ASCENSION 2025
Why ceremonies honoring Black college graduates are still needed
Members of Louisville’s Black community will come together at St. Stephen Baptist Church on Thursday, May 8th at 6:00pm for the first “Ascension Citywide Black Graduation Ceremony.” We are encouraging Black undergraduate, graduate, and professional students to don their regalia and join classmates and faculty from Bellarmine University, Simmons College of Kentucky, Spalding University, and the University of Louisville. We have organized “Ascension” because such a celebration of Black graduates is needed. Spalding has never offered one. Bellarmine and UofL recently cruelly canceled and forbade such ceremonies on their campuses. Their excuse? Their convicted felon president in Washington and racially retrograde legislators in Frankfort, Kentucky now say such ceremonies are illegal, discriminatory, and divisive.
Arguing it is against the law to celebrate Black children on predominantly white campuses is only the latest in a long line of indignities. Contrary to popular belief, Black Americans have always valued education in a country that has continuously sought to deny it to us. We have fought through laws barring us learning to read during slavery and others, such as Kentucky’s Day Law, that prohibited our children from attending white schools well into the 20th century. We have survived ostracization, loneliness, outright violence, and unspeakable dehumanization on American campuses. Yet we remain!
That is not woke, CRT, or DEI. That is history and reality, though it’s hard to deal with because America has an open and notorious aversion to the truth.
The sojourn of Black students at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) has been, and continues to be, no easy walk. Their numbers are few. They have even fewer Black professors and administrators on these campuses to teach and mentor them. They don’t graduate at lower rates than their white counterparts because they are less intelligent but because they are less supported, less wanted, and under the psychological assault of miseducation that Carter G. Woodson spoke of almost a century ago.
Over the years, Blacks at some PWIs began organizing harmless graduation ceremonies to honor the herculean effort needed from our children to make it through these meat grinders. And now, the leaders of Louisville’s PWIs have tossed Black people to the mob once again by forbidding them. Again, they have betrayed us while smugly saying, “We will follow the law” – even though no actual laws on Black graduations have been passed.
Why do the leaders of these schools continue to do such terrible things? Why do they sit silently as white supremacist politicians deceptively commandeer the language of the Black civil rights movement and now portray whites as the racially injured group? Why do they allow these lies to go unchallenged from their seats of intellectual and academic authority? Their silence is tantamount to agreement. Why have they abandoned the commitment to “doing better” their institutions made to Blacks during the so-called “Great Awakening of 2020” after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd?
Maybe they’re afraid. If they are, they should say so. After all, we now live on a terrifying, authoritarian hellscape where a United States senator said, “We are all afraid.” Maybe they simply agree with the racially twisted worldviews of Donald Trump and Kentucky politicians like Jennifer Decker and Emily Callaway. If that is the case, again, they should say so. Or maybe they simply don’t give a damn. Just say it!
That honesty would let Black faculty, staff, and students know they need to get away from the schools these people lead with all deliberate speed. It would also let Black parents know they shouldn’t send their children there in the first place, because they will be ignored and mistreated. Exactly when would the boards of trustees, presidents, legal counsels, and advisors of Bellarmine, Spalding, or UofL stand up for Black people or say anything of consequence - if the Day Law, segregation, or slavery were reintroduced? After all, each and every one of those things were “the law” at some point.
We simply don’t know the answers to these questions. What we do know is Louisville’s Black community can no longer wait for these callous universities to do right by our precious children. We have to do it ourselves. Therefore, our community is independently offering “Ascension” for our wonderful graduates. It is not affiliated with Bellarmine, Spalding, or UofL. We will not use their facilities. They are giving us no money or support in any way. It is an event conceived by, supported, and funded by US!
After the announcement of “Ascension” and public shaming, Bellarmine sneakily reinstated its Black graduate ceremony at the last minute. To be sure, no self-respecting Black faculty member, staff person, administrator, or student should attend and partake in such table scraps. Have some pride! Either way, Ascension will go forward with or without Bellarmine representation.
With every indignity comes opportunity. This is our opportunity to come together and build something beautiful. Outside of Simmons College of Kentucky, higher education institutions in Louisville have chosen to live in ignorance and darkness. We cannot reason with them and must finally allow them stay there. Let us expend our energies elsewhere. Join us on May 8th at St. Stephen as Louisville’s Black community comes together and begins our ascent into the light.
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Dr. Ricky L. Jones is Professor and Past Chair of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville. Follow him on Bluesky, Facebook, TikTok, X, and other platforms.
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