ATLANTA — Morehouse College will conduct its 137th commencement on Sunday, featuring the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and the creator of the New York Times' award-winning 1619 Project.
The school will conduct the commencement ceremony on Sunday, May 16 at 9 a.m. at its Century Campus in Atlanta.
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The commencement speaker will be the Equal Justice Initiative founder and executive director, Bryan A. Stevenson. The organization works to end mass incarceration, and runs the groundbreaking National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a site in Montgomery, Ala. that honors the victims of lynchings and explores the "legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence."
NIkole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times journalist who was the driving force behind the 1619 Project, will receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters. The series was first published in 2019, to mark 400 years since the arrival of slavery brought by European colonists to America, and sought to "reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative."
Hannah-Jones was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for the series.
The school also said it would be honoring professor and five-time Fulbright Scholar Dr. Ida Rousseau Mukenge. Dr. Mukenge is retiring, and the school said it would honor her "50 years of global impact as a faculty member" who had a personal mission to "take Morehouse to the world and bring the world to Morehouse."
"Dr. Mukenge’s scholarship is wide-ranging and reflects her passion for African heritage and social transformation with more than a half-century studying, working, and conducting research in Africa and about the African diaspora," the school said in a release. "Her research interests include relationships between work, identity and mental health; church and society; women in leadership; and social justice."