Speaking
a day before the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark
school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education,
Minnesota Supreme Court Justice and former football great
Alan C. Page '67 told the audience at Notre Dame's 159th commencement
that some things have changed for the better in regard to race
issues in this country.
But many haven't.
Page, who is African-American, told the capacity crowd in the
Joyce Center on May 16 that the disappearance of "Colored Only"
signs and other symbols of what he called "state-sponsored apartheid"
demonstrated clear progress. But he despaired of studies showing
that five decades after Brown, many schools are re-segregating.
And nearly four decades after passage of the Voting Rights Act,
"far too many African-Americans feel they have no reason to vote."
Page said he was particularly concerned about the criminal justice
system. He cited studies showing that people of color are arrested,
charged, and given higher bails, tougher plea bargains, less fair
trials and far longer sentences than whites.
"There is something fundamentally wrong when our judicial system
-- the one branch of government designed to protect individual
rights -- persistently denies equal justice to communities of
color," he said.
Page became the first African American to sit on the Minnesota
Supreme Court when he was elected to the post in 1993. He had
previously served as an assistant attorney general for the state
and, prior to that, practiced law at a firm in Minneapolis. He
attended the University of Minnesota Law School during his years
starring in the National Football League and earned his law degree
in 1978. He was a three-year starter at defensive end for Notre
Dame, a consensus All-American and led the Fighting Irish to the
1966 national championship as a senior.
He and his wife, Diane, established the Page Education Foundation
in 1988 to provide educational grants to students of color to
attend colleges and universities in Minnesota and Notre Dame.
In partnership with the Notre Dame Club of Minneapolis, the foundation
has awarded grants to five current Notre Dame students. To date,
the foundation has awarded some 4,000 grants to 1,885 students
totaling more than $2.5 million.
Page devoted about half of his address to issues of race and
the other half to the more traditional commencement theme of encouraging
graduates to be of strong character and work to change the world
for the better.
"You don't need to be a Supreme Court justice or even a football
hero to make change happen," he told the assembled students, faculty,
administrators and family members and those watching on TV elsewhere
on campus and on the Internet. "Everyone here . . . has the ability,
the opportunity, and I believe the obligation to make this world
a better place. All we have to do is act. And act we must."
Also speaking at commencement was the recipient of this year's
Laetare Medal from Notre Dame, the oldest and most prestigious
honor given to American Catholics. Father J. Bryan Hehir, president
and treasurer of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Boston,
talked of the priest sex-abuse scandal in the Boston area, which
he said had devastated the archdiocese and created a "crisis of
trust." He said he was accepting the award on behalf of all those
trying to restore that trust and "as a pledge of commitment to
the work which must be accomplished if the social ministry of
the church is again to be credible and effective."
Before his most recent appointment last January, Hehir had served
as president and chief executive officer of Catholic Charities
USA since 2001. He had been on the faculty of Harvard Divinity
School beginning in 1993 and from 1998 to 2001 was the first Catholic
priest to lead the school. Prior to Harvard, Hehir worked for
two decades in Washington in what was then called the United States
Catholic Conference (now the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops).
A prominent scholar on the theory of just war, he is regarded
as the principal architect of the bishops' influential 1982 pastoral
letter on nuclear weapons, which called for reducing the nation's
nuclear arsenal.
Valedictorian Sarah Streicher of Toledo, Ohio, who earned a
3.99 grade-point average as a double major in English and French,
spoke of the multitude of activities, interests and causes in
which students are involved at Notre Dame. She called on graduates
to remain engaged.
"If we were to stop doing so," she said, "the tensions that
once pulled our character so big might slacken, and we might just
snap back to something narrow and diminutive."
Academic degrees were conferred on some 1,850 undergraduates
and 600 advanced-degree candidates at this year's commencement.
Eleven individuals were given honorary degrees, including Page,
whose doctor of humane letters represented his second honorary
degree from the University following a doctor of laws in 1993.
Also receiving honorary degrees this year were: Judge José
A. Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit; Sister Anita de Luna, MCDP, assistant
professor of religious studies and director of the Center for
Women in Church and Society at Our Lady of the Lake University
in San Antonio; John L. Hennessy, president of
Stanford University since 2000 and a professor of electrical engineering
and computer science; Elaine Kim, professor of
Asian-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley;
business executive Terrence J. McGlinn '62, a
member of Notre Dame's Board of Trustees and Board of Fellows;
Reverend Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, O.P., Dominican
priest and professor at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise
in Jerusalem; Homer A. Neal, Samuel A. Goudsmit
professor of physics at the University of Michigan and former
interim president (he was the first African-American to lead the
university); James D. Sinegal, founder, president
and chief executive officer of Costco Wholesale Corporation; Roxanne
Spillett, president of Boys & Girls Clubs of America;
and Peter Tannock, vice chancellor of the University
of Notre Dame Australia.
(July 2004)
