May 26, 2025
Morehouse awarded a posthumous degree to Dennis Hubert, a student lynched in 1930.
Morehouse College’s recent commencement ceremony commemorated the lynching of Dennis Hubert in June 1930 by giving his nephew, Imam Plemon El-Amin, the honorary degree that his uncle never got the chance to earn after he was murdered by a group of white men on the playground of one of Atlanta’s segregated schools.
According to CNN, Hubert was 18 at the time of his lynching and in his sophomore year at Morehouse, where he was studying divinity. At the commencement ceremony, Morehouse’s president, David Thomas, called Hubert a “son of Morehouse, a martyr of justice, and what history now sees as the Trayvon Martin of the 1930s in Atlanta.”
The 75-year-old El-Amin, whose family has a long connection with the Atlanta University Center, or AUC, was appreciative of the ceremony; several members of his family have gradated either from Morehouse College or its sister school, Spelman College, which like Morehouse, is mono-gender.
“Many prayers were said in his name,” El-Amin said about the ceremony, which he told CNN reminded him of an Islamic saying that people only leave behind their charity, knowledge, and family members who pray for them when they die. “Many people remembered him and were informed about his life and his legacy, and so the knowledge was there, as well as the charity of him sacrificing his life so that we would be more conscious of the value of young life and the value of human life, but also the value of justice.”
El-Amin continued, further contextualizing the murder of Hubert, “For one of their promising children, who (was) a rising sophomore at the Morehouse College to be murdered just in cold blood…at that time, 1930, is saying that there (were) no human rights given to the (Black) people of Georgia.”
Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization dedicated to honoring the memories of Black people who were lynched, applauded Morehouse’s decision to honor Hubert.
“When we begin to address this history, when we begin to try to create remedies for the harm and suffering that terror violence and lynching violence created, I think we lay a path down that will help us move forward, which is why I was so pleased that Morehouse decided to award a degree posthumously to Dennis Hubert,” Stevenson told CNN.
The tragedy of Hubert’s murder was compounded by the fact that there has not been much awareness about his story, and Morehouse’s alumni, like Sean Jones, a 1998 graduate of the university, pressed the university to both formally recognize Hubert and tell his story to both current students and alumni.
“It’s personal, it’s painful, and…oftentimes it’s a scary thing, because some persons have nightmares about it once they hear this kind of history,” Jones told CNN. “But it is something that must be discussed, must be highlighted.”
Stevenson agreed, noting that it is important to highlight such stories “when there’s such a hostility in some spaces to learning the history of struggle and violence against Black people.”
El-Amin also noted the political climate, after noting that keeping his uncle’s story alive also means keeping him alive.
“Ninety-five years later, people are conscious of his life, which means he’s still alive, though not here with us physically or in body, but his life, his will, and he is providing inspiration for those of us left behind,” El-Amin also cautioned in his comments to CNN that, “We can see that those very, very terrible times are not that far away and can easily come back.”
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