John Legend’s Speech At The 2024 LMU Undergraduate Commencement (Transcript)

I felt connected to my thousands of fellow graduates.

And since then, through all these years, from all that life gives and all that life takes, I’ve come to realize that we should savor these moments. Take the time to pause and reflect, to revel in our accomplishments and with our communities. Celebrate with the people we love. So do me a favor, class of 2024.

Can we just take a breath and let it soak in? Look at the people around you. Your people. Take a mental snapshot.

Overcoming Challenges

Savor it. Relish it. Remember it. Because that joy you feel right now, that’s what this ceremony is really about.

And man, do you all deserve this ceremony today? You have earned it. You have traveled a remarkable journey to this time, to this place. And I don’t need to say it because it’s already been said.

But if we rewind the clock four years, the spring of 2020, sometimes we want to block out that time, right? We were in a global pandemic. You were robbed of all the traditional milestones. You didn’t have a senior prom. You didn’t walk across your high school graduation stage. You finished your senior year trapped in a Zoom screen. There’s no point in sugarcoating it. It sucked.

Then in the fall of 2020, you began your journey again on Zoom screens and masked and socially distanced. Somehow you juggled your first year seminars with study sessions as you figured out how to adult. You participated, hopefully, in one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime in which democracy was on the ballot. And as you prepared for your second semester, we all watched an attempt to overturn that election insurrection at our nation’s capital.

That was all during your first year of college, long before you could partake in a well-deserved drink. You deserve that drink. You deserved it. And yet, class of 2024, your resilience and resolve, the way you powered through with grit and determination and a little bit of fun, sense of humor.

The way you looked out for one another, forged connection with one another amidst an epidemic of isolation and loneliness. The way you advocated for the causes in which you believe, the way you immersed yourselves in the work and play that brings meaning and life. It fills me with so much hope. And hope, hope, that’s something we all could use a little more of these days.

The Solidarity Generation

Let’s talk about hope, about the faith that you give me for the future, about the optimism I feel when I look into your faces. Why do I have so much hope, class of 2024? It starts with you and your unique education. President Snyder rightfully deemed this class the solidarity generation, a class that recognizes, thanks to the challenges you’ve overcome, that the most effective way to drive change, to find joy, to survive is by doing it together.

From a once-in-a-century pandemic, like Yinka said, you learned the importance of caring for one another, of putting the needs of your community above your own self-interest. From converging national and global crises, you’ve learned to march together for accountability and action and justice, to get in good trouble, as the late John Lewis would say. But just as important, from your time here, you learned that the power of an education lies not in just acing the test or landing a fancy management consulting job like I did after college. Yes, I was a consultant for a while, believe it or not.

The power of education is that it empowers you to serve. It empowers you to build. It empowers you to give. And I see your commitment to service reflected in the host of organizations at the heart of campus life here, from the Pam Rector Center for Service and Action, to the coaches and volunteers that put on special games every year.

And I see it in the next chapters many of you will write. I see it in the scholars, doctors, lawyers, teachers, founders, artists, producers, and yes, musicians you are becoming. I see it in the causes this class has championed, on this garden at Alumni Mall, across Los Angeles, and far beyond. I see it in your advocacy for your fellow student-athletes, in your work to address the climate crisis, and to advance justice here in America and around the world.

Purpose and Challenges

I see it in your academic work too, in the effort you’ve taken across disciplines to better understand our world. All of this education, this service, all of it is a remarkable gift. It will be part of you forever. I can say that with confidence because I know how my college experience shaped my beliefs, my relationships, my career, the music I write, the work that I do.

I know it helped me understand my purpose. I know your experiences at LMU will help you understand your purpose and live your purpose. And we need purpose, especially in those moments of profound challenge. Of course, this is one of those moments.

It’s a heated time on our nation’s college campuses. We’ve got roiling crises all around the world. Everything seems to be on fire. Places like Israel and Palestine, Ukraine, Iran, even here at home, where the threat of autocracy continues to gather.

But also in the places that probably deserve more of our attention. Haiti, Myanmar, Sudan. Other areas of conflict around the world. In so many of these painful instances, the patterns are similar. So-called leaders act with malice and apparent impunity. They exploit people’s very real fears and anxieties. They inflame ethnic conflicts. They pit people and communities against one another.

They deploy misinformation and disinformation. They exploit inequalities. They peddle grievance and resentment. And they thrive on dehumanization.

Dehumanization and Its Dangers

When you dehumanize someone, when you call them vermin or animals, when you say an immigrant community will poison our blood, you create a permission structure that allows people to harm them one by one or family by family or community by community. This sort of attitude is a dangerous thing. All of history’s worst moral catastrophes, from slavery to genocide, are fueled by this sort of dehumanization. And the autocrat’s playbook usually involves identifying someone as an other or enemy, dehumanizing them, and then saying, “I alone can fix it.”

Or “I alone can impose law and order or dispense with democracy, dispense with checks and balances and the rule of law. You need a strong man. You need to concentrate power with me and take it away from the people where it belongs.” Our history books are replete with these types of leaders, replete with the havoc they’ve wreaked, the injustice they’ve wrought, the wars they’ve started, the lives they’ve destroyed.

And those of us who believe in our shared humanity, in democracy, should be worried that these forces of dehumanization might have their way again in 2024. Our problems are not neat. The solutions are not easy, and I’m not going to suggest that they are. But I believe, and I’m certain your LMU professors do too, that a great education teaches you that your job is to think critically.

To challenge assumptions, to question the status quo, to interrogate the common wisdom. Moral clarity is certainly comfortable. We prefer for everything to be black and white. Social media pushes everyone to pick a side.

Navigating Complexity

And yet, most things happen in those shades of gray. Humanity, life, is filled with nuance and complexity. And I say lean into that nuance. Engage with the complexity.

So how do we do this? How do we do this, class of 2024? How do we engage with complexity? We do it by listening with more humility. Listening with more curiosity. Listening with more intentionality. Listening with more empathy. After all, with the freedom of speech comes the responsibility, the community responsibility, to listen to each other, to give a full and fair hearing.

We engage with complexity by recognizing that in a multiracial, multiethnic, pluralist democracy, we are going to disagree. That’s inevitable. The noise and the mess are features, not bugs. At the same time though, diversity and difference need not be synonymous with intractable division.

Even when we disagree, we have no choice but to find ways to tolerate each other, to respect each other, to live with each other. We might start with the assumption that for the most part, most of the time, most people are operating in good faith. So we can extend grace to them and the benefit of the doubt. We might acknowledge that we each are bringing our own histories and experiences and biases to our perceptions, our own legitimate fears and anxieties.

And then we might, each of us, try to see the world through one another’s eyes. To do the really hard thing, to genuinely honor one another’s humanity, even when we disagree. Because we all are God’s children. We all are someone’s child or sibling or friend.

Israel and Palestine

And class of ’24, we may as well talk about the elephant in the garden. Let’s talk for a moment about Israel and Palestine. No doubt, there is staggering, stupefying complexity swirling all around and through this multi-dimensional, multi-generational crisis. The vexing, bedeviling questions have stymied world leaders and ordinary citizens for decades.

But one thing is clear. There has been too much profound human suffering. Millions of innocents, Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and secular, they yearn for just and lasting peace. They yearn to live with dignity, all of them, like all human beings, with equal rights and equal opportunity.

And yet, they remain trapped in what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called a “descending spiral.” As you’ve learned here, there are profound limits to what war can accomplish. War may win territory, but it does not win hearts and minds. War can subjugate, but it cannot unify. War can destroy, but it cannot build. And the ultimate weakness of violence, Dr. King said, is that it only begets more violence. Violence leads only to vengeance and reprisal. Fire to more fire. We know this.

All of human history affirms it. And Dr. King said repeatedly, during another period of national upheaval and campus unrest, that “darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” The same is true of the here and now. Violence will never be a lasting solution to violence. Hate will never be the solution to hate. Instead, we must be the light. We must be the love.

Now, I can imagine what at least a few of you are thinking. All this Kumbaya talk is nice, but thousands of people are dying. How could it be that in the face of war and autocracy and ethnic conflict, after all of the compounding trauma of our recent past, that we should just love more? I can understand the skepticism, but hear me out. I come from a family of preachers.

The Power of Love

Alright. I’m the grandson of a preacher, the great grandson of a preacher, the nephew of several preachers. I grew up going to a lot of church, and I’ve heard a lot of sermons. And what many of us learned during those Sunday sermons, and I’m sure some of you have learned at this fine Jesuit Marymount University, is that there isn’t just one kind of love.

There are at least three. There’s eros, romantic love, the intoxicating love, the love that burns hottest. You know, the type of love that makes you want to sing. “All of me loves all of you.” Hey, I made a career of that kind of love. Then there’s philia, brotherly and sisterly love. That means love for our family and friends, love for our teammates, love for the places that shape us. It’s the love that has you picking up a Mendocino farm sandwich for your buddy or throwing them in Foley Pond on their birthday.

But I want to spend some time on the third kind of love, class of 2024, the type of love that Dr. King called the most powerful, transcendent kind of love. It’s called agape. Agape is the universal love that’s intrinsic to the human heart.

Agape Love

The love that burns the longest. It’s bigger than any of us because it resides in all of us. It’s not the love of rom-coms or pop songs, nothing against pop songs. Agape is a righteous, rebellious kind of love.

And through our histories, the most powerful tool at our disposal to build social change and social justice. You see, it’s easy to love your friend or your lover. Agape emboldens us to love our enemies. It’s easy to love the people who share our sense of what’s right, the people with whom we agree.

Agape emboldens us to love the people who, at least in our eyes, could not be more wrong. It’s easy to love the people who are marching with us. Agape emboldens us to love the people who are marching against us, even the people who try to silence or suppress us. Agape is the love that dares us to believe deeply in our shared humanity and that we can find a way through together.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time at the library, reading about Dr. King and other civil rights icons, Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells and James Baldwin and Fannie Lou Hamer. I wasn’t into comic books.

Heroes of Love

These were my superheroes. And together, they summoned the power of Agape during other periods of turbulence and transformation to challenge America to live up to its founding aspirations, to challenge all of us to make the American project our own step-by-step, ballot-by-ballot, protest-by-protest, law-by-law. And why am I sharing this with you despite the vitriol all around us, despite the crackdowns, despite the insanity of our politics at this fraught, perilous moment? Because I believe with every fiber of my being that love, that Agape love, is the true path toward the world that we want.

Radical love. Audacious love. Defiant love. Love is how we turn that descending spiral of violence into a virtuous cycle. Love is how we reject anti-Semitism. We reject Islamophobia. We reject bigotry and homophobia. We repudiate the forces of autocracy and avarice.

Love is how we learn from the fullness of our histories, from the pride and the pain of our past, to prevent ourselves from being trapped by history. Love is how we dismantle the pernicious systems of caste, of racial inequality, that trick us into denying that your liberation is bound up with mine, and mine with yours. Love allows us to forgive. And I believe in love because of my own life, because of my own story.

A Personal Story

Allow me to get personal for a moment. I grew up in Springfield, Ohio. Alright. We got Ohioans everywhere. We like to leave Ohio. Springfield is a small, blue-collar city. My idol, my hero, my inspiration was my grandmother, Elmira Lloyd. She was the daughter of a preacher who later became the wife of a preacher.

Like I said, it’s something of a family business. In our church, my mother directed the choir, my father played the drums, but my grandmother was the heart of it all, in her seat behind the organ. I remember vividly how after church, we would gather in her house every Sunday. She would cook collard greens, cornbread, chicken, and week after week, month after month, year after year, she would sit with me at the piano and taught me to play gospel music.

When you hear me playing today, you’re hearing my grandmother in me. I wouldn’t be the musician I am today without Elmira Lloyd. And then we lost her when I was just 10 years old. I was heartbroken, but nobody was more heartbroken, more lost, than my mother.

A Mother’s Struggle

They were very close. They led the choir together. And after her mother died, my mother spiraled into depression and addiction. For a decade, she was out of our lives.

I felt cheated and angry. During this time, we were raised by our single father. My three siblings and I took care of each other, picking up whatever chores were necessary to keep the house going. I would cook dinner from the time I was like 12 years old.

Not a hamburger helper. I went to high school, applied to colleges, graduated from both high school and college, all without my mother in my life. And frankly, I didn’t want anything to do with her at that time. I blamed her for failing us, for deserting us.

And I thought I had proven that I could succeed without her. And then one day, it hit me like a ton of bricks that my mom did what she did because she was in deep pain. She was alone. She didn’t need punishment.

Healing Through Love

She needed love. She needed people to see her humanity, her real human frailty, to help her and give her a second chance. So one day, I looked into the eyes of the person who abandoned her family, my family, who for a decade left me deeply confused and deeply wounded, and I forgave. We had some difficult conversations with my siblings, some confrontations.

We listened. She listened. And together, with love as our North Star, we healed. Today, my relationship with my mother is as strong as ever. She just celebrated her 70th birthday with a big party back in Ohio a few weeks ago. She’s a wonderful grandmother. She’s living her best life. And it was this experience with my mother, and because of her, because of her encounters with the criminal justice system, because of some of my relatives’ encounters with the criminal justice system, I was inspired to create my own organization called Free America.

Reforming the System

I learned about our country’s addiction to mass incarceration, how the United States has just 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its incarcerated people, how one in three black men will serve prison time, how more black men are under corrective control today than were enslaved on the eve of the Civil War. And I listened. I met with people currently incarcerated, visited some of the state prisons here in California. I met with their families.

I met with survivors of crime. I met with district attorneys, correction officers, state legislators, civil rights activists. And what then followed was the most challenging, humbling, gratifying work of my life. I saw families forgive people who hurt their loved ones.

I saw some of the very people that perpetuated mass incarceration take steps to reform the system. I saw the people who put up the walls begin to tear them down. This is what love can do. Class of 2024, these are no ordinary times, no question about it.

The Solidarity Generation

But the history through which you lived, the history you’ve witnessed, the history you’re making, all of this has made you extraordinary. And we need extraordinary now more than ever. The crucible of these last few years has forged in you the solidarity generation that resilience and resolve. It’s forged strength of mind and character with deeper empathy perhaps than any generation before.

It’s forged a conviction that you can change the world and that you must. Too much is at stake for you to fall prey to indifference or to fear or to division. You are prepared to be thinkers and creators, dreamers and doers, leaders for others, for our shared humanity, for justice. And I like to think that these last few years have instilled in you the recognition that love matters most of all.

The kind of love that has defined my life’s journey. That radical, audacious, defiant love. Because if love could bring healing and forgiveness to my broken family, if the crime victims I met with can extend love and empathy and grace to the perpetrators who hurt their families, then we all can. In this hour of division, class of ’24, this is what we all need.

Love is the Greatest

As the Scripture says, “faith and hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” Because with love we can listen. With love we can understand. With love we can see ourselves in each other. We can discover our abiding mutuality. With love we can serve. With love we can heal.

We can build. We can do. We can undo. With love we can sing the words of my friend and idol, Stevie Wonder. “Good morning or evening, friends. Here’s your friendly announcer. I’ve got serious news to pass on to everybody. You know that love’s in need of love today. Oh, don’t delay. Send yours in right away.” We need love, LMU. Class of 2024, I’m so proud of you.

I’m so excited for you. I cannot wait to see how you will harness the power of love. I cannot wait to see what you will do for this world and for each other. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you.

I congratulate you. I love you all. And we are all counting on you, so let’s go Lions. Thank you so much.

God bless you. Thank you.

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