Michael D. Shear, The New York Times, May 7, 2016

WASHINGTON — President Obama told America’s next generation of black activists on Saturday that passion and outrage would fail to bring about the change they seek — unless it is accompanied by strategic thinking and tempered by a willingness to compromise.
Addressing the class of 2016 at Howard University, but speaking broadly to African-American youths who have fueled a new civil rights protest movement during his presidency, Mr. Obama urged them to adopt a more disciplined form of activism that goes beyond indignant rhetoric and uncompromising demands.
“Change requires more than righteous anger. It requires a program and it requires organizing,” Mr. Obama, the country’s first African-American president, told the graduates at Howard, one of the country’s oldest historically black universities. “Passion is vital, but you have got to have a strategy.”
That strategy, Mr. Obama told the graduates, must include listening to those with whom they disagree and compromising when necessary to achieve their goals. The message appeared to be aimed at Black Lives Matter activists who have expressed frustration and impatience with the slow pace of change by those in power.
“If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want,” the president said, adding that such an approach leads to “a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair, and that’s never been the source of our progress.”
The president’s commencement speech — one of three he will deliver this year — was written to envision a future in which the young Howard graduates will take over from Mr. Obama’s generation. But for a president nearing the end of his time in office, it also served as a reflection on his own successes and failures.
Mr. Obama’s tenure has been filled with compromises: health care legislation that fell short of his ideal, immigration executive actions that are limited in scope because of congressional opposition, economic measures that were tempered by Republican ideology, and foreign policy ambitions held back by allies and adversaries alike.
Without mentioning them specifically, Mr. Obama on Saturday offered a defense of his legacy of incremental progress, saying that “I always tell my staff, better is good, because you consolidate your gains and then you move on to the next fight from a stronger position.”
The president praised Brittany Packnett, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement, for being willing to participate in discussions with big-city police chiefs and others in search of a solution to the violence that has too often erupted between African-American young people and the police. She did so, he said, despite criticism from other activists who questioned her participation.
“She did participate, and that’s how change happens,” Mr. Obama said.
But he also chided Ms. Packnett’s generation of young people, especially African-American youths, for failing to exercise their electoral power. Just 20 percent of young people voted in the last election, the president said, his voice rising in anger.
Had young people voted in greater numbers, he said, his own policies would have been more successful. And though he accused political adversaries of seeking to make voting more difficult, he said young people were willingly giving up their chance to bring about change by failing to cast ballots in every election.
“And you don’t have excuses,” he said. “You don’t have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar or bubbles on a bar of soap to register to vote. You don’t have to risk your lives to cast a ballot. Other people already did that for you.”
He also urged them to infuse their activism with knowledge, saying that raising awareness about problems is not enough. They must educate themselves enough to hold the right people accountable, he said.
“If you care about better policing, do you know who your district attorney is? Do you know who your state’s attorney general is? Do you know the difference?” he asked. “Find out who they are, what their responsibilities are, mobilize the community, present them with a plan.”
As he has before, Mr. Obama began his address with an optimistic message: that he believes race relations in America are better now than they have ever been, despite the focus in recent years on economic disparities, unfairness in criminal sentencing rules and clashes between police and African-American youth.
He said that his election did not “create a postracial society.” But he said that African-Americans were now succeeding in areas that they did not 30 or 40 years ago. Michael Jordan is not only the “greatest basketball player of all time,” he said, but a team owner. “Shonda Rhimes owns Thursday night, and Beyoncé runs the world,” he said.
“We’re no longer entertainers, we’re producers, studio executives,” he said. “No longer small-business owners, we’re C.E.O.s. We’re mayors, representatives, presidents of the United States.”
Still, he said, it will be up to the next generation of young African-Americans like those in the audience to close educational achievement gaps, eliminate pay disparity for black women, end unfairness in the prison system and bring down the unemployment rate for African-Americans.
To do that, he urged those listening to embrace their heritage and their skin color in hopes of helping to shatter stereotypes that hold down minorities.
“Be confident in your heritage. Be confident in your blackness,” Mr. Obama said, citing Prince, the singer who recently died. “You need to have the same confidence. Or as my daughters tell me all the time: ‘You be you, Daddy.’ ”
Mr. Obama warned the audience that their path would not always be easy, and he warned that they will have to deal with “ignorance, hatred, racism, foolishness.”
But he said they should always remember “a little phrase that I’ve found handy these last eight years: ‘Yes we can.’”