Impassioned Speech Inspires on Parents Weekend

In a talk sprinkled with references to science, Mr. Maqubela (who teaches organic chemistry) praised parents for imparting good values to their children. He told of one student’s response when he asked his class what inclusion means to them. “All opinions matter,” she said, “as long as they are expressed with kindness.” That child, the headmaster observed, “captured the essence of our democracy better than our current politicians often do.” Good messages said with frequency eventually resonate, he told the parents gathered in the Sackett Forum.

 

Mr. Maqubela went on to outline how Groton’s values took root from the school’s founding and continued through the years. “Imagine the founder of the school, Rector Peabody, inviting a freed slave, Booker T. Washington, not only once but twice, in 1899 and 1905, to address the students. In this awakening, he was saying to the students, ‘the ideas of former slaves matter.’ In 1899, one of those students was FDR.”

 

Headmaster Jack Crocker admitted Groton’s first black student, invited Martin Luther King Jr. to campus, and took students to march with Dr. King in Boston. “Imagine the courage of those acts at that time,” Mr. Maqubela said. “…How many of us would have been that courageous?”

 

He praised the headmasters who laid the groundwork for coeducation in the 1970s and Headmaster Bill Polk’s determination to create a climate where girls were not just present but included. Mr. Maqubela also mentioned the four current student prefects, elected by their peers to help lead the school, of whom two “are at once African, Latino, Senegalese, Nigerian, and American. And it is your children’s judgment that they chose them by the content of their character rather than how much melanin they have.”