Summary

Michelle Obama begins her commencement address by thanking the members of her audience and the graduate class of 2013, while also bringing up the challenges that some of them may have faced before graduation.

She then tells the story of Bowie State University’s origins back in 1865, when it was started within an African Baptist Church in Baltimore. This leads her to reflect on the discrimination that African Americans have been exposed to during American history. She mentions that slaves were not allowed to read, but that Emancipation quickly lead to new schools being created in defiance of the idea that black people should not be educated.

Moving back to the present, she praises the generations of students that have graduated since the beginning and thus concludes the story of the university.

The next part of the speech...