Good morning. President Bordewich, Board of Trustees, alumni, faculty, staff, friends -- everyone who is part of the Guilford College community. Thank you for having me here today. I thank you for this honor, and for so warmly welcoming me.

Above all, congratulations, class of 2026. Congratulations to you, to your families and your loved ones. Today is a day for celebration, and I’m excited to share it with you – this celebration of all you’ve already accomplished and all that is to come.

Over my years as a teacher, my students have asked me plenty of hard questions. But no question was harder than one posed to me by one young man from the Baltimore School for the Arts.

We’d spent the year studying the early history of our city, Baltimore. In its early years, Baltimore had been the country’s third largest city; it became prosperous through banking, railroads and commerce at its port. When my students walked Baltimore’s streets, they saw the signs, really the remnants, of a glorious past: grand churches, towering monuments, stately homes, and an imposing courthouse. But other parts of Baltimore’s history, they were learning, was hard, hard as in harder to face. In those same glorious years, Baltimore was a slaveholding city where, even for Black people who were free, racism and discrimination degraded their lives. Many of my students were descendants of those early Black Baltimoreans.

That student – the one with the hard question -- was finishing up a final project. He had written and was preparing to deliver a speech: He would introduce the school and the community to the story of a little-known figure, a free Black man named George Hackett; George had lived in early Baltimore, during the early 1800s before the Civil War.

George was a key to our learning about the city’s hard history. He was someone who spent his entire life fighting against the racism and discrimination imposed on him and other Black Baltimoreans. My student was excited to deliver a speech that would even include George Hackett’s own words.

So we were in the middle of a morning rehearsal when this same student stopped. He put down his script, and he turned to me. “Professor,” he said, he demanded, “Professor, why have you kept this history from us for so long?”

You see, in his research my student had discovered a story that no one had told him before. And it was not easy to understand. In George Hackett’s time, Baltimore had been a major center of law and business and politics, but it had been a tough place for men like George: discrimination was widespread, jobs were no where, schools and the voting booth were closed to Black residents.

That was hard history.

So why had we kept the story of George and the early history of Baltimore from my student for so long? I knew what he was getting at. Growing up, adults around him had sometimes told my student that “the past is the past.” They had sheltered him from the difficult moments in Baltimore’s history. They worried that hard history might frighten, discourage or depress him. It might even make him love his hometown a little less.

So I had to take a moment to think that day, “Why had we kept this history from him for so long? Why today do we cover up the hard parts of our past?"

Why have we as your teachers, your parents, your elders sometimes kept the difficult past from you? Why have we sheltered you by whitewashing what has come before? Why have we sometimes thought that if you – you, young people -- knew too much about the past – the good but also the bad, the easy but also the hard – why did we think it would harm you, hurt you, keep you from living your very best lives? I wondered that day was I – was I as a teacher – guilty of promoting the notion that when it comes to the hard past, ignorance might be bliss?

So that day we paused the rehearsal at the Baltimore School for the Arts. And for a few moments, my students became the teachers. And I listened. And what I learned was that, rather than being afraid of the past, my students were fascinated by it. Rather than being unsettled by hard history, they felt informed by it.

They didn’t worry that knowing more about the hard past – in the life of George Hackett and in the life of their city – would harm them or keep them from working toward their goals. Instead, understanding the past helped them to see how we had gotten to where we were, it helped them to understand the troubles of the present. Nothing about the past would keep them from loving their city and contributing to its best future.

For me the most important lesson for me was one about finding inspiration. My students explained that when, amidst the history of slavery and racism in Baltimore, they had discovered George Hackett and people like him, they were inspired. They had discovered heroes.

In a time when many people thought he should be little more than a slave, George was free and he built a family and a church, he served in the Navy and ran his own business. George campaigned for civil rights and when others wronged him, he went to the local courthouse and insisted on the rule of law. The history books had nearly forgotten George, but there we were, my students and I, rediscovering his remarkable story. He inspired them.

And that day inspired me too. Today, I run a lab called “Hard Histories," a space in which students and teachers, curators and librarians, public historians and the general public, come together to find courage and then face the difficult past. We take our lead from those courageous students at the Baltimore School for the Arts. No more “ignorance is bliss.”

At "Hard Histories," we’ve had enough of fearing or hiding from the past. We're not satisfied with myths that leave out the rest of the story. We're sure that we -- all of us -- have the courage, the nerve, and even the strongest need to understand the past for what it was. We don't write fairy tales. We tell the truth, the whole truth. Our work on hard histories is premised in the belief that especially young people – students like you here at Guilford – have been taught, trained, prepared, and equipped with courage, with fortitude, and a burning need to know where we’ve come from, how we got here. We believe that only by understanding the past – all of it, including the hard parts -- can we built the futures we aim to live in for ourselves and for the world.

Now, young people, you will encounter folks who will encourage you to fear the past. Those who want to be sure that hard history is forgotten, or suppressed, even whitewashed. In some places, at this very moment this is happening in your names. People will tell you that you, young people, including the bright and educated among you, that you cannot take it, the difficult past. You will hear that the past will harm you, wound you and undermine your ability to be great. Do not believe them.

Today, my charge to you, Class of 2026 is to take what you’ve learned here, what you’ve gained, take the courageous thinking that you exemplify, take it out into the world. And, when you come upon a monument or a historic site, or when a next work assignment requires you to explain the past, when you visit a museum or a library, when you discover that history has been taken down, changed, erased, whitewashed, ask yourself – is what you need protecting? Is what you need is to be afraid? Remember that your time here at Guilford has taught you that you have the insight, the critical thinking skills, and even that bravery that requires that you have to know and to understand the very hard past, not to hide from it.

I recently visited one of these places: a national parks site that for the last 15 years had told a hard history: that of an American president who was also a slave holder. This offered us a place to think through the American paradox, the founding paradox of liberty and slavery together. And it was especially an apt lesson here in 2026 as we celebrate the nation's 250th birthday. I learned there that each year, since the site's opening, one million visitors from around the world had come there — each in their own way mobilizing their courage and their critical thinking. But today that is not possible. Park officials have ripped down the site’s interpretive signs, disappeared the text that helped guide visitors, erased the history that went along with the place. And standing there, witness to the erasure of hard history, I thought of you.

I heard you asking me, asking all of us, that question that my student at the Baltimore School for the Arts had asked me, “Why are you keeping this history from us?” I can say I felt ashamed, discouraged, maddened. I left frustrated. And still, thinking of you, gave me hope. Because I knew that you, that all of us together, will not fall for torn down signs, we will not fall for whitewashed historical sites. I knew that we will keep asking the hard questions and then strive to answer them. Class of 2026, history and this country that holds so much of our shared past, needs you, it needs your courage and your willingness to ask the hard questions, your willingness to face the hard past and your commitment to making for all of us a better future.

Congratulations, and Godspeed.