He described how the commencement speaker for the Stanford University class of 1975 was former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “We were shocked and dismayed because Moynihan, within that decade, had made a name for himself by raising questions about the stability of single-parent, black families.
What made it so offensive to us as Stanford students is that many of us were from single-parent, black families… I helped to start the very first, what I called, black resistance graduation.
Stanford had its graduation on Sunday, but we called all our parents and told them, Moynihan’s gonna be the speaker.
And we want to let you know before you arrived here that we’re gonna do that… we organized a black graduation.”
[3] This protest inspired a new tradition where, “at institutions across the country, Black students, Asian American students, Latino students and Native American students have graduations for their families on Saturday before the Sunday commencement.”
