This is an opinion column

At the bottom of the bleachers in Kenan Stadium sat a sea of blue. Carolina blue. The roughly 5,000 graduates of the University of North Carolina class of 2023 filed in and sat down, wearing their caps and gowns and waiting for their adult lives to begin. My granddaughter was one of them.

These are lucky graduates. The University of North Carolina is the oldest public university in the country, founded in 1793. (The University of Georgia claims this spot, too.) Carolina produces thinkers, activists, statesmen, stateswomen, and hard-working people who managed to get through four years of a grueling undergraduate program and come out on the other side with a degree.

Maybe parents paid for this privilege. Maybe scholarships. Or maybe a student worked her way through, serving up steaming breakfast plates at the Carolina Coffee Shop and studying in the break room between shifts.

After tuneful renditions of both the National Anthem and “Carolina in My Mind,” the speeches began. If you’ve been to graduations, you know that students are congratulated for their hard work and given advice for the years that are just ahead.They’re urged to be their best, make their mark, and climb the ladder to success.

But the final speaker gave a different kind of message. Bryan Stevenson, attorney and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, took the podium to tell his story so it could become everybody’s story.

Born in segregated southern Delaware in 1959, Stevenson was one of the first African-American children to attend the previously white schools. A bright student, he ended up at Harvard Law and eventually founded the Equal Justice Initiative, where he’s worked with an incarcerated population, including young teens who’ve been sentenced to life in prison without parole.

His best-selling book about his work, “Just Mercy,” was made into a highly-acclaimed movie.

His message to the graduates? Don’t hide from history, even the ugly parts of it. Especially the ugly parts of it. We have to teach it so we won’t repeat it. We have to know what happened back then so we can keep it from happening right now. The beatings, the lynchings, the terror of the mobs. All of it.

The graduates can make a bundle on Wall Street but they can also make a difference on Main Street, and all the side streets where ordinary people struggle to get by. He tells them about his own grandmother—an ordinary person— who made sure she made a difference in his life. She nearly hugged him to death.

When “Mama,” as he called her, came in for a hug, it was so powerful it took his breath away, literally. His small body ached after her embraces and he tightened up when she came across the room to grab him. When he finally asked her why her hugs were so hard, she said it was because she wanted them to last long after she was gone from the room and from this life.

It worked. Stevenson said he could feel her presence in that huge crowd. And then he directed the class of 2023 to go forth and do the same.

After 5,000 tassels were turned and 5,000 caps were tossed into a clear Carolina sky, the graduates poured out to greet family members and hug them so hard and so long they’d never forget it.

Contact Beth Thames at [email protected]