MIDDLETOWN — Bryan Stevenson, a human rights lawyer who has dedicated his life to fighting racial injustice in the criminal justice system, urged Wesleyan's graduating class to change the world by changing the narrative about race in the United States.

“As wonderful as things are today, it pains me to have to acknowledge that we are still not free in this country,” said Stevenson, a graduate of Harvard Law School. “We are burdened with our history of racial inequality. It hangs over us like a kind of smog. And this pollution created by this history of racial inequality — we haven't dealt with it. We have to change this narrative of racial difference that we have created in America.”

Stevenson, who was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Wesleyan, is executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based group that has won many legal challenges on behalf of the poor and incarcerated.

He and his staff have argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and have won reversals, relief or release for more than 115 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row.

For decades, Stevenson said, “We beat and battered and excluded people of color. We told black people, ‘You're not good enough to vote just because you're black.' We said to people of color, ‘You're not good enough to go to school with the rest of us.' My parents were humiliated every day of their lives. Those signs that said ‘white' and ‘colored' weren't directions, they were assault.”

Stevenson's comments, drew a long standing ovation from the large crowd gathered on Andrus Field in the center of a campus where social activism is prevalent and student concern for racial injustice has been high this year.

Gregory Blaize, a government major from Boston and one of the 731 students to receive a bachelor's degree Sunday, said after Stevenson's speech, “I definitely identified with him a lot. I feel like you couldn't have that speech anywhere else but Wesleyan.”

The university also awarded 59 master's degrees and 15 doctorates, as well as an honorary doctorate of fine arts to Patti Smith, the writer, performer and visual artist.

In accepting her award, Smith urged the students to “embrace the joy of this moment,” but also to “embrace the worst possible moment that you experienced to achieve this moment. That worst possible moment, the most difficult thing you went through is your source of inner strength. When you go into the world and you have a tough time, you know that you have the power to surmount it.”

Smith didn't sing, but she spoke the lyrics to her song, “People Have the Power,” telling students, “The power to dream, to rule, to wrestle the earth from fools, it's decreed the people rule ... ”

Tahreem Khalied, a senior, told her classmates about the “cultural shock” of adjusting to Wesleyan when she arrived from Karachi, Pakistan.

She spoke of sledding for the first time with a friend who was Jewish and having lunch with another who “nonchalantly told me that he identified as queer.”

“For a Pakistani Muslim woman, that is indeed a big deal,” she said, “because my relationships with each forced me to reconsider some serious cultural biases I had grown up with.”

Stevenson told students that if they want to make change, they have to get “proximate” to the neighborhoods they have been told to avoid in the past: places where there is violence and despair.

“When you get close, you understand things you cannot understand from a distance,” he said.

To make change, Stevenson said, students also have to be “willing to do uncomfortable things… The truth is we can't change the world by doing just what's convenient and comfortable.”

Hannah Sokoloff-Rubin, a history major from Amherst, Mass., said Stevenson's speech was “fabulous.”

“When he talked about proximity and power that really resonated to me,” Sokoloff-Rubin said. “I've been trying to get off this campus from day one to take what I'm learning” into the community.

Sokoloff-Rubin tutored inmates at Cheshire Correctional Institution through Wesleyan's Center for Prison Education and has worked with the Wesleyan Doula Project, which provides emotional support to patients undergoing abortions in clinics.

Sokoloff-Rubin, who is going to be teaching a course at the Cheshire prison this summer, said of graduation: “I feel hugely emotional that this period in my life and this time in this community is done. But I also think it's aptly timed and just because I feel sad doesn't mean it's not right. I'm ready to take what I have learned and who I have grown into here and see what happens in the real world.”