...you didn't hear the wave of applause, the sheer thunder of welcome that greeted him as he walked out onto the floor of the Siegel Center of Virginia Commonwealth University at 6:08 this evening. In a broad-ranging and stunningly-delivered oration, he both evoked the long history of racial oppression in America, pointing out (rightly) that the very wealth which enabled the colonies to launch this two-hundred year experiment in democracy and freedom was amassed on the backs and bodies of Black slave labor, and challenged the students today, over and over, to wrestle with the central question, "What kind of person do I want to become?"

"How shall integrity face oppression? What shall honesty do in the face of deception? How does decency respond in the face of insult? And how shall virtue meet brute force?" Over and over, Dr. West returned to the four central questions of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Ordeal of Mansart, using them as a springboard to explore the moral and spiritual challenges of engaging in meaningful activity in our corrupt, profit-driven, corporate-controlled culture.

I couldn't even begin to give you a proper overview of his speech. I'm looking for a link, but I don't think anyone's posted it to youtube yet. But for those inclined to dismiss Cornel West as irrelevant or without influence in the Black community, all I can say is that right now in downtown Richmond there are some two thousand VCU students who would beg to differ.