Graham encourages students to become leaders

Business man keynote speaker of MLK commemoration week

Becoming the best in any field begins with understanding who you are, according to Stedman Graham, author and CEO of S. Graham & Associates, a management and marketing consulting firm.

 

Graham, the keynote speaker of the 23rd Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Week at UVU, repeatedly asked the audience in a packed Grande Ballroom to ask themselves who they were and stressed the importance of self-identity Jan. 18. Throughout his speech, he did not use the podium or stage and interacted with the audience at ground level.

 

Graham stated that the productivity of a person sets them apart from everyone else.

 

“It took me a long time to get this,” said Graham. “I spent all my life looking for equality. It took me a long time to realize that everyone is equal because everybody has 24 hours.”

 

During his childhood, Graham suffered with a low self-esteem and constantly fought in school because children would call his family names.

 

The New York Times best-selling author, who was born in Whitesboro, N.J., shared that he was told as a child, “nothing good ever comes out of Whitesboro.” When he was 14 years old, a mentor told Graham that he was not intelligent enough to attend college. Graham used the negative comment as fuel which pushed him to get an education and went on to complete a Master’s degree.

 

“When you don’t know who you are, the world defines you,” said Graham. “And the world defines you and they put you in a box. They say ‘this is who you are’.”

 

Graham stated that people might make themselves self-marginalized by allowing others to define them and believing they are limited based on social constructs, such as race and gender.

 

One of the most valuable lessons Graham learned from Martin Luther King Jr. is the importance of valuing self-worth.

 

“He taught me how to be yourself. The importance of being yourself. The importance of giving yourself value and working on socioeconomic issues for yourself. Working on community development, service other people,” said Graham. “Freedom is a process and you got to work at it, and those are the things that stood out among his teachings.”

 

Graham expressed how love is the most important word and chose four students from the audience to participate in a contest where they could name everything they loved in 30 seconds.

 

“It was very inspiring and a lot of the things he said made me think back to times in my life and it was really encouraging. It makes me want to do better with myself, with my life and my future,” said Michelle Aldana, a junior social work major.

 

Madison Hanks, president of the Black Student Union and presidential intern at UVU said,

“In the past we’ve had a lot of speakers come and speak on MLK himself, but we really wanted a speaker who would come and empower the crowd and empower the students to really follow their dreams.”