It was 20 years ago this week that I graduated from college.
Strangely enough, what I remember most about that day was that I was missing a Grateful Dead show in California. I left the next day for California and saw a terrific run of shows at Cal Expo and Shoreline with a juicy Jerry Garcia Band sandwich at the Warfield between the Sacramento and Mountain View Dead shows.
I cannot recall who my college graduation speaker was or even the topic. However, I am reminded of a piece that I read years ago that described the greatest graduation speech that the author ever heard.
That speech is available for reading here and was written by William Kunstler.
For those of you who may not know, William Kunstler was for many years the best-known civil rights attorney in America. He had, since he first represented Freedom Riders attempting to integrate interstate busses in Mississippi in 1962, been a central figure in nearly every major civil rights case. Because many of his early clients are now American heroes, it is easy to forget that at the time Kunstler represented them, most were American pariahs. He represented or worked with Martin Luther King, Lenny Bruce, Malcolm X, Phillip and Daniel Berrigan, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Adam Clayton Powell, the Chicago 7, Jack Ruby, Attica prisoners, Black Panthers, Wounded Knee Indians, and countless others.
The part of Kunstler's speech that has always resonated with me is this section:
As you know, the American Revolution was not a revolution engineered by poor people or by people who sold rats for a penny a pound down on the Long Wharf in Boston. It was engineered by the wealthy who wanted to transfer the power of wealth from London to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The people who fought it were those people who sold rats on the Long Wharf--the tinsmiths, the blacksmiths, and so on. But those who gained the most from it were the wealthy, the slave owners.
They met in Philadelphia in 1787. They met at what's called Independence Hall, designed by a very famous lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, who defended John Peter Zenger in that famous freedom of speech trial in 1735 in New York. They blacked out the windows with paint so that no one would know they were going to violate their orders from those who sent them there by writing a new constitution and not reforming the Articles of Confederation, which was why they had been sent to Philadelphia. They were so afraid that people would find out what they were doing that they had Benjamin Franklin followed home every night and then followed from his lodgings to Independence Hall, because old Ben liked to tip a glass or two at the local tavern and they were afraid that he would give away the story before it was ready to be given away. They worked all summer and they evolved this document.
The document is fine. It sets up a tripartite form of government, and so on, but it says nothing about human rights whatsoever. And while they were talking about the supremacy clause in that document, somebody stood up and said, "How about a bill of rights?" This man was George Mason of Virginia. They voted on it. They voted twelve to one against a bill of rights. The only one that didn't vote against it was, strangely enough, North Carolina. I guess those delegates from North Carolina would be very surprised to see that the man who sits in the United States Senate from that state today is Jesse Helms. They voted again. Again, twelve to one against a bill of rights.
And so, Mason left the convention, joined by John Randolph of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. The Constitution went out for ratification and they were so afraid that it would not be ratified that they made a two-thirds vote the ratification number, rather than unanimous. Five states immediately ratified--Georgia and Connecticut among them. But the big states of Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts did not ratify immediately. In fact, as you know, the Federalist Papers were created by Hamilton and Jay and Madison to try to sell the Constitution to the New York ratifying convention. Finally, Massachusetts--meeting in the Long Wharf in Boston and led by Elbridge Gerry--had an idea: Massachusetts will ratify if you agree to have a bill of rights in the first congress. There was agreement on that score and the three big states voted narrowly--three votes in New York and ten in Virginia--and the Constitution became law.
There was an election, George Washington and John Adams were elected president and vice president, and a congress was elected. It met in Federal Hall (still standing in New York) in 1791 and there was a vote on a bill of rights. After thrashing it out for months, they finally got a bill of rights.
The Senate voted that it should not be binding on the states; the House voted that it should be binding on the states. The Senate won. (It took six hundred thousand lives between 1861 and 1865 to begin to make the Bill of Rights binding on the states.) It went out for ratification. Virginia ratified on December 15 of that year, and that became the anniversary year of the Bill of Rights.
It had twelve amendments. The first two were meaningless for present purposes; they were never voted in. They had to do with salaries for representatives and senators. You can see what was on their mind with reference to what came first. The third, Freedom of Speech became the First, and so on.
Can you ever recall a graduation speech from any event you attended? Did it move you in any way?
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