Kaine tells VSU graduating class to keep optimistic spirit

Jameelah Johnson is leaving for the Peace Corps in April.

“I want to receive more international experience and eventually become an ambassador,” said Johnson, who is from San Diego.

Christopher Thornton, from Appomattox, is going to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he will teach writing at a middle school.

He also will start on his master’s degree as part of Teach for America, a nonprofit organization that enlists high-achieving college graduates to teach for at least two years in low-income communities throughout the United States.

Brittany Uzzell, from Prince George, said she is still trying to figure out what she wants to do. But it will be in media.

She is heading to graduate school in media management in August.

All three are freshly armed with big dreams and their undergraduate degrees from Virginia State University.

Friends and family of nearly 600 graduating seniors nearly filled the Richmond Coliseum on Sunday morning for Virginia State University’s commencement ceremony.

Uzzell’s family members came from North Carolina, including her great-grandmother, and from as far away as Florida to celebrate her big day.

They were there because Uzzell promised her grandmother, who died from cancer in 2011, that she would one day graduate from college.

Uzzell barely made it through high school. She tried community college, but spent more time partying than studying. She was suspended for poor grades.

Then her grandmother talked to her. “She made me promise,” said Uzzell, who finished college in three years. “This was her one wish.”

Sen. Timothy M. Kaine, D-Va., the keynote speaker, told the nearly 600 students that they can accomplish a lot if they stick with it and keep optimistic.

“An optimistic spirit produces accomplishments,” he said.

Kaine acknowledged all the graduating students who were mothers, giving a nod to Mother’s Day, and he shared a piece of advice that he learned from his mother.

“Would you rather be right, or would you rather do right?” he said, reflecting on the question his mother posed to him many years ago.

“If you want to be right, it’s OK to be negative,” Kaine said, adding that often things don’t work out in life.

“You can always say ‘I told you so’ when things turn out wrong. But no one says ‘I told you so’ when things turn out right.”

Kaine encouraged the graduation class to do right and be positive even if they don’t always feel that way.

“You fill find over and over again that not only will positive events occur, but you will be able to shape those events,” he said.

Virginia State University, a historically black college in Ettrick near Petersburg, was founded in 1882.

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