Service Above All
[Music]
do me a favor
think of the very first time you heard
the word service
then think of how you serve or are of
service in
your communities and in the world today
when i was a junior in high school my
grandfather passed away
the week following his passing our
family hosted the usual memorial
services consisting of awake and a
funeral
during this time of grief and loss there
wasn’t very much that i remembered
in fact there wasn’t very much i wanted
to remember
but of the memories i do have one of
them i’m particularly fond of
in fact it’s one that i hold near and
dear to my heart
and that’s the story that my
grandfather’s former student
and athlete shared with us during his
service
this student got up before the church
and starts to tell
a story of how he was being threatened
with suspension
and in wake of his suspension the board
was going to host
a special meeting at this special
meeting
certain people show up and of those
people that show up
is my grandfather this student’s coach
and teacher
my grandfather not only shows up for
this student but he actually goes to
advocate before the board
for the student and in the words of the
student he fought for him
he did so in a way that this student was
able to stay in school
when i first heard the story i thought
that this was a story of victory
that included my grandfather that this
young student could share
but then i soon realized that with that
story and all the other stories that
everyone shared and
even some of the stories that i heard
before my grandfather’s passing
all of that meant one thing and outlined
one thing for me
and that was that my grandfather had
lived a life of service
that he was dedicated to living a life
of service
at that time i started to ask myself
what is service what does it mean to be
a person or to live a life
of service and what exactly was
i passionate about therefore i could
serve in that capacity because
let’s face it i was a 17 year old
teenager who
thought i knew everything and everything
i was involved in i was
passionate about well that turned out
not to be true
a year later i went off to college and i
enrolled in prairie view a
m university upon my arrival on campus i
saw the hundreds
of activities and organizations i could
throw myself into literally
but i promised myself we’re going to
take some time
we’re going to secure a good gpa one
that can maintain our scholarship and
also one that i could apply to law
school with in a few years after
graduation
once i had done that i told myself that
now it was time to approach
this idea of going out and becoming
involved on this campus
before i could go out and seek some of
those opportunities
one came to me and that was the
opportunity
of becoming precinct chair
i did not know what a precinct chair did
i knew of them but not of their duties
i quickly found myself being appointed a
week before
christmas break and with this
appointment i knew that there were
greater challenges that were going to
come
but of those great challenges i thought
that they might have been
the fact that i was one of the youngest
ones in the nation to ever be named
precinct chair or in fact that i was the
first one
to do so in this particular precinct
but i found that the greatest challenge
of it all
was in the idea that i was going to be
precinct chair
given the duty within this role to
organize and mobilize
9 000 plus black and brown students
at a historically black college and or
university
that university sits within a county
that has spent the last
five decades doing everything that they
could do to severely
suppress these students votes
and here i was now to organize and
mobilize
them i soon discovered my passion
and how exactly i was going to spend a
life of service
and that was through my activism and my
call
to advocacy service sounds like a simple
task
at this moment many of you are thinking
in your heads how you serve
how you served this year or how you’ve
served so far in your lifetime
but i want us and i challenge us to
think of service
in a different way in a different light
service is not you volunteering to feed
the homeless
every year and it’s not you going to
donate your old
used clothes that you no longer wear or
no longer want
to a clothes drive at your child’s
school
service is something that requires us to
make one a lifetime commitment to do
it’s a continuous commitment it’s not
one and then done
as an activist and social justice
advocate
but most importantly someone who
dedicates their life to service
i believe that my greatest purpose is
not to only live
a life of service but to inspire
others to do the same
you you and you
service sounds like this simple task
and i think for a minute i thought so
too
with our efforts of committing to
service we can create a domino effect
a domino effect that requires the person
that comes after us and the generations
after
us to do the same how do we do it
ask yourself these three things
first what are you passionate about
second what inspires you or
who inspires you what’s your inspiration
and lastly can your
passion be turned into a lifetime of
service
and do so in a way that inspires others
to do the same and for those of you who
think that you have yet to find your
passion
you might be right but i challenge you
to have the courage to raise your hand
when opportunities around you arise
when you least expect it you can find
your passion
you can find what you can spend your
life
committing to service doing i know i did
service is something that i feel
we should all be committed to
we should all inspire the generations
behind us
that come after us to do the same
i know that i never intended to be an
activist
but i know that through my role of
activism
and advocacy i can push
the envelope of injustice and equality
for every person
that it has been denied for every
marginalized
underrepresented overlooked person
and community and because i know that i
can do that through my activism
and my service through each of those
capacities
my service is not an option but it is
a must
now truth is activism advocacy
to be on the front lines of movements of
social ju
and tackling social justice issues it
was never something that had crossed my
mind before
i came to this illustrious campus
but since then i’ve learned that
service is something special
activism is something special
you might not need to go be on the front
lines of a protest
or to go lead a march downtown
to lead a social justice movement
but you might need to do something in
this world for the greater good
for the generations that are to come
that no one else
knows that it needs to be done or you
might be past the baton
and continue the fight for whatever it
may be
that needs change and you can lead it
how can you serve
thank you