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Annapolis Grads Write Powerful Pledge to Combat Racism
We challenge every American to take it
32 years ago, almost to this day, I walked across a graduation stage with 1,059 fellow students of the United States Naval Academy’s class of 1988, nominated, as mandated by federal law, from every state — all 50 — including Washington D.C., Guam, Puerto Pico, and the U. S. Virgin Islands.
If any alumni group represents a complete geographic cross-section of the United States of America, it’s us.
We had arrived in Annapolis one by one on a sweltering, humid morning, the day after Independence Day in 1984, teenagers tumbling out of the backseats of our parents’ cars, Greyhound buses, subways, and our first plane rides.
Survival, our common goal, bonding us together.
Seventy-eight percent of the class indeed did survive the ensuing four years of school and training, and it should not surprise anyone familiar with the Naval Academy that its graduates include John McCain, Sunita Williams, David Robinson, Jimmy Carter, Michelle Howard and thousands of other leaders in every discipline across this nation who once called “Mother B” their home.
On Induction Day, like every person in the armed forces before us and each one that will follow, we raised our right hands and vowed to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
Three decades later, we find ourselves (finally) facing a brutal and unjust domestic enemy, a creation of our country’s own history.
We, as classmates, and we as a country, are facing down the enemy of systemic racism and white privilege: an enemy that, regretfully, so many of us never even realized we had — or worse, abetted.
Four Black Naval Academy graduates, now well in their 50s with their own families and careers to focus on, yet still invested in the ironclad relationships that service to our country forges, took the time and initiative to write a pledge for our class.
Their strategy seeks to overcome this domestic enemy not with Tomahawks, not with the latest laser weapons, not with UAVs, but with words and a three-part, actionable pledge.
