Wow, thank you for that generous introduction. What an amazing group of young women. What a beautiful day! And how wonderful it is to be back here, at Stone Ridge.  

I am here to celebrate you and to give you some advice. But let me begin by telling you how I got here.  

I come, on my mother’s side, from West African people. They survived the Middle Passage that forced them across the Atlantic Ocean, and they worked in enslavement in Mississippi for generations. 

My first ancestor, who was born free, gave birth to a daughter—a daughter with my complexion. For this daughter, she wanted a better future. Their area in Mississippi was unusual, because it was Catholic—and she heard about a Catholic school in Virginia that educated Black women, which was unusual for that time. The only requirement was that you were baptized. So, she baptized her daughter Veronica, and sent her north to the school called St. Francis. Next door was its brother school, St. Emma’s. Kind of like Stone Ridge and Georgetown Prep. My ancestors are part of a long tradition of Black people in America rising up through education and through the church. 

Let’s pause for a moment in gratitude for each of our ancestors and what they did to get us here today.  

When her daughter died in her youth, Veronica raised my mother and her four siblings in a little house on Blaine Street in Northeast D.C. My mother—who was also named Veronica—went to parochial school because there weren’t enough funds. When the time came for high school, she took the independent school exam. She was stressed, and her score was not good enough to go to the school she wanted. She was determined that if she ever had a daughter herself, she would not go through that experience. 

My mother became a lifelong civil servant, like so many people in this audience today. She worked most of her career across the street at NIH. But at the time I was born, she was working at Navy Med, next door. She noticed that the people she respected there sent their girls to this school—to Stone Ridge.  

So she saved her earnings, and she convinced my public school-educated father that private school was best. My great-grandmother, the one who was sent north, passed away at this time. And it was because of this that there was enough money for me to start Stone Ridge, some thirty-nine years ago, when I was five. 

In Kindergarten, I met Meredith, and Kathleen, and Naela, Meghan, Marisa, and Sophia, Kristen, Alison, Brie, and Roopika—with whom I shared a locker in the first grade. Lisa and Meredith and Kristin and I started a club to look for a ghost that we were convinced lived in the woods where the pool is right now. The club was also a band. We assigned ourselves instruments even though we didn’t know how to play them, and we also didn’t have any instruments. And at the end of recess, we always lingered to look for that ghost who we thought was named Merlin. This was an exercise of personal responsibility in an atmosphere of wise freedom. Goal V. 

In the seventh grade, my father died after a short illness of cancer. School became the most stable thing in my life. Stone Ridge brought my class to his funeral at Blessed Sacrament. And that summer, I went to Kristen’s house for a sleepover—she lived on a farm. And the way I remember it, I called my mom every couple of days to ask if I could keep sleeping over, and she said yes, and Kristen’s mom said yes. And that summer was full of horses, and woods, and barn chores, and dogs, and home cooking. I healed, some. 

Last year, my mom passed away suddenly. Friends from Stone Ridge started to call and text. Brie called and I told her I needed flowers for the funeral—all I said was, “purple and white, ” and she did the rest. A letter came from Manhattan, from a priest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Charlotte had organized a mass to be said in my mom’s name. Meredith’s mother, Margot, who had been friends with my mother since we started Kindergarten, agreed to say her eulogy. And it was beautiful, and funny. 

And Alison, whose late mother and mine were great friends also, helped me to start a Stone Ridge scholarship for a girl like my mom, who was sitting the independent school entrance exam. The Veronica Crawford-Robinson Scholarship is for a student from the Washington School for Girls, which is tuition-free Catholic K-8 school in Anacostia. It aims at providing full financial support for a student to attend high school at Stone Ridge. 

My mom’s funeral took place a year ago, almost to this day, at Blessed Sacrament. In the audience were so many Stone Ridge classmates and their mothers. Mrs. Fazio was also there; she taught me to sing from the diaphragm over countless years at Stone Ridge. And it was comforting to know that that would probably help me get through crying. But the most remarkable thing of that day happened just before mass started. The Stone Ridge friend that I spent that summer with—Kristen—she must have noticed that I was crying, even though I was trying not to show it. And she launched a packet of tissues through the air, over the aisle, and into the hands of Joey, our friend who went to Prep, who was sitting behind me. He handed me a tissue.  

So that’s how I got here. 

"You keep doing this work for the world, while you do your own work beyond Stone Ridge." 

Now to you.  

What I want to tell you about is the importance of three things for you to remember as you leave Stone Ridge, and you enter the world beyond. 

Those three things all start with the letter C, and I want you to remember them when you don’t know what to do, when you maybe feel uncomfortable. If you focus on these three things, I believe that you will continue to do the good you’ve done at Stone Ridge, and to feel good, all your lives long.  

The three things are:  

• Compassion, and in particular Self-Compassion, 
• Community, 
• and Courage.  

I have learned about these things in the twenty-five years since I sat exactly where you are. And I’m trying to give you a head start here, so listen up.  

First, what is compassion? What is self-compassion, in particular? 

Well, you’re going to have to learn to support yourself, even in unsupportive environments, and to do so outside your family, your home, and outside of Stone Ridge as you begin to make your life among a group of strangers at college.  

Let me explain using a personal example of what self-compassion is. When I graduated from law school, my mother bought me the robes I am wearing right now. It’s called academic dress, or regalia. The details on the robes symbolize the work you did to graduate. So for me, it’s red for Harvard, purple embroidery on the front for law, a blue and grey hood from MIT, with this strange shape in the back that indicates a doctorate. My mother bought me these robes because she believed in me. She believed that I would be wearing them my whole life, because becoming a professor was my dream. 

But I remember how I felt when she surprised me with this gift: I felt embarrassed. I did not believe in myself. I knew the robes were expensive. And, at that time, I didn’t believe I was worth the price of these robes.  

There’s a thing about self-belief that isn’t captured by self- help slogans like “you can do it.” And that thing is the essential skill of being compassionate to yourself when it comes your weak spots. Your so-called flaws. 

I, for example, am a big thinker. I like big ideas, and I spend a lot of time with them. Time. Time is hard for me. Time: a thing so small it can be counted in milliseconds, but so necessary for daily life, and for getting important things done—like getting to a graduation on time—that you have to pay attention to it. Virtually all the time! 

I used to give myself a hard time about time. I would say to myself, “why can’t you handle this!?” “Here you are, late again!” “Another deadline. Missed.” 

It wasn’t until I learned to separate my observations about what I was doing with time from my judgments about it that I was able to change this harsh inner-critic.  

With self-compassion, I can observe myself and say, now: “Wow, I lost track of time, while I was thinking about that big idea.” And then I can say:  “I really appreciate how I can  think about big ideas.” And then I say:  “what can I do to help myself?” 

You know what helps? This is a nursery clock. It counts down time. But the way it does it is with a rainbow and a little cloud with a smiley face at the end. When you set the time, the rainbow gets smaller and smaller and eventually the cloud disappears and the green light turns into a blinking red. It doesn’t have a big sound that makes me feel guilty, for running out of time. And I can simply say to myself, when the rainbow disappears: Do I need more time? Do I have more time? I have three of these, one for every location where it’s important for me to think about time. 

This approach to yourself will help you to approach other people with compassion too. You will be able to listen to them, to observe them, to notice what they are doing and saying without judging immediately whether it is good or bad. These are not helpful categories. They never helped me in my struggle with time. You can still decide what you want to do, or not do; who you want to be around, or not—but you don’t have to be making those decisions from a place of fear, or guilt, or shame, or embarrassment when you have approached them compassionately. And compassion starts with yourself.  

Next, find community, wherever you are. And where there isn’t a community—make one. 

What is community? It is a set of relationships. Relationships that form around mutual interests, around the need for mutual aid. 

And I know that you already know this, because of what I learned when I met with some of you over Zoom a few weeks ago. 

Kira, who is coming up to join us in Boston for college, said that her time on the field hockey and lacrosse teams taught her cross-grade collaboration. Abby, who likes chemistry, talked about the Black Student Alliance. Laura described being involved across the grades, because she is the president of student government. 

Gaby told me about “people who come and go but the relationships stay close.” Ruth, who is also coming to Massachusetts, said: “We’ve all been able to find what we love here.” Someone else said: “We have learned not to take things for granted: friends, family members, teachers, and mentors.” And Caroline, the yearbook editor, said: “I want to make my mark on the community by capturing what defines our grade.” 

Audrey said she found community not only in this grade, but across the grades through softball. Stone Ridge traditions that incorporate every single grade means students “look up” to the older girls—at feast days and Congè. Someone remembered the senior run and said, “as a lower schooler I saw them going by.” Now you became one of them. Desi mentioned Ring Day, and she said “how sacred that was”—even though it rained. In your own words, this class is funny, and it is weird. You attend the musical, the play, and the games. The last thing I wrote in my notes from that day was: “we rely on each other.” 

That’s community. 

Stone Ridge is a community. But in the world out there, you may need to create it. The building of community is a Christian value. Goal IV.  

To do this, you’re going to need courage. And that is my third and final piece of advice. 

When, with others, I started the first NAACP branch among seventeen towns and cities north of Boston, well-meaning people who advise my career suggested that I put it off. I’m on something called the “tenure track,” which is like a really long tryout to become a professor. 

I didn’t listen to them. 

In May of that year, George Floyd had been murdered in broad daylight over eight minutes on a Minneapolis street, and it was captured on video. People did not know what to do, but they wanted to do something. In the two months that followed, I joined organizing meetings in my community, and by July we had applied for and were granted a charter to begin the first branch of the oldest civil rights organization in the country in that area. A social awareness impels to action. Goal III. 

The reason I ignored my well-meaning mentors was because we know at Stone Ridge that we can do our work and also work for our communities. You do it every Wednesday afternoon at A Wider Circle (where I donated all my mother’s furniture), at Bread for the City, at Bikes for the World, at Friends of Sligo Creek, at I Support the Girls, and at Children’s Inn at NIH, among other places. 

You keep doing this work for the world, while you do your own work beyond Stone Ridge. 

In closing, there is a statue, on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, of a man named William Lloyd Garrison. He published The Liberator, which was an abolitionist newspaper, beginning in 1831. Garrison’s parents were immigrants to this country, from Canada. His mother, Frances Maria Lloyd, led the family when his father deserted it—and it was she who started to refer to William by his middle name, Lloyd, which was her family name, so that it would be preserved. She died not far from here, in Baltimore. 

The Liberator appealed to the moral conscience of its readers, urging them to demand the immediate freedom of enslaved people. It also promoted women’s rights. And it served as a kind of community bulletin board, printing what was actually happening in America at that time, forms of brutality that spurred on the new abolitionist movement. 

On the side of Lloyd Garrison’s statue in Boston it says:  

I am in earnest.

I will not equivocate. 

I will not retreat, a single inch. 

And I will be heard. 

The message I’ve been trying to give you as you leave Stone Ridge is that you have to have compassion for yourself and for others; you must have courage to be yourself, in the face of difference—to explain your reality, your life experiences, and your thoughts and your feelings to others who may not be inclined to agree with you, and who may not be like you in terms of what their lived experience has been. 

I have learned that out of those two things—compassion and courage—you can form a community. And it’s a deeply American idea, one that is encapsulated in concepts like E Pluribus Unum: Out of many, one. Through community, we can build a better world. 

You are leaving Stone Ridge and entering a divided moment in history like William Lloyd Garrison’s, two hundred years ago. In such times, things are often presented in absolutes:  

• Too many federal employees—bad 
• Tech entrepreneurs—good  
• Trade—bad 
• Protectionism—good  
• Them—bad 
• Us—good  

Things are rarely, if ever, black and white like this. 

We are all playing a mix of roles, occupying the position of victim, of bystander, of survivor. And usually choosing your position, is a choice. 

That is why Maya Angelou said, also in a commencement speech, that courage is the most important virtue. It is the most important because courage is what you need to practice any of the other virtues consistently. To give generously of yourself, you may need to defy well-meaning advice as I had to do when working for the NAACP. 

And this is not something for a far-off time, when you’re older. It is for right now. When she founded the Society of the Sacred Heart, dedicated to the education of young women at a time when French authorities prohibited devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, St. Madeleine Sophie Barat had to be courageous. She was twenty years old when she did that. St. Rose Philippine Duchesne had to be courageous when she plotted to escape her enormous family home in Grenoble, in opposition to her father, who was a prominent lawyer. She eventually left France altogether and spent ten weeks at sea and another seven weeks on a steamboat to get to St. Louis, where she established the first convent of the Sacred Heart in the United States—in a log cabin. 

My friend Kristen, who is here. She had to be courageous when she threw that pack of tissues over the aisle at Blessed Sacrament last year, putting my needs in grief over the good behavior that is expected of us in church. 

And I look forward to hearing your courageous stories of compassion, of self-compassion, and of community building and community serving, in the years to come.  

Thank you for involving me in your day today, congratulations, and you’ve got this! ❤