The gift – which will be named the Kenya and Rainbow Barris Annual Scholarship Award - kicks off the University’s 30th anniversary yearlong celebration, which officially starts on July 1, 2018, and will include a host of national events. And that’s what I learned here-that being me was okay.” “As much as they try to tell us we need to sound like everyone else-we need to sound like us. “The universality of any message is in its specificity,” he continued. “In order to find my voice, I had to really dip back into what I learned here at CAU-and that was that I had one. It was because I hadn’t found my voice,” said Barris. “Before I got ‘Black-ish’ going, I sold 19 pilots, none of which could ever get off the ground.
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Aaron, who was the first African-American woman to host a television show in the Southeast, contributed to Lemon’s and Barris’s success in their areas of broadcasting, he said.īarris, creator of the acclaimed ABC television series “Black-ish” and co-writer of the 2017 blockbuster, “Girls Trip,” was also recognized for the $1 million he and wife, Rainbow Barris, donated for scholarships to mass media arts and biology majors. Lemon, along with television writer and producer, Kenya Barris, and former UNCF executive and television personality Billy Suber Aaron all received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters.Įarlier, President Johnson drew a thread that connected the three honorary degree recipients. “It’s time for the second act, where dreams become reality, possibility becomes probability, and opportunity become change, ideas become action,” he said. “We have dreamed about a different world where we live a life of quality, opportunity and justice. Instead of an ending, Lemon said commencement is the beginning of a new beginning.
“I know a revolution when I see one,” he said. When you abandon hope or descend into depression, you deprive us of the light that only you can shine.”Ĭiting the “Me, Too” and the gun control movement galvanized by high school students in Parkland, Florida, Lemon assured the graduates that they too must recognize their own movement. And you cannot give up … because if you give up, you give up on all of us. “And change isn’t just on your shoulders, it’s on our shoulders. Lemon told the newly minted CAU alumni that they do not embark on “this heroic journey” alone. Even with everything I’ve said, there are no excuses for you and no excuses for me, either.” “And you want to know why? Because I have no choice, and you have no choice. “There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not underestimated – still at 52 years old-that I’m not underappreciated and undervalued – and still I rise, still I rise, still I rise.
“We don’t move forward by preparing to crash,” he told the crowd of nearly 8,000 who gathered in the Panther Stadium for the 8 a.m. Lemon warned the graduates to not listen to those who believe “the beginning of the end is here.” CNN Anchor Don Lemon to Class of 2018: ‘You are the new black power movement’įor the more than 800 graduates poised to leave the hallowed halls of Clark Atlanta University to put their education to the test in the real world, there was first the matter of a cautionary tale to be considered from convocation orator, CNN anchor and correspondent Don Lemon.
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