Our guest author is Jaden Alexander Cody, a 2025 graduate of Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. and the 70th Student Bar Association President of Howard University
Good afternoon everyone, it is a delight to share this space and this air with you all today. To President Vinson, to Provost Wutoh, to Dean Fairfax, Senator Alsobrooks, faculty, staff, esteemed alumni and guests, families and loved ones, I bring you greetings, but most importantly to the reason we are all here today, the class of 2025! Good afternoon, to you!
My name is Jaden Alexander Cody, I am a graduating Third-Year Law student here at the University from Atlanta, Georgia and I have had the esteemed privilege of serving as the 70th Student Bar Association President of Howard University and thus Student Body President of Howard University School of Law.
Before I continue, I want to just take a moment and class if you would join me I’m gonna need you… Because as much as we like to think it’s us and our brilliance, hard work and grit that got us to this seat, I’m sure those who filled the seats around us and online would disagree. All of us are here because someone or a lot of someones ensured that we had what we needed to graduate today, whether it be prayers, calls, textbooks, outlines, food, a roof over our head and or money, we are here because of a village behind us, so I want us to thank the villages that have convened here today for their part in ensuring that JD is about to follow our names. Lets thank the fathers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, friends, spouses, children, linebrothers and linesisters. And of course, because our celebration shares a weekend with a special day, the mothers and mother-like figures that have impacted us, class, if you would join me in thanking them for all they have done for us.
While today we are ending a chapter as students of Howard University School of Law, we are entering a time of urgency, a time that scholars are noting already feels eerily similar to what many of us have learned about during our educational careers. We are standing in the days in which our children and their children will look back and either view our actions fondly, speaking our names proudly or question our complicity as we do those in Germany in the 30s, South Africa in the ’40s, 50s, and 60s or honestly, how we view peoples inaction in the face of injustice at any other point in American history. How will people be able to answer where you, where we, where the HUSL class of 2025 stood in history, how did we impact this field, that is so rapidly changing? How are we living out the mission of our University? How are we making the lives of minorities everywhere better? That is what I am here to welcome you to, welcome to a lifelong commitment to service, a lifelong commitment to justice, a lifelong commitment to equity, even when it makes some feel uncomfortable. That is what is expected of a Howard University School of Law lawyer.
People often stop me after I speak or after seeing one of the amazing things one of our students have done and some say to me, that’s black girl magic or HUSL has black boy magic. And I’ve found myself having to stop them, while their sentiment is in the right place, Howard University School of Law, and her students are not magic because we are not mysterious, and our power is not unknown. What we do and what happens on our campus is nothing more than sacredly regimental. Our professors who have committed their lives and their scholarship to Howard have also committed themselves to ensuring that this institution, the oldest Law school in the world, erected for the education of black lawyers and missioned to save the world — many times from itself — they are committed to ensuring she still stands. That is from whom we learned, this is where we got our legal training, and this is what we must represent. That is the legacy we now carry by taking this degree.
Howard University School of Law is not magical and her students are not either, but rather sacredly radical. By our sheer existence, and movement in the field, we teach the world that the legally educated minds in our beautiful Black and Brown students, that some would foolishly call DEI hires, are not only capable of anything but because of the titans of industry that teach us, and the titans of industry that are made here, we become evidence that we are uniquely ready for everything.
So class of 2025 as we sit adorned in fine regalia as a testament that trouble truly does not last always, having survived many a terry cold call, finally yes finally making it to the penthouse with Provost Dark, and somehow, some way, memorized Thomas’s long framework… so that you could do what you will do today, call yourself a HUSL made lawyer! I say welcome to the new you, the you that is different than the timid first year sitting in pinning or even the ready to go 3L that made their way to bar skills sometimes.
All that we’ve learned, all that we have gone through, all that Howard has instilled in us both by design and by flaw. That, will be what makes us the best advocate for our clients, the best clerk for our judge, the best jurist in our courthouse, best partner at our firm, the best mentor to that young and upcoming attorney, but most importantly the best person for the time we are facing now, as long as you remember to take Howard with you.
So, class of 2025, I want to welcome you into the rest of your life, lifting and extending a legacy that is so much bigger than us, a legacy that has existed for 156 years. But to the rest of the room, the villages that have found themselves on this sacred campus on a Friday afternoon and are streaming from across the world, I want to welcome you to what will be the showing of a historical class, a class of deal makers, chain breakers, litigators, and legislators, because we will be the ones, our will be the names that Thurgood Marshall, Pauli Murray, Charlotte E. Ray, and Charles Hamilton Houston must make room for.
So, everyone welcome, and class of 2025, welcome and congratulations, and to the world, I say sit back, and in the words of the great scholar and poet laureate, GloRilla, let us cook.
Photo credit: Daeja Langston
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