Morehouse College Obama Dilemma

Morehouse College’s president, John Wilson, Jr., is deciding how to balance President Barack Obama speech at graduation ceremonies a day after a Morehouse alumnus and Obama critic speaks to graduates.

Rev. Kevin Johnson leads a Baptist church in Philadelphia and will speak at the baccalaureate ceremony on May 18, the day before Pres. Obama speaks on May 19. Johnson wrote an article published in the Philadelphia Tribune, titled, “A President for Everyone, Except Black People”, that lambasted Obama for discriminating against blacks in his new presidential cabinet. Johnson also said that Obama “has not moved African-American leadership forward, but backwards”.

Instead of the original plan, which was to feature Johnson as a speaker, Morehouse’s president decided to place Johnson as a part of a three-person panel, “to reflect a broader and more inclusive range of viewpoints.”

The Chronicle for Higher Education reports that critics oppose this change in the ceremony and charge that Wilson is too close to Obama, having served as the chief of the White House’s program on black colleges before taking the position at Morehouse, which is based in Atlanta. Wilson denies the allegations of censorship because “these allegations are fundamentally deleterious and are undeserved.”

Wilson, in turn, joins the unprecedented exodus of Obama appointees rushing out of the Administration and into academe before the U. S. president’s term is up.

 

Spencer Irvine is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.
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