Speakers at Morgan State University's 128th commencement yesterday invoked memories of the civil rights movement, calling on graduates to find a unifying cause, as their parents and grandparents did in the 1950s and 1960s.
Morgan bid goodbye to 980 undergraduates and 127 graduate students at its ceremony yesterday. Coppin State, meanwhile, celebrated its first commencement as a university, awarding 483 undergraduate and 181 master's degrees. St. John's College in Annapolis and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore also held commencement ceremonies yesterday.
"The enemies of our mothers and fathers are coming back in a new and different way," said the Rev. Vashti Murphy McKenzie, Morgan's keynote speaker and the first female bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
McKenzie didn't list those enemies but questioned why national leaders are focusing on the war in Iraq when they should be focused on domestic issues such as poverty and health care.
"How do we convince them it's just as important to rebuild urban America as it is to rebuild Iraq?" she asked. Part of the answer, she said, is for graduates to do more than fit in.
"We need you to find a common goal, a common good in this `me, myself and I' culture," said McKenzie, who attended Morgan for three years before earning a degree at the University of Maryland, College Park.
McKenzie's speech followed opening remarks by university President Earl S. Richardson, who reminded the crowd that the graduation was occurring a day before the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation.
Morgan State awarded diplomas in its stadium under sunny but muggy conditions.
Family members and friends of graduates crowded into any patch of shade they could find at W.A.C. Hughes Memorial Stadium. The line leading out of the stadium for a booth selling bottled water was often as long as the line going in. Umbrellas bearing the school colors - bright blue and orange - filled the stands, although the showers many expected never materialized.
Evanson Mukira, a medical technology major from Baltimore, won the school's top academic achievement prize.
At Coppin State University's graduation at 1st Mariner Arena, family and friends of graduates were as pumped up as any hometown sports crowd.
