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How Rachel Maddow Went Rogue in Her High School Graduation Speech
The future MSNBC anchor asked the board for approval on an anodyne draft. But the day of, she gave a very different address.
Years before she became a firebrand for the left, Rachel Maddow practiced her signature spicy oratory in a very different setting: her high school graduation. In an excerpt from her new biography Rachel Maddow, Lisa Rogak explores the MSNBC host’s early days of speaking truth to power.
Rachel Maddow wasn’t her high school’s class valedictorian — with her 3.9 grade point average she placed third in the class — but she, not the valedictorian, gave the commencement speech anyway. She had asked the school board for permission, providing them with an outline of a typically generic graduation boilerplate about pursuing your dreams, blah blah blah, entitled “What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been.”
The board signed off on it.
But she had another secret: Her final act of defiance against the small, conservative California hometown she detested was to give a different speech, one where she’d reveal the deep-seated contempt she felt for Castro Valley. She sat down to write the real speech, which had nothing to do with her original outline. Even though she was in the closet in high school, it bugged her to no end that parents and the school were so skittish about sex education, HIV, and anything revolving around sex. Some parents and teachers even wanted to ban certain textbooks and to promote prayer in school.
On Graduation Day, instead of wearing a fancy dress like many of her classmates, Rachel wore a t-shirt and shorts under her gown, with Birkenstocks and what she later described as “old Grandpa socks” on her feet. She stepped up to the podium, and announced that instead of giving the speech that the school board approved, she was going to take a different tack and “say the things that I’ve truly wanted to say for the past four years.”
Murmurs and nervous laughter spread across the audience as she began. “After we leave the Castro Valley high school campus, we are no longer the children of Castro Valley, nor are we the economic units of the managerial infrastructure of the Castro Valley Unified…
