For the first time as US president, Barack Obama on Sunday delivered a commencement address to a historically black college, Hampton University, telling graduates that they have “a separate responsibility” to become mentors to other young African-Americans to help close a persistent gap in educational achievement.
Obama, clad in a “Hampton blue” robe, said the 1,072 graduates were better poised to enter an economy still recovering from recession and facing global competition than Americans without a college degree, who have an unemployment rate twice as high as those with one.
“I don’t have to tell you that too many folks back home aren’t as well-prepared,” he said.
“By any number of different yardsticks, African-Americans are being outperformed by their white classmates, as are Hispanic-Americans. Students in well-off areas are outperforming students in poorer rural or urban communities, no matter what skin color. Globally, it’s not even close,” he said.
Obama said all Americans have a responsibility “to change this, to offer every single child in this country an education that will make them competitive in our knowledge economy.”
However, he told the graduates: “All of you have a separate responsibility — to be role models for your brothers and sisters, to be mentors in your communities and, when the time comes, to pass that sense of an education’s value down to your children.”
Recalling Hampton University’s start as a trade and agricultural school for freed slaves after the Civil War in a state that had outlawed education for blacks, Obama said the founders of the school and others like it “knew, of course, that inequality would persist long into the future.”
“But they also recognized the larger truth, a distinctly American truth,” he said. “They recognized, class of 2010, that the right education might allow those barriers to be overcome, might allow our God-given potential to be fulfilled.”
Obama was enthusiastically received by an audience that packed the field and bleachers of the school’s stadium on a sunny, breezy morning.
William Harvey, Hampton’s president, underscored Obama’s historic achievement as the first African-American president. He gave him a seedling from the university’s Emancipation Oak, under which former slaves who had sought refuge at a Union fortress were educated by a free black woman in violation of Virginia law in 1861, seven years before Hampton was founded.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS