fully aware that a mass uprooting was going on. But they couldn’t have seen the magnitude of their private decisions and had no grand title for it. Because they were in the middle of it, they could not have seen how one person added to another person added to another person, multiplied by millions, could become a liberation movement all its own.
Together, these people who had virtually nothing were able to do what the Emancipation Proclamation was not able to do. These people, by their actions, were able to do what a president of the United States—Abraham Lincoln—could not do. These people, by their actions, were able to do what the powers that be, North and South, could not or would not do. They freed themselves, in a leaderless revolution. They turned a captive people in the South into a people spread out across the country for the first time since its founding. All of this arose from the single decision of individuals who made history without realizing it.
That means we each have more power than we may have allowed ourselves to believe. It means that we each have the power to make history. You, in particular, at this moment, have the power to make history.
Now is a time when people often are looking for hope. I sometimes have a hard time with this word because there is sometimes so little in human conflict, war, and aggression over the centuries to give concrete reasons for hope.
But the thing that keeps me going is this: Every single one of us here, every single one of us on this planet, is here because the ancestors of all of us found a way to somehow survive war, famine, drought, floods, depression, plagues, and pestilence—upheavals of every kind. Not one of us would be here if they had not found a way to survive. Every single one of us is the product of every single decision that every single ancestor throughout our lineage ever made.
We each have been given a code of instructions for survival deep in our marrow. How can we harness the wisdom of the ancients to survive and to transcend humanity’s current upheavals?
I believe you will find that path. Your education does not end today. This is only the beginning. And I know that our future is brighter now that you are bringing your gifts—your extraordinary gifts, your passion and brilliance—to the world.
So I want to leave you with the words of Richard Wright, who was one of those people who was part of the Great Migration. He journeyed to Chicago from Mississippi in 1927 at the age of 19, what I consider to be the migration age, crossing barriers, crossing boundaries, facing uncertainties, as you are, at that milestone in his life.
He wrote these words as a whisper, as a prayer to anyone at a turning point, as a whisper to those of us alive today to imagine a future that we cannot now see, but that we can have faith is possible.
He wrote:
“I was leaving the South
to fling myself into the unknown.
I was taking a part of the South
to transplant in alien soil.
To see if it could grow differently,
if it could drink of new and cool rains,
bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns,
and perhaps to bloom.”
May you bloom in both darkness and in light, and may God bless you, the class of 2025, as you go forth to a world that awaits you! Congratulations to you all!
Transcription of the event by members of the media is not permitted without written permission from Ms. Wilkerson’s representation.