When someone asks how you’re doing, Byron Pitts, award-winning journalist and co-anchor for ABC’s “Nightline,” encourages you to respond, “I’m living the dream,” because of the opportunity of attending college, especially somewhere like NC State.
Pitts spoke at Talley Student Union in the Coastal Ballroom to nearly 300 students and emphasized the importance of dreams and the power students have to change the world for the better. His speech was the headline for the 2016 Martin Luther King Jr. campus commemoration.
“I believe deeply in the power of dreams,” Pitts said. “Don’t be indifferent about the opportunities you have to change the world right now where you stand.”
In his speech, Pitts warned of the dangers of indifference.
“Indifference can be a deadly weapon,” he said.
At a young age, Pitts overcame many struggles to achieve his dream. His mother was a single mom who had him before she started high school. He dealt with a stutter until his sophomore year of college, was deemed illiterate at the age of 12 and was put on academic probation his freshman year of college.
“Three to five doctors met with my mom and I, and they said ‘We’re sorry to inform you, but your son Byron is mentally retarded. Not just he can’t read, but he has a mental deficiency,’” Pitts said.
The doctors told Pitts’ mother that, because she lacked the education and financial resources to get him help, they recommended he be institutionalized. His mother refused that option, so she fought for him to attend an adult literacy program in Washington, D.C.
While at college, Pitts faced obstacles that challenged his will to attend college. One of the biggest was his professor telling him he didn’t belong at the school, Ohio Wesleyan. After being told this he walked to the admissions office to get the withdrawal papers. Thinking of the disappointment he would bring to his grandmother and mother, Pitts said she started to cry “ugly tears” the kind that “shake your shoulders and give you a runny nose.”
An English professor, something Pitts was unaware of at the time, saw him sobbing and stopped to ask him if he was all right. The professor turned out to be an Estonian refugee who understood what it was like to struggle and related to the struggle that had Pitts in tears. From then on, that professor became a mentor of Pitts for his remaining time at Ohio Wesleyan.
“Each of you has the capacity to make the world better for someone else,” Pitts said.
Callie Daniel, a freshman studying mechanical engineering, said the message resonated with her.
“His speech made me want to help other people and not focus on other petty problems,” Daniel said. “I liked how he said it’s not about what you can’t do, but about what you can do.”
Pitts also spoke about a question he had been asked when he spoke at an elementary school in East Baltimore, the area in which he grew up. Pitts told the story of an 11-year-old girl named Pillar and the difficult question she asked: “When you were my age, where did you go; where did you hide when the world gets too much?”
Pitts explained that Pillar was placed in foster care at a young age but eventually found a permanent home with an 80-year-old woman. Not long after, a 16-year-old boy was also adopted into the home. He went on to explain that every night the boy would sneak into Pillar’s room and say, “No one will believe you. You will tell no one.”
Although Pillar no longer is a little girl, Pitts told the crowd that she has plans to attend college in the fall. He credited her success to her sharp mind the and “good people that came into her life.”
Daniel said no one could forget that anecdote.
“Giving her a name made it so much more personal,” Daniel said. “But I felt angered that something like that could happen. We need to make sure that everyone is looked out for, and I was really glad that someone like Pitts could step in.”
Pitts challenged the crowd to decide on and set out to achieve their dreams. Not matter how difficult they might be to obtain.
“That’s my challenge to each of you,” Pitts said. “Live your dreams — bold, big, outrageous, crazy dreams. Let your dreams be so big that it includes other people. Let you be the one to find the Pillar in your life, and when they ask ‘where do I go, where do I hide?’ you say, ‘come to me.”
