Wellesley, Massachusetts – Journalist and bestselling author Isabel Wilkerson, whose boundary-breaking nonfiction writing earned her both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, urged Wellesley College’s graduating seniors to believe in their ability to influence the world. “History is not the long-ago actions of bold-faced names from centuries past,” Wilkerson said. “History is whatever each of us did before the moment that we are in. History is what each of you is destined to make.”
Speaking before some 5,000 people, including 566 members of the class of 2025, Wilkerson noted the immense challenges facing the world today—“a global pandemic, existential climate change, and dystopian upheaval across the planet and in our own country”—and acknowledged that it would be easy for the graduates to secretly wish that their lives had “intersected with a different timeline.”
“I would suggest that there is a reason why the things we are witnessing are happening in our exact time on this planet,” she said. “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.”
Wilkerson recalled her own experience becoming an author, remarking that her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, took 15 years to complete. The book documents the migration of 6 million Black southerners who fled the Jim Crow South for the rest of the U.S. during much of the 20th century. The people who lived through the daily indignities of segregation did not see their lives as heroic, Wilkerson noted, but their individual decisions reshaped the civic life of America and eventually pressured the South to end the country’s feudal caste system. “Sometimes you can’t see history while you’re making it,” she said.
The demands of our current moment have many people searching for hope, Wilkerson said. “But the thing that keeps me going is this,” she said. “Every single one of us in this gathering, 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 imaginable. … Every single one of us is a product of every single decision that every single ancestor throughout our lineage ever made.”
She continued: “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?”
Wellesley College President Paula A. Johnson also praised the class of 2025 for their strength, applauding their “explorations” and “leaps of faith.” Johnson noted the courage required for students to choose Wellesley sight unseen when the pandemic prevented pre-enrollment visits to campus. And she applauded the graduates for choosing a type of education that is broadly values-based, rather than transactional.
“You are prepared for careers that do not yet exist,” Johnson said. “You have received an education in curiosity, critical thinking, connecting despite differences, and communicating persuasively that represents a kind of meta-power applicable to almost any endeavor.”
Johnson noted that the real measure of a liberal arts education is “the values it encompasses, and therefore imparts.”
“At Wellesley College, we seek truth, and understand that there is such a thing as truth, even though the search for it may never end,” she said.
A video of Wellesley’s 147th commencement ceremony, along with photos, transcripts, and other material, will be available online.