Julieanna L. Richardson Named Speaker for Muhlenberg’s 2024 Commencement
Richardson is founder and president of The HistoryMakers, a national nonprofit research and educational institution committed to preserving and making widely accessible the untold personal stories of both well-known and unsung African Americans. She will receive an honorary degree alongside Tom Graves ’76, an author and photographer.Wednesday, April 24, 2024 09:54 AM
A student receives their diploma during Commencement 2023. Muhlenberg’s 2024 Commencement Ceremony will be held Sunday, May 19, at 10 a.m. at the PPL Center in Allentown. Graduates will celebrate with their guests at the in-person event, and the ceremony will be streamed to the public and archived for later viewing.
Commencement speaker and honorary degree recipient Julieanna L. Richardson has a diverse background in theatre, television production and the cable television industry that created a unique path to founding the largest effort to record the African American experience since the WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s. The HistoryMakers is a national nonprofit educational institution headquartered in Chicago. Since its founding in 2000, it has grown to be the digital repository for the Black experience and a unique resource for K-16 education, the media, STEM and other disciplines.
A 1980 graduate of Harvard Law School, Richardson graduated from Brandeis University with a double major in theatre arts and American studies, where she did extensive oral history interviews on the Harlem Renaissance and later, poet and writer Langston Hughes. She worked as a corporate lawyer at the Chicago law firm of Jenner & Block prior to serving in the early 1980s as the cable administrator for the City of Chicago Office of Cable Communications.
Richardson currently sits on the Honors Council of Lawyers for the Creative Arts; the Simmons University Dean’s Advisory Council of the Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts and Humanities; and James Madison University’s Flowerings Advisory Council.
In 2014, Black Enterprise magazine awarded Richardson its 2014 Legacy Award, its highest recognition of women’s achievement. That same year, Richardson was profiled in American Masters: The Boomer List, a PBS documentary and exhibition at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. She is a 2021 recipient of the Chicago History Museum’s John Hope Franklin Making History Award. She delivered her TED Talk, “The Mission to Safeguard Black History in the U.S.,” in 2022, and in 2023, she was featured on 60 Minutes.
Honorary degree recipient Tom Graves ’76 has enjoyed a long career as a commercial photographer in New York and San Francisco, specializing in distinctive portraits and photography for the business world. Assignments have taken him to 50 states and to Europe, Asia and Australia for clients including AT&T, BASF, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Cisco, IBM, JAL, Merrill Lynch, The New York Times, People magazine, Pfizer and Time magazine. For seven years, he taught photography majors at The New School/Parsons School of Design in New York.
For the last 20 years, Graves has devoted himself to capturing and sharing the experiences of WWII veterans, and he has photographed and interviewed hundreds of veterans of every race, rank and branch of service. In 2013, he published the award-winning Twice Heroes: America's Nisei Veterans of WWII and Korea, telling the stories — through his portraits and interviews — of the Japanese Americans who enlisted or were drafted into the segregated U.S. Army, many while their own families were illegally imprisoned by the U.S. throughout WWII. The principal Nisei infantry unit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, became the most decorated unit in U.S. history.
Graves is a sought-after speaker and considered an expert on the Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) experience in WWII. He has spoken to audiences in Italy and France, where the Nisei soldiers liberated villages from the Nazis, and in Japan, where Nisei linguists were instrumental in rebuilding the nation after WWII. Graves was awarded a grant from the state of California to produce a documentary on Japanese American WWII veterans encountering racism upon returning from their service in the U.S. Army.
Graves, who was a social science major at Muhlenberg, lives in San Francisco with his wife, Becky Saeger ’76.
About Muhlenberg College
Founded in 1848, Muhlenberg is a highly selective, private liberal arts college offering baccalaureate and graduate programs. With an enrollment of nearly 2,000 students, Muhlenberg College is dedicated to shaping creative, compassionate, collaborative leaders through rigorous academic programs in the arts, humanities, natural sciences and social sciences; selected preprofessional programs, including accounting, business, education and public health; and progressive workforce-focused post-baccalaureate certificates and master’s degrees. Located in Allentown, Pennsylvania, approximately 90 miles west of New York City, Muhlenberg is a member of the Centennial Conference, competing in 23 varsity sports. Muhlenberg is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
