Robert A. Bland
First African American to receive an undergraduate degree from U.Va.
"Success is a Journey, Life is a Choice"
January 23, 2000

Robert Bland: Thank you for that very generous welcome. I am as pleased as I can be to be a guest here and thank you for inviting me to your Millennial Celebration of Harambee. I am pleased and proud to see the progress that has been made here at the University since I left. During the time, the four years that I was here, there were never more than three to five of us who were here at any one time and when I look back in this audience and see the number of students here, it's amazing to me and so I'm very pleased and proud to be a guest here today and music, Black Voices. That was truly inspirational. I found myself sitting back here wanting to sing myself and anybody who's heard my singing voice knows that that has to be inspirational for me to want to sing, but that was truly inspirational and I thank you for that musical selection. It helped to inspire me.

I also wanted to express my congratulations to those of you have achieved academic distinction here and I saw your names in the program and I understand you're going to be recognized later and just on an historical note, you may be interested to know of those undergraduate students who went here in the early days who was the first one to ever make the Dean's List here at the University of Virginia, and the first clue is it was not me, but it was Harold Marsh. Now, some of you may have heard of him. Harold went on to be a very successful lawyer in Richmond, Virginia and a judge. Harold was tragically killed a couple of years ago or else I'm sure he would be here helping us to celebrate Harambee because the University of Virginia was always very close to Harold and he thought very fondly of this place, but on behalf of him and behalf of myself, I want to congratulate all of you who have done so well.

What I plan to do this evening is to share with you some stories of what it was like when I first enrolled here, give you a feel for that and some of the experiences I went through, tell you some stories about myself, some of which I haven't shared before about my academic career here at the University of Virginia and then, secondly, to hopefully draw some lessons from that that I hope may be of value to you and the other students who are currently going through this institution.

As Dean Terry said, it was 1955 and to put that in historical perspective since most of you here were not born at that time. As a matter of fact, very few of you were. September of 1955 was approximately 16 months after the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional. The prior system of separate but equal education had been overruled by the courts and the court had for the first time come out and said that segregation in public institutions is unconstitutional. To continue the historical perspective, that was approximately three months prior to Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of that Montgomery, Alabama bus. It was approximately two years before President Dwight Eisenhower had to send troops into Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce the integration of schools there. It was approximately three years before Prince Edward County, Virginia, decided to do away with public schools altogether in order to avoid integration of the schools. It was approximately three years prior to the governor of Mississippi standing on the schoolhouse steps to block the entrance of the black student there and the same amount of time prior to Governor Wallace trying to block the integration of the University of Alabama. It was before the freedom marches, before the sit-ins at the lunch counters, and eight years before Martin Luther King made his famous "I have a dream" speech.

The time that I came to the University was at the very beginning of what later came to be known as the civil rights movement. And for that reason, there was very little precedence to tell me what to expect when I came here and I must admit that I came prepared for the worst. I came prepared to be a martyr and I had my martyr's clothes all on at the time that I came here and the biggest thing that I had to think about was planning what I was going to do to the first person that came up and called me a nigger and I had all of that figured out and I steeled myself for the reception that I was going to receive here, and when I got here I was in for a series of surprises.

The first surprise was that I was not the only black. That same year two other undergraduate students--Theodore Thomas from the Portsmouth area and George Harris from Lynchburg--were admitted along with me and the three of us became the first black undergraduates to attend the University, but more importantly there were graduate students already here. John Merchant who's sitting over here today was going to law school. There was a student in med school, also a black student who was here, and so that also was a surprise to me, but I guess the biggest surprise was that there were no crowds, nobody standing at the door to the administration building to block my entrance. For the most part, the people who really had a problem with me being here tended to ignore me and the people who didn't, welcomed me. I wasn't ready for that. I had prepared myself to be a martyr and that was the last kind of a reception that I was really prepared for, but it turned out that the real challenge that I faced here at the University of Virginia was one that I had never thought about, and that was the academic challenge, and that is the same challenge that all of you are facing here as you go through this as well.

And the fact that I had concentrated so much on being a martyr and neglected so much the fact that I was going to be challenged as a product of the state's separate but equal educational system coming in from an educational system of public schools that was entirely segregated, supposedly equal, but not really, and being thrust into competition with the best and the brightest that the white public system had been able to produce and the fact that I did not recognize that challenge almost became my undoing. By the end of my second year, I was on a fast train back to where I came from. I had one foot out of here and the other foot on a banana peel, and I was not in very good shape.

To tell you a story that kind of illustrates what that second semester of my sophomore year was like, I'll share with you a story about my course in differential equations, not because that is unique but it's kind of typifies what I went through that year. Normally math was one of my better subjects but I had neglected my math that year and I was taking this course in differential equations and I was passing but barely; 75 was passing and I think my quiz average was like 76 or 77 at the most, and toward the end of that semester, I happened to miss a couple of classes and during those classes that I missed, the instructor had gone over solutions to a particular type of differential equation and I've long since forgotten was type that was, but for sake of discussion, let's call it type A differential equations and so I didn't get that. And so I tried to get it from the book and couldn't quite figure out the explanation in the book. Tried to find some other students in the class who were capable or willing to explain it to me, couldn't find that, and so finally decided that the only way to get this was to break down and go talk to my instructor and see if he could explain it to me.

Now, that was the last thing I wanted to do because this particular instructor was one that I didn't care for a lot, and I'm sure the feeling was mutual, because I didn't think he cared a lot for me too, and it later turned out that I confirmed that fact because when I went to his office and asked him to explain that to me, he told me three things. First of all, he said he didn't have time during office hours to teach differential equations. Second of all, that if I had been in class, I would've known how to do it anyway, and so when I left his office I don't know if I was madder at him or at madder at myself for going in there in the first place, but anyway, I adopted a strategy that says, well, okay, that's just one type of differential equation, so what I'm going to do is since I can't find anybody to explain that to me, I'm going to adopt a strategy that says I'm going to learn the other 90% of that course as well as I can learn it and then I'll just take my lumps if they happen to have any of those kind on the final exam. Well, as you might suspect, that strategy didn't work.

On the final exam, there were 10 problems; three of them were type A differential equations, right, so if you do the math, you find out that the best you can get is 70 if you don't know that and then I didn't do all that well with the others, and so when I left that class I was pretty well bummed out and convinced that maybe I failed that course, but you know it's a funny thing how the mind works, particularly when you're desperate, and the longer time passed between that exam and the more I convinced myself that maybe I did pass that course. You know, a little partial credit here, a little partial credit there, you know. Add it all up. Average it out. All I needed was a 75 and so by the time I heard that the grades were posted, I had pretty well convinced myself that I had passed that course. I went rushing over to Thornton Hall where they posted the grades and when I got there and I saw that grade sheet up there, then I got nervous. What if? What if I didn't get that partial credit? What if I didn't, and so I was running my finger down the page and I finally found my name and I moved across and found my grade.

Then I got mad. Oh, no. Oh, no. I didn't expect to get a 90 in this class, but a 48! Well, I was mad then. I was going to see that professor. I was going to make him explain to me exactly where that grade came from and if I didn't like his explanation, I was going to see the dean and I was going to raise hell about that. And so I was getting my arguments together and everything when my other grades came in and when I saw my other grades from that semester, I decided that probably the last person I wanted to see was the dean. So I quietly packed my bags and went home that semester, but the dean found me in the form of a letter that came a couple of weeks after I got there telling me that because of my abysmal academic performance that semester, that I was on academic probation.

Well, by that time I had crawled pretty far down into the pity pot and I was feeling so sorry for myself that you couldn't believe it and I was a victim of everything that you might imagine except my own failure, of course, and so as you know, if you've been there, when you get down in the pity pot, it's kind of hard to pull yourself back out again, but when I got that letter, it was kind of a wake-up call for me because I knew at that point I had a decision to make, right? I was either going to sit there and wallow in my own self-pity and eventually end up transferring somewhere else where the academic standards were a little less rigorous, or I was going to decide then and there that failure was not an option and I was going to come back and do whatever it took in order to be successful.

Well, obviously because I'm standing here, I chose the latter of those two options and I'd like to be able to tell you that when I came back I made nothing but straight As from that point on, but that wouldn't be the truth, but I did manage to turn my academic performance around enough that two years later I graduated from the institution, and you know what? When I walked across that stage and I received that piece of paper, it had the same initials on it that the best student in the class had--B.S.E.E., and I was pretty proud of that.

And I think in reflecting on it, that I learned a lot when I was here at UVA. I learned an awful lot. I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about what it takes to be successful and I've often thought, well, what are those lessons because certainly I have continued to apply them in my life ever since then.

There's a book that's out and some of you may have read it. It's called Everything I Really Needed to Know about Life I Learned in Kindergarten. Has anybody read that? Okay. A couple of people. Well, I thought maybe I'd write one that said everything I really needed to know about life I learned at UVA, and I guess that makes me a slow learner if he learned it in kindergarten and I had to learn it in college, but if I were to write such a book, I think that it would have two chapters in it, and the first chapter would say that success is a journey and the second chapter would be life is a choice. And then the first chapter would grow out of my experiences here at UVA and as I reflect back on it and ask myself the question was my career here a success. Well, certainly if you look at my transcript you might wonder whether or not that was true. I think it was the Oakland Raiders who had the expression win ugly but just win, baby.

Well, I graduated ugly but I graduated, and so if you look back over that trail of failed and dropped courses and other things that appear on my transcript, you might think that it was not a success. If you look down in the corner and you see that part that says awarded B.S.E.E., you might conclude that I was successful, but in reflecting on it, I have found that there was something much more important than that happened while I was here at the University and that is I began a journey that taught me what success really was. I began to develop the mental toughness, the discipline and the self-motivation that is required to meet goals, and I have applied those same principles throughout my life and the things that I accomplished since I left this University I can trace directly to the lessons I learned here. And that's why I believe that success is a journey and not a destination, and if success is a journey, then that journey involves at least three steps that I've been able to identify.

The first step is conviction. You need to believe in yourself and that's especially true for me because if I didn't believe in myself, I don't believe that I would've finished this University. And if you don't believe in yourself, regardless of what the goal might be, you may never try or certainly never put forward the effort that's required in order to achieve it and so conviction stems not from some intellectual hypothesis that we might have about a fact, but a feeling that we get and assurance that comes from our gut that says that I am somebody, created by God with unlimited potential, and I have the ability to use that potential in my life to achieve whatever it is that I decide that I want to achieve, and if you believe that, really believe that, there's nothing that you can't do and that's certainly proved true in my life, not only here at the University but in later life as well, so I commend that you--that the journey starts with conviction.

The journey continues with commitment because it was one thing to believe that you can do something and it's another thing entirely to commit yourself to achieving that goal, and what commitment involves is being willing to say that whatever it takes, if I accept this goal for myself, whatever it takes I'm willing to do. And that may involve going beyond where other people would go and doing more than others would normally do, but if that's what's required for my success then I have to be committed to do that. It's been said that excellence is a result of caring more than others care, of risking more than others feel is safe, of dreaming more than others think is practical and of expecting more than others think is possible. And so if you've got that kind of commitment, then you've completed the second step in that journey.

The third step, I believe, is execution. Now you believe it, now you've committed yourself to doing. Then the next step is you've got to go off and do it. You've got to put it into practice. You've got to execute it. You've got to act out your beliefs, and one thing that that's always required is hard work. There're very few things that we can accomplish in life that are significant that we can accomplish without hard work, but one of the things that I learned is that hard work alone is not sufficient. If hard work alone would have done it, I would've graduated with one of the highest GPAs in UVA history because I don't think that there were many people here who worked harder than I did, but in addition to working hard, you've got to work smart and what that means to me is that we have got to be flexible enough that if one approach is not working to meeting your goals, then you've got to be willing to try other approaches to get where you want to go. It's not going to do any good to keep butting your head against that same wall if it's not working. Then doing it twice as hard is not going to make it work any better.

Now, I'll let you in on something just as an aside that I didn't discover until after I left here, but one of the things that kind of answered for me the question of why some of the course work that I had here was so difficult was discovering the fact that we all have mental models that we use, that we form in our mind in which we store and manipulate information on a given topic, and so we have one model that may represent if you're a physicist the phenomenon of light and another one for electricity, for example, and some times the models that we have in our mind are simply inadequate to handle the information we're presenting with and what makes that particularly more interesting is the fact that our models may be in some ways adequate but in many other ways inadequate, so if you have a mental model that differs in many aspects from that of the professor who is teaching the class or the author who wrote the textbook, then in those instances where your model and his model overlap, everything is going to make sense. You can understand what's being taught and why it is happening. You can apply it to other situations, but when you get into areas where your model is different than his, then it's going to be a mystery to you. Why can't I understand this? This is part of the problem that I had in a number of courses here is that I had the wrong model. And when that happens, what you need to do academically is to go back and revise that model. Either expand the model that you have or abandon it and adopt a new model that is adequate to handle the information you're being taught and that's hard. That's a hard thing to do intellectually is to unlearn something that you've been comfortable with and learn something new, but that's often what's required.

We say that life is a choice. Now, there's lots of different ways of talking about life and I'm sure you've heard a lot of them, but the one that I want to call your attention to today is the fact that life is a choice that we can make and in order to illustrate that point, I call your attention to the book of Deuteronomy, thirtieth chapter, and in that chapter of Deuteronomy we find Moses speaking to the people of Israel, and it has been 40 years since they left Egypt and the slavery in Egypt and I can always kind of relate to these stories about Moses and the people of Israel coming out of slavery because there're a lot of parallels between those stories and our history in terms of slavery and so Moses is talking now to the Israelites some 40 years after they have come out of bondage in Egypt and they have been wandering in the desert this whole time and all of that generation that came out of Egypt with Moses has died off now and this is the second generation, and they're getting ready to enter the promise land, but before they do, he is calling on them to renew the covenant that their forefathers had made with God, and after a lengthy explanation of what that covenant was, he approaches them with these words. "Behold, I set heaven and earth to testify against you today that I have sat before you life and death, a blessing and a curse. Therefore, choose life."

And so life is a choice that we can make and not just for the Israelites or the people of Israel, but for each one of us because in those defining moments of our own lives, we get to choose between life and death. We choose life whenever in a decision-making situation we choose the alternative that is life enhancing and we choose death when we choose the alternative that is life diminishing. When we choose right over wrong we're choosing life. When we choose success over failure, we're choosing life. When we choose the important over the trivial, we're choosing life. And the most important choice, in my opinion, that we can make is the choice to love somebody when we get the opportunity. When that moment comes, we need to take advantage of that moment because when it's gone, it's gone forever. And the greatest failure in life is not the failure to acquire wealth and it's not the failure to achieve greatness, whatever greatness might be, but it is the failure to love somebody when you get the chance. So, in your search for personal excellence, don't forget to take time to help somebody.

One of the fondest memories that I have of my experience here at UVA was the fellowship and the bond that developed between those of us of color who were attending and as I said before, at the undergraduate level, there was never more than three to five at any given time that I was here, but we were very close. We helped each other. If one person had money, everybody had money. If one person got in a fight, we all jumped in and helped. If one person had something to eat, we all did. We were on a meal plan at that time and we got fed in the cafeteria five days a week and on the weekends we were on our own, and a lot of times one person would have a can of Vienna sausage, somebody else'd have peanut butter, and for dinner we'd have Vienna sausage and peanut butter, but we had it together and we were very close and we helped each other in whatever we could do, whether it was academically, socially, or financially. We helped each other. And that's very important. And I think that when you get down to it, and you really get down to it, it doesn't matter what heights of personal achievement we attain, what's really important is how many people you've helped along the way. So, keep in mind that success is a journey, life is a choice that you make.

Thank you very much UVA students. Thank you African-American students. Take care of each other. Believe in yourself.