Lisa D Cook: "Oh, the places you'll go and the things you'll do"
Speech by Ms Lisa D Cook, Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve
System, at the 2024 Commencement, Georgia College and State University College of
Business and Technology and College of Arts and Sciences, at separate ceremonies,
Milledgeville, Georgia, 4 May 2024.
* * *
Greetings Georgia College and State University Class of 2024! Congratulations to all of
you. For those earning your bachelor's degrees, you entered college during the
pandemic and made it through a very challenging time to obtain a college education.
For those of you earning graduate degrees, you took on a difficult course of study while
in many cases also working and caring for families. The path may have been long and
winding, but you did it. Congratulations and thanks also to your families, friends,
professors, mentors, and everyone else who walked with you on the journey that
brought you here today.
It has been a journey, but I imagine that most of you are thinking a lot more right now
about the path ahead. And I do want to talk to you about the places you'll go and the
things you'll do. I think that one of the most exciting aspects of this moment is the
infinite set of possibilities your future holds. If you have any doubts about that, let me
tell you about the improbable, unimaginable journey that has led me here-back
heretoday.
It is customary at commencements to hand the speaking duties over to an alumnus or
alumna of the college or university who has gone forth and done well. I note with
approval that this is exactly what GCSU has done this year, by inviting two
distinguished alumnae to speak at ceremonies for the College of Health Sciences and
the College of Education. So, I will stipulate that I am not a graduate of GCSU.
However, my roots here run much deeper than that.
I was born and raised here in Milledgeville, but in many ways, it was Georgia College,
as it was known then, that was my home. My mother, Professor Mary Murray Cook,
was the first tenured African American faculty member at this university. She was a
member of the faculty of the department of nursing here for 17 years. I want to thank
several of her former students and advisees, including Deborah Davis Arnold Boyd,
Mary Gordy Hurt, and former professor in the department of nursing Ella Milner, as well
as some of her former colleagues, Dr. John Sallstrom and Dr. Harriett Whipple, for
joining us here today. Let me also acknowledge and thank my sisters, other family
members, friends, former church members, and former Girl Scouts in attendance today.
My feelings about GCSU begin with immense gratitude. It was rare in the early 1960s
for colleges to hire, let alone to grant tenure to, an African American man or woman,
particularly in a rural community in Georgia. My father, Rev. Payton B. Cook, worked as
a chaplain and then in senior leadership at the state hospital. But due to my mother's
participation in many aspects of the college, I grew up here, on this campus.
My family lived through the events that brought Milledgeville out of a deeply segregated
South and made Georgia College and State University into the university it is today. My
sisters and I attended the Peabody School, a laboratory school created and run by
GCSU's College of Education. In that contentious era, we helped desegregate
Peabody. Some of the students did not welcome us, but the school did. While
Milledgeville moved forward in fits and starts, Peabody was a nurturing and positive
place for me, much like the university it served. One of my fondest memories at
Peabody was when teachers allowed us to take classroom pets home for the weekend.
On one occasion, my sisters and I cared for a guinea pig, an event that was
remembered by us with delight, but rather differently by my parents. Outside my home
and those of my extended family, the lab school was the first place to seriously
entertain and cultivate our curiosity. I would also like to acknowledge my great teachers
at Baldwin High School who were trained at Georgia College. One I especially
remember fondly was my AP English teacher and writer extraordinaire, Sandra
Worsham. She was constantly writing and sharing her writing and writing practice with
us. She submitted her short stories to the New Yorker, got rejected, and, with great
tenacity, resubmitted her work elsewhere, which was an invaluable skill to learn as an
aspiring professor who dreamed of being published. Thank you!
Much of my childhood revolved around Georgia College. The scholars in my family
were social and natural scientists, and my sisters and I entered science fairs that were
supported by GCSU and sometimes judged by its faculty.
We also learned a lot from students at Georgia College. We were especially sponges in
the presence of the international students, so far from home, whom my mother advised
and whom my parents took a special interest in and often invited to church at Flagg
Chapel and to our house for Sunday dinner. These students brought the world to us. My
sisters and I will also forever be grateful to another group of students, our GCSU
babysitters, who were critical in promoting scholastic achievement while exposing us to
popular culture, which we had little access to at home. They smuggled in music by
Earth, Wind, and Fire, Teddy Pendergrass, and other artists, rescuing the Cook girls
from being seen as complete nerds.
Something else that brought the world to me was the GCSU library, and its amazing
librarians, who could assist a curious girl who always had more questions. Around my
house, many questions from the pesky kids were met with, "Ask your mom", or "Ask
your dad." And, if my parents did not know the answer, they said "Ask the encyclopedia
or the librarian (at Georgia College)!" The librarians and archivists took special pride in
preserving the legacy of renowned author Flannery O'Connor, a resident of
Milledgeville and 1945 graduate of Georgia College for Women, as it was known then. I
remember walking by an exhibit displaying some part of the O'Connor archives each
time I visited the library.
The Georgia College community introduced us to the world in many other ways. Allied
Arts, the local arts-presenting organization, partnered with the university to bring world
renowned dance, theater, and music performances, as well as the visual arts, to the
college community and the town. Betty Snyder, whom some faculty and staff might
remember, was the indefatigable force and immense talent leading Allied Arts at the
time. Her daughter, Genie Snyder Chamberlain, is with us today. The national arts
program of the public service organization Delta Sigma Theta Sorority also partnered
with my mother and the college to bring well- and little-known history makers to
campus. In the seventh grade, I was afforded the transformative opportunity as a
student journalist to interview three of these figures-poet Nikki Giovanni; Rosey Grier,
the actor, football star, and entrepreneur; and Olympian and track star Wilma Rudolph.
Georgia College not only brought the world to us, but it also brought us to the world, a
world larger than ourselves. For my family, GCSU always represented the promise, so
fundamental to the Civil Rights Movement, that education would help bring about the
fairer and more just world that we hoped to make. The first students of African descent
were integrating the college and, with their classmates, implementing the change they
wanted to see in the world. My sisters and I distinctly remember the day the college
voted to make history in the 1970s and selected Monica Manns as the first Black
woman to become Miss Georgia College.
In a fundamental way, on this campus, what mattered was intelligence, knowledge, and
effort. For me personally, from an early age, GCSU and the world it opened to me was
evidence that I could do anything in life and be anyone I dreamed of being, regardless
of where I was raised and whatever my race or gender.
GCSU represented the endless possibilities of what I could do with my life, but it also
planted the seeds of what I have actually done.
When I was in the sixth grade, my mother helped to start a Delta Sigma Theta chapter
at GCSU. Are there some Deltas out there today? It was there I first heard about the
woman who was Delta's first national president: Dr. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander.
She was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of
Pennsylvania law school, the first Black woman to practice law in that state, and an
early civil rights activist. She went on to serve on President Truman's Committee on
Civil Rights and played a prominent role in Philadelphia's civic life.
But before all those achievements, Sadie Alexander's first interest was economics. She
wanted to understand, among other things, what the major causes were of black
unemployment, which became the topic of her dissertation. Dr. Alexander was the
second African American woman, ever, to earn a Ph.D. and the first African American
to earn one in economics. But, unlike my mother decades later, in the 1920s, Sadie
Alexander was actively denied entry to her chosen profession, the one she made
history in, on the basis of her race and sex. Lesser people would have been crushed by
this impediment. But she stepped around this barrier, made lemonade out of lemons,
and pursued her interest in economic opportunity through the law instead.
So, in seventh grade, at the Baldwin County social science fair, I took up the subject of
Sadie Alexander's dissertation. Collecting my own data and employing some of the data
and discoveries of economics over the ensuing decades gathered at Georgia College's
library, I researched the major causes of African American unemployment. I remember
that the local newspaper, the Union-Recorder, marked this occasion with a photograph
of 12-year old me. I sincerely hope that picture remains lost to history!
I did not know it at the time, but this was the beginning of my interest in economics. I did
not know it myself when I went away to college-ranging as far away as Atlanta-and I did
not know it when I graduated and was thinking about the appropriate field of graduate
study.
I figured it out, as it happened, at another place I never imagined I might get to-the
slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. I was hiking alongside a British economist who,
by the end of that trek, had me convinced that economics possessed the tools to
address some really big and important questions-questions, I realized, I had been
excited and enthralled by since my seventh-grade research project largely done at
Georgia College's library. This economist also advised me on the higher-level math
courses I would need to take to prepare to do a Ph.D. in economics, and within months
I moved back home and enrolled in the first of those math courses at Georgia College.
I relentlessly pursued the economic questions we discussed on Kilimanjaro and related
questions, in graduate school in California and then in Moscow, where I conducted
dissertation research on banking in pre- and post-Soviet Russia. I became a researcher
and professor, teaching first at Harvard University and then at Michigan State
University. While much of my research relates to various aspects of economic growth
and innovation, I have spent time in various roles addressing why few women and
people of color enter and advance in the economics profession, which is related to my
research on patent teams. Then, in 2022, I had the honor of being nominated by
President Biden to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,
whose decisions affect the entire economy and the well-being of everyone in America.
It is a very wide circle that I have traced to return here today. And now that I have told
you a little about the role GCSU has played in my life, I think that you may begin to see
why this homecoming for me is so meaningful and emotional.
But I also hope that you can see what this story should mean to you. It means that
whoever you are, wherever you come from, and whatever anyone has ever said about
you or your capabilities, you can be anything and anyone you want to be. If you wonder
what the future holds for someone like you, someone educated here in a small town in
Georgia, who then makes their way in the world: I am here today to tell you that where
you come from and have been is not necessarily where you are going, and that the
possibilities are endless. Georgia College and State University has prepared you
Bobcats well. You will only be limited by your motivation, preparation, and imagination.
Oh, the places you'll go, and the things you'll do, GCSU Class of 2024! Your family,
friends, former professors, your community, and I cannot wait to see it all and are
cheering you on. Huge congratulations, again!
Thank you.