By Hazel Trice Edney
Trice Edney Communications
(TriceEdneyWire.com) – Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, a nationally renowned scholar, public intellectual and cultural critic, has urged an audience of HBCU students to use their historically Black college education to continue the “unfinished fight” by impacting and transforming America.
“HBCUs are critical. They still produce most Black people who are educated in America. Right now, despite Harvard and Yale and Princeton and all of them, we got Morehouse, we got Spellman, we got Talladega, we got Livingstone, we got Tuskegee. They still produce the vast majority of Black people who are educated in this nation. And the graduates of HBCUs have changed America, have made America what it is today,” Dyson told the applauding audience at the 147-year-old Livingstone College in Salisbury, N.C. “You’ve got to think about all the great people that HBCUs have produced. And now you have your opportunity to stand up and to be a proud member of that great sorority and that great fraternity.”
Speaking on the Livingstone campus during its 2026 convocation Sept. 18, Dyson was giving his inaugural lecture as the college’s new Visiting Scholar in Residence. Livingstone President Dr. Anthony J. Davis envisions four lectures by Dyson on the topics of Black thought, faith, hip-hop, politics and democracy as fortifying the college’s growing reputation as an institution of “Black intellectual thought, cultural expression and academic excellence,” Davis said in a statement.
Introducing Dyson to the audience of more than a thousand people, including newly installed student government leaders, Davis said Dyson’s residency will help position Livingstone as a college for preparing “students not simply to enter the world, but to help shape it.”
In the speech, formally titled, “Represent: The Unfinished Fight”, Dyson challenged the student body to follow the examples of Black American heroes who attended or led HBCUs. He pointed to the works of noted sociologist E. Franklin Frasier, a Howard University graduate; civil rights lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston, a dean at Howard Law School; U. S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a graduate of Howard Law School; civil rights activist Pauli Murray, also a Howard graduate, and the civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Morehouse College graduate.
“When we think about the great thinkers and the great philosophers and the great sociologists, they have been associated with an HBCU,” Dyson said. He also lauded President Davis as a hero in his own right, having grown up in foster care and is now president of his undergraduate alma mater, doing an “extraordinary, magnificent and mighty job.”
Dyson told the applauding audience, “What an amazing story he has growing up in foster care. Now he fosters care for all of you.”
Also a distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University, Dyson is assuming the visiting scholarship at Livingstone during a season in which Black history and contributions of Black people to the building of America is widely being downplayed. This denigration across the nation is often led by the Trump White House.
With attempts to roll back civil rights gains and the suppression of Black history as a backdrop, the inspirational atmosphere in the Varick Auditorium during the Convocation often appeared to be a church revival. Student choirs empowered the audience with historical songs, including the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and the Gospel song, “Sometimes You Have to Encourage Yourself.”
“We beg God, keep your hand on the plow. Hold on,” preached Dyson, who is also an ordained Baptist minister. “And so, my brothers and sisters, Black excellence is a hallmark. It is not an exception. Black excellence is the practice and the norm. Yes, sir. Not something that you got to aim for that’s outside your race.”
He concluded by encouraging the students to develop their thinking skills and never forget the heritage they have assumed from hard-working parents and families, who may not have been educated, but who prayed for their success.
”So, I want you to stand tall. I want you to think clearly and cogently. You ain’t got to agree with your professors. Read and think and reflect for yourself. I tell my students, you ain’t got to agree with me. Study for yourself. Know for yourself. Because when somebody gives you something physical, they can take it back. But when God gives you learning in your mind and in your spirit, can’t nobody take that away.”
Dyson used Dr. King as a prime example of a leader who used his education, his intellect and his faith to impact America by telling the nation, “You have not done all that you should do in order to be what you are meant to be.”
Recalling Dr. King’s “Mountain Top Speech” made the day before he was assassinated, Dyson quoted Dr. King as he drew from his knowledge of the Declaration of Independence: “‘All we ask America is be true to what you said on paper’…What did they say on paper? All lives should make a difference. That all lives are central to defining America. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women, all people are created equal.”
Last updated on October 6, 2026
