June 4, 2025: GraduationStudying: Du Bois’s Speech

[This pastweekend, my younger son and co-favorite-GuestPoster Kyle Railton graduated from high school. As I wipe awayproud Dad tears, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and contextsfor this momentous occasion—leading up to a special weekend post on what’s nextfor the new grad!]

On two ofthe many vital 2025 lessons from a 1930 speech to high school graduates.

I wrote agood bit about W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1930 address “Reflectionsupon the Housatonic River,” delivered to the graduates of Searles HighSchool (in his hometown of Great Barrington, MA), in this priorpost. In lieu of a full first paragraph here, I’d ask you to check outboth the speech and my post if you would, and then come back for a couplefurther thoughts.

Welcomeback! One of my favorite things about Du Bois (a very long and competitivelist, as readers of this blog know well) was how much he loved rivers, and hislove of the Housatonic River of his childhood in particular contributed to the publicationin his NAACP magazine The Crisis of the first poem by none otherthan Langston Hughes, as I discussedin this post. He opens his speech with a recognition that that love, andthus the speech’s titular subject, might seem silly, that “on hearing thesubject of my speech, some of you may have thought of it as a joke.” But it isanything but, and not just because of his personal affiliation with andfondness for this particular river. Instead, the central subject of Du Bois’sspeech is an overarching argument for taking better care of our rivers and all ournatural spaces, an impassioned plea that, as he concludes his speech, we “shouldrescue the Housatonic and clean it as we have never in all the years beforethought of cleaning it, and seek to restore its ancient beauty; making it thecenter of a town, of a valley, and perhaps—who knows?—of a new measure of civilizedlife.” Never has that call been more necessary than here in the summer of 2025.

Suchenvironmental conservation is a key part of Du Bois’s speech, but I would arguethat he makes the case for it through an even more overarching concept: that ofwhat we collectively owe to the communities that we are part of. Earlier thisyear, the film historian and American Studies scholar VaughnJoy focused her excellent reviewof High Noon on the defining American debate between the individualand the community. Like both Vaughn and me, Du Bois was a lifelong advocate forthe communal emphasis, for the idea that we are all profoundly connected to oneanother and the concurrent concept that society only functions at all (muchless approaches its more perfect unions) when we seek to strengthen suchcommunal connections. And he also ends this moving speech, just before thatquote about rescuing and restoring the river, with an appeal to his audiencebased precisely on that sentiment, through the lens of the high school fromwhich they all had graduated: “And so I have ventured to call to the attentionof the graduates of the Searles High School this bit of philosophy of living inthis valley.” If America is to survive, and certainly if has a chance to thrivein the years ahead, we must all hang together, not just out of necessity butout of such communal connection.

Nextgraduation connection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Graduation texts or topics you’d share?