Obama Urges Morehouse Graduates to 'Keep Setting an Example' ATLANTA - President Obama came to Morehouse College, the alma mater of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on Sunday to tell graduates, 50 years after Dr. King's landmark "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, that "laws and hearts and minds have been changed to the point where someone who looks just like you can somehow come to serve as president of these United States." The president tied Dr. King's journey to his own, speaking in forthright and strikingly personal terms about his struggles as a young man with an absent father, a "heroic single mom," and the psychological burdens of being black in America. He also issued a challenge to the graduating class, imploring the young men of Morehouse, the nation's only historically black, all-male college, to be responsible family men, to set an example, and to extend a hand to those less privileged than them. While Mr. Obama has struck these themes before, he has rarely done so in such unsparing terms. After a week in which his presidency seemed adrift on a sea of controversies, the speech served as both a reminder of his historic role and an emphatic change of subject. "We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices," Mr. Obama said. And I have to say, growing up I made quite a few myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. "But one of the things all of you have learned over the last four years is there's no longer any room for excuses," the president said to the roughly 500 graduates in a downpour, his words punctuated by claps of thunder. Wearing academic robes in maroon and black - he was later awarded an honorary law degree - Mr. Obama singled out a graduate, Leland Shelton, who, as a four-year-old had been taken away from his mother by the state. By 14, he was in foster care. On Sunday, Mr. Shelton graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors and is enrolling at Harvard Law School. The president said that Mr. Shelton planned to use his law degree to advocate for other foster children. Above all, Mr. Obama exhorted the graduates to extend a hand to other black men, noting that his own success depended less on his Ivy League credentials than on the sense of empathy and obligation he felt, as a black man, to his brothers. "But for the grace of God, I might be in their shoes," the president said. I might have been in prison. I might have been unemployed. I might not have been able to support a family. Reflecting on his turbulent childhood, Mr. Obama said, "I sure wish I had had a father who was not only present, but involved; didn't know my dad. And so my whole life, I've tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father wasn't for my mother and me. Declaring that "there are some things, as black men, we can only do for ourselves," Mr. Obama urged the graduates to "keep setting an example for what it means to be a man." And he asked them to extend their sense of justice to other minorities. Even as he preached responsibility, Mr. Obama praised the distinguished lineage of Morehouse, whose roots go back to shortly after the Civil War, when 37 black men, slave and free, gathered to form the first class. It is a place, he said, where Dr. King first read Gandhi and Thoreau, and absorbed the theory of civil disobedience. The president dwelt on the legacy of Dr. King, a member of the class of 1948, whom he described, on his arrival here, as an undersize 15-year-old nicknamed "Tweed" for his natty dress. "It was here that professors encouraged him to look past the world as it was and fight for the world as it should be," he said. "And it was here, at Morehouse, as Dr. King later wrote, where "I realized that nobody was afraid" - not even of some bad weather," Mr. Obama added. But the president's visit came as Morehouse was enmeshed in its own controversy. The college hastily revamped the format of its baccalaureate service after one of the speakers, the Rev. Kevin Johnson, wrote an op-ed in The Philadelphia Tribune, criticizing what he said was the president's lack of advocacy on behalf of African-Americans. In an open letter to the college, the president of Morehouse, John Silvanus Wilson Jr., insisted he had changed the format to include more speakers. "To my chagrin," he wrote, "my decision has been wrongly construed as a decision to "disinvite" this individual." Separately, four students from Morehouse were charged with sexual assault earlier this month in the alleged rape of two female students from nearby Spelman College. Three of the four students are members of the Morehouse basketball team. Lawyers for the students say the encounters, fueled by drinking, were consensual. The college, declaring it has a "zero tolerance policy related to violence of any kind," said it was cooperating with police and weighing its own disciplinary measures.