Use struggles as push, ot excuse, MLK diversity breakfast speaker Pendleton says

YOUNGSTOWN

Rather than using your struggles as an excuse not to pursue your dream, use them to push to achieve it.

“This life is not for wimps; it’s for warriors,” said Emma Fraser Pendleton, the keynote speaker Thursday at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Diversity Breakfast at Youngstown State University.

The annual breakfast is sponsored by YSU’s Office of Student Diversity Programs and the Student Diversity Council.

Pendleton, a motivational speaker, was one of 11 children. They ended up in a series of what she called “cruel and toxic” foster homes after their mother was institutionalized for mental illness.

In one of those homes, Pendleton and one of her brothers were abused sexually, physically and emotionally.

She said she knows pain.

“It’s what you overcome that makes you who you will be,” Pendleton said.

But God doesn’t give you anything that you can’t use, she said.

Pendleton married at age 19, and by 21 she had two children.

“I had never been near a college,” she said.

She lived in fear but said God was grooming her for better.

She went on to earn five degrees, including a doctorate, from Harvard University at age 45.

Pendleton said if the Rev. Dr. King were alive, he’d ask what people were doing with his dream.

She urged attendees to cultivate friendships with people of other races and to visit their ancestral homes.

Life isn’t about arriving at your grave in a well-preserved body, she said.

Read more of her remarks in Friday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.