ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Thank you, Christopher, for the introduction. And congratulations on your recent election as Alcorn State’s Student Government Association President.
Our colleagues at USDA are lucky to have you as part of their 1890 National Scholars, a program providing full tuition, mentorship, and job experience to a cohort of exceptional students at HBCUs studying agricultural, food, natural resources, and related sciences.
Perhaps after your time there with USDA, you might consider joining us over at USAID!
Good morning, everyone. It is such a pleasure and honor to be here at Alcorn State University, the United States’ first historically Black land-grant institution.
In 1871, Alcorn was established with the vital mission of educating the descendants of former slaves, offering some Black Mississippians—carpenters, masons, farmers—their first chance at a higher education.
Alcorn’s mission has widened immensely since then to include students of various backgrounds and interests, giving them an education and resources that they have used to give back to the global community.
Thank you to President Nave for her leadership of the University, ably navigating Alcorn through an unprecedented pandemic, while highlighting the need to continue support of HBCUs in the halls of Congress and celebrating Alcorn’s 150th anniversary.
And thank you to Dr. Ontario Wooden, Alcorn’s Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Dr. Dovi Alipoe, Alcorn’s Director of Global Programs, who I understand played a lead role in planning today’s historic MOU signing between Alcorn State and USAID.
From our side, I’d like to thank Clinton White who leads USAID’s work in the Eastern and Southern Caribbean, for the instrumental role he played in making this MOU happen. I’d also like to thank Neneh Diallo for joining us here today, USAID’s first-ever Chief Diversity Officer.
Finally, I’d like to thank Alcorn’s other senior leadership and students who have joined us this Monday morning to give us at USAID such a warm welcome.
Later today, I will visit the memorial statue of Alcorn’s most famous alumnus and civil rights icon, Medgar Evers.
Evers, an Army veteran, who experienced a profound sense of betrayal in serving a country that denied him the right to vote, one of the very rights he sought to defend during World War II.
Evers, the NAACP’s first Field Secretary in Mississippi, who braved racist language and violent threats to push for integration in public facilities.
Evers, whose perseverance and belief that a better America was possible, became a legacy for other civil rights activists—including students right here at Alcorn.
Evers, who believed that every Mississippian deserved the right to vote. The right to pursue an education. The right to start a career, begin a family, and live without fear.
Being a pioneer like Evers—seeking justice and social progress while so many stand opposed and actively root for your failure—requires vision, willpower, and, most of all, courage.
And if you’re Black pioneer? How much tougher is your path? How much heavier is your burden, bearing not just the weight of your own struggle, but of those who might follow you?
Jackie Robinson. Bayard Rustin. Shirley Chisholm. Barack Obama. Kamala Harris. Ketanji Brown Jackson. People who defied the odds and overcame obstacles to become the first. And who had to endure outrageous hostility and searing indignity and work twice as hard to make sure they were not the last.
That pioneering spirit, nurtured by your faculty, staff, and students, has allowed Alcorn trailblazers to shatter glass ceilings, redefine what it means to be a leader, and empower those who followed them to do the same.
And as you all know, Alcorn has had more than its fair share of trailblazers.
Mississippi Senator Hiram Revels, the first African-American to serve in the U.S. Senate, was the first president of Alcorn State. Alex Haley, the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Roots, attended Alcorn. Steve McNair, the first African-American quarterback to win the AP NFL MVP award and a philanthropist who supported over 25 charity organizations in Tennessee and his home state of Mississippi, was an Alcorn Alumnus. Dr.Nave herself, who was sworn in as the first woman president of Alcorn State almost one year ago, spent her undergraduate years right here on campus.
For more than 150 years, Alcorn State has molded students into pioneers in fields ranging from business to politics to higher education. Pioneers who have revitalized local economies, awakened the conscience of America, and transformed countless lives.
And with its commitment to social mobility, Alcorn State has unlocked this opportunity for students who are the first in their family to receive a higher education.
In fact, 34 percent of Alcorn’s newest students are first-generation and 71 percent are Pell Grant recipients. Here in Mississippi, the impact of Alcorn students, alumni, and researchers is deeply felt.
In partnership with the USDA, agricultural extension workers from Alcorn have reached underserved farmers and ranchers with training on better watering methods and access to seeds to grow crops that can withstand extreme weather.
As COVID-19 raged across the country, Alcorn State public health experts set up clinics to decrease vaccination disparities in Mississippi’s rural Black communities.
Scientists at Alcorn’s Mississippi River Research Center, like Dr. Leonard Kibet, are studying how new sensors can monitor soil health and limit local water pollution, helping to increase crop yields while reducing waterborne illness.
But Alcorn has also taken its expertise and culture of care beyond Mississippi, serving the needs of underserved communities overseas.
Alcorn State worked previously with the World Cocoa Foundation and the Mars company to train Ghanaian cocoa farmers on good farm management practices, record-keeping, and harvest planning. They also worked with local youth groups to get young people interested in agriculture and entrepreneurship.
In 2002, in partnership with USAID, Alcorn experts like Dr. Alipoe developed public-private partnerships in Rwanda and Zambia to create and grow African businesses that sell herbal teas, spices, and dairy products.
In Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and Nigeria, Alcorn scientists and extension specialists provided training to rural families on alternative crop development, budgeting, and agricultural marketing to diversify incomes and strengthen community resilience to economic downturns.
Today, through Feed the Future, the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative, Alcorn faculty, like Dr. Anthony Baffoe-Bonnie, are working in Ghana with our Peanut Innovation Lab to educate farmers on better ways to plant, water, and store valuable peanut crops to bring to market.
Still, despite two decades of some meaningful work together, we know that USAID has yet to fully tap into the expertise developed and housed at HBCUs like Alcorn. We don’t do enough to recruit your students, partner with your faculty, or advertise research opportunities to your campus, or those of other HBCU’s.
And when we are able to recruit Black staff to USAID, we haven’t always necessarily provided them an environment that encourages them to stay and thrive.
At the highest levels of our Agency leadership, Black people and particularly Black women are underrepresented. Of the nearly 33 percent of our workforce who are Black, the majority of them serve in support functions or in less senior roles.
But we recognize that has changed. And so, we are taking some pioneering steps of our own. USAID hosted its first-ever HBCU International Development Student Conference to introduce students to the work that we do and highlight our need for their involvement.
At USAID and the State Department, we are greatly expanding the number of paid internships and fellowships we offer, increasing access to the halls of power and more permanent job opportunities.
Last year, I had the privilege to swear-in Paloma Adams-Allen as our Deputy Administrator, the first Black woman to serve in this role in our history. Later this year, Clinton White will become our Agency’s first-ever Black Counselor, my chief foreign service advisor.
And Neneh, who as I said is our Agency’s first-ever Chief Diversity Officer, will lead USAID’s efforts to diversify our recruitment and create a more welcoming work culture so that underrepresented groups can thrive at our Agency.
Today’s MOU with Alcorn State will challenge us to do even more to bring Alcorn’s pioneering spirit to USAID, tackling the longstanding barriers HBCUs and their students have faced in attempting to partner with us.
We will coordinate on-campus and virtual sessions and a speaker series to share basic yet vital information about how to work with USAID, whether that be through grants, public-private partnerships, or job contracts. We will expand paid research opportunities and internships.
In fact, USAID’s Eastern and Southern Caribbean office has already facilitated a partnership between Alcorn State and the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology to create a new, paid internship, and organized a trip to Barbados for Alcorn’s students later this year.
This internship will allow students to gain hands-on experience with weather and water-mapping technology and risk management planning that help prepare local communities in Jamaica for climate-related disasters. Alcorn students will be able to apply for this opportunity later this year.
And we will host experiential learning sessions, like our newly developed “Model USAID” program, happening tomorrow, which will give students a taste of the challenges USAID tackles every day. And those challenges are frankly the biggest challenges of our time.
A pandemic, which has killed millions, that continues to ravage communities where vaccines and treatment are still not readily accessible. A changing climate that threatens all of our lives with stronger storms, droughts and wildfires—but especially communities of color.
And, as we’ve all witnessed during Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine, the rising threat of autocracies who are willing to shed blood and murder civilians threatens all of our democratic values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To rise to these challenges, we will need your vision, and yes, your courage. We will need your fresh ideas and pioneering spirit that reflect the lived experiences of all Americans.
In short, we need you.
In June of 1963, as students of Medgar Evers’ legacy all know, he was brutally gunned down in his own driveway by a White supremacist, and it would take 30 years before his murderer faced justice.
But just 23 days before that, Medgar Evers was granted airtime on the local news station in Jackson after suing the city to desegregate its schools. For years, representatives from the NAACP and civil rights advocates were denied news coverage—what Evers described as a “cotton curtain” that allowed segregation and racism to maintain its hold in the city.
But after Evers’ lawsuit, he was granted the chance to make his case. Across 17 gripping minutes, he talked about his own history as an Army veteran who had fought for democracy. He discussed how Jackson, a city of 150,000 people, 40 percent of whom were Black, had no Black police officers, no black firefighters, and no black clerks.
And then, toward the end of his remarks, he spoke about the hopes of Black people—about the role they wanted to play in American life, if only given the chance. “This country is his home,” Evers said of the Black American. “He wants to do his part to help make his city, state, and nation a better place for everyone, regardless of color and race.”
Alcornites, I know that is true of you. And I know you don’t just to help make your nation better, you want to help make this world better.
Around the world, hundreds of millions of people could benefit from your helping hand in their pursuit of liberty, opportunity, and the power to chart their own future. And the work you all lead—of calling out disparities, of championing the disempowered, of uplifting human dignity—shows the potential of what you have to offer them.
Together, through today’s agreement, we can work together to extend that helping hand. To be the trailblazers. To be the pioneers of a more peaceful, healthy, and prosperous world.
And I sincerely hope that you’ll join us.
Thank you.