Graduation Speech

June 26, 2006 by Marc Lamont Hill

Last week, I gave a graduation speech at Furness High School in Philadelphia, where I was once a Spanish teacher. It went fairly well, as many young people told me that they enjoyed it. Two older people, however, told me that they had problems with the speech. One had beef that I quoted Tupac (”I’m sure you could find someone better than that”) and the other took issue with me saying “I wanna give a shout out to my baby’s mommas in the crowd. I know it’s some of y’all out there.” I’m not sure if she thought I was encouraging out-of-wedlock sex or if she feared that I had impregnated a large sector of the audience. Either way, I just chalked it up to the generation divide. Anyway, somone was nice enough to upload footage. Click here to see excerpts from the speech.

Categories: MLH
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Comments

1. Marc Lamont Hill wrote:

yeah, the white cat with the afro wasn’t feelin me

June 26, 2006 @ 11:49 am

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