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Education as Liberation

Margaret H. Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court,
Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Before her appointment as a Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, in November 1996, Margaret H. Marshall was vice president and general counsel of Harvard University. Prior to that she was a senior partner in the Boston law firm of Choate, Hall, and Stewart. A native of South Africa, Justice Marshall graduated from Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg in 1966. Justice Marshall came to the United States in 1968 and earned a master's degree in education at Harvard in 1969. She studied law at Harvard and Yale law schools, receiving her JD degree from Yale in 1976. She became a US citizen in 1978.

Margaret H. Marshall

Few Commencement speakers can resist the temptation to congratulate the graduating class. But you are remarkable women and men. Your commitment to education is profound. With all of your myriad other responsibilities, you find time in your demanding lives to add to long days by attending classes and studying late into the night. For you, learning has never ended. For that reason you are special; you are exemplars of what all of us should be.

It is probably also the case that no Commencement speaker this year has been able to resist the temptation to comment on your year of graduation--1999--the last year of the twentieth century, "this terrible century" as Hannah Arendt, the philosopher, called it. With your own commitment to learning over a lifetime, what can you teach us as we contemplate a new millennium?

Recently our news has been dominated, again, by tragedies of an unspeakable kind. Some have occurred far away--in Kosovo and Rwanda. Others have occurred closer to home--in Littleton, Colorado. Addressing the Columbine community, President Clinton included in his remarks this anecdote:

He is 80 years old, he served 27 years in prison. For 14 years, he never had a bed to sleep on. He spent most of his years breaking rocks every day. And he told me once about his experience. And I asked him, 'How did you let go of your hatred? How did you learn to influence other people? How did you embrace all the differences in, literally, the centuries of oppression and discord in your country, and let a lot of it go away? How did you get over that in prison? Didn't you really hate them?'


And he said, 'I did hate them for quite a long while. After all, look what they took from me--27 years of my life. I was abused physically and emotionally. They separated me from my wife, and it eventually destroyed my marriage. They took me away from my children, and I could not even see them grow up. And I was full of hatred and anger.'

And he said, 'One day, I was breaking rocks and I realized they had taken so much. And they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart. Those things I would have to give away. I decided not to give them away.'

President Clinton was talking, of course, about Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, that extraordinary man who has emerged at the end of this "terrible century" as the living example of the capacity of a human being to rise above degradation and hatred and embrace his oppressors in forming a new society.

I grew up in South Africa. My parents and grandparents were born in South Africa. I went to primary and secondary school--white schools then--in South Africa. I attended University in South Africa--a white university because the government had forced it to close its doors to black students. We look at South Africa today and perhaps forget (because we so often forget history) how violent the oppression of black South Africans was by the former government. The leading black and nonracial political parties were outlawed, including the African National Congress, its leaders jailed and tortured, sometimes to death. Political leaders, intellectuals, and students were arrested, expelled from the country or banned. The latter essentially restricted individuals to their homes, unable to have any contact with other people except one-by-one. Books, periodicals, even movies that the nationalist government considered offensive were outlawed. And many were. Stringent laws restricting the freedom of the press were enacted. By statute and rule--and by the application of the rules--disagreement with the racial system was defined as a crime. Women and men were treated as sub-human simply because of the color of their skin.

Did Nelson Mandela rise above this because of some innate attribute, unique to him? Of course he is unique. But how does that account for an entire leadership of the African National Congress emerging from decades of imprisonment under the harshest conditions equally committed to building a nonracial, democratic society with their former oppressors?

"And they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart." Ah, then, but how does one keep one's mind in an environment like Robben Island?

I want to tell you another anecdote. On May 8, 1996, President Nelson Mandela signed the new South African Constitution, a document that had been negotiated over the preceding four years with the white nationalist government and other political parties. It was a momentous occasion. A grand day. It was celebrated throughout the world. A signal that even the harshest opponents can negotiate their differences at a conference table. The ceremony took place at Sharpeville--a desolate township on the outskirts of Vereeniging where black workers who provided cheap labor to white industry lived, many without their families. Sharpeville is an important place in South African history. It was there, in 1961, that white police opened fire on several hundred black men and women marching peacefully to show their opposition to government legislation requiring every black South African to carry a hated identification book, a pass. At Sharpeville, on that terrible day, 67 people were gunned down by the hail of police bullets fired indiscriminately into the crowd. Many of those killed, it was later determined, were shot in the back. It was extraordinary for President Mandela to choose Sharpeville as the place to sign the new South African Constitution. That point was noted by media around the world.

But there was another symbolic gesture that was not noted. Several days before the signing ceremony, a diminutive, white woman in her 70s received a telephone call from President Mandela asking her to accompany him to the signing ceremony. To her great surprise (she later told me), she flew with the President in his helicopter to Sharpeville and then drove with him as the only passenger in his limousine to the ceremony. Why would he choose to bestow this unique honor on her, you might ask?

She is Helen Suzman. During the apartheid years--when only whites could vote for and be elected as members of Parliament--Helen Suzman, the lone member of the Progressive Party serving in Parliament, was, de facto, the only opposition to the nationalist government. The formal opposition party went along with many of the draconian laws enacted by the Nationalist government in the name of fighting communism. Helen Suzman did more than shout aloud her condemnation of each new oppressive law. She was the only representative willing to see disenfranchised black South Africans as part of her constituency. She counted among her constituency political prisoners, and they included President Mandela on Robben Island.

When he was first sent to Robben Island, President Mandela describes in his autobiography, he was refused access to all books, newspapers, radios, or other sources of learning. Because of the persistent year-after-year efforts of Helen Suzman, the prison authorities finally relented and allowed political prisoners to receive books and, ultimately, to enroll in courses of education that they could take by correspondence. President Mandela was one of those who made effective use of that small privilege, not only for himself but for all prisoners serving long prison sentences. Members of the African National Congress who had never had an opportunity to finish high school were now enrolled in a lifetime of learning, albeit behind bars. Some learned to read and to write while they were incarcerated. Others studied for their GED, and then undergraduate and even graduate degrees. They learned other languages. They learned the histories of other peoples. They learned the history of Afrikaners in South Africa. They learned their own history. And learning played a critical role in their survival.

"And they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart."

There was not much that Helen Suzman--a lone voice--could do to prevent the enactment of terrible laws in South Africa. There was not much that Helen Suzman could do to stop the brutality of police interrogations. There was not much that Helen Suzman could do to stop the violence against families forced to separate, or to prevent people from being forced from their land. She voiced her opposition, but the legislation rolled through that white-dominated parliament year after year. But Helen Suzman did make a significant, a profound contribution to the history of South Africa. Because of her efforts to secure for political prisoners the right to have access to books, and paper, and writing materials, she probably did more to ensure the sanity, to save the minds, of political prisoners than anyone else did.

I do not know why President Nelson Mandela asked Helen Suzman to accompany him as he took the journey to sign the new constitution of South Africa. I do know that written into the new South African constitution is the following provision: "Everyone has the right to a basic education, including adult basic education; and to further education, which the state must take reasonable measures to make progressively available and accessible" (1996, Chapter 2--Bill of Rights, Section 29 (1)). I know that the leadership of the African National Congress is a well-educated leadership, deeply devoted to the education of all people. And I know that many of those leaders had their first real opportunity for formal learning when they were adults.

Each of you here today is more than a student. You are parents, employees, bosses, community activists, leaders, and followers. But you share an important attribute. A lifelong commitment to learning. You have learned, sometimes at high cost, the profound value of education. You are the last graduating class of this century. I do not know whether we can prevent the twenty-first century from being another "terrible century." You, like me, must wonder whether we have learned anything from Germany, from Cambodia, or from Kosovo, or from the shootings at Columbine High School. But I am certain, in my own mind, of one thing. Education makes a difference. If you know the history of "the other," if you learn her language, if you understand what is important to her, surely then, hatred is less feasible.

In pursuing a lifetime of education as you have, you have much to teach all of us. I hope that each of you, in your own way, will become a Helen Suzman, and will find in whatever paths you choose, the opportunities to make education available for everyone. In your towns and communities, when someone proposes cutting the education budget, I hope that you will muster all of your courage and take to the floor and speak out against that. When there is a proposal that immigrant children or adults should not be able to attend public schools, I hope that you will find the time to write to an elected representative to express your opposition. When your employer says that taking time off during the day to sit for an examination must be treated as a vacation day, I hope that you will speak out against that. I hope that you will work to keep public libraries open, to pay for librarians to be available late into the night. I hope that you will take the time to teach a child, or an adult, who is having difficulty learning to read, so that they too may learn that reading is the greatest joy.

"I did hate them for quite a long while. . .they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart."

I salute you for opening your minds and your hearts to the teaching and learning that this great institution can offer.

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