On Saturday, Texas state Representative and Democratic U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico asked graduates of the oldest Historically Black College and University in Texas to embrace their “disillusionment” in his first commencement address.
The speech’s thesis was pretty ambitious and a bit unorthodox for a political candidate in our current day and age of negative politics. Talarico argued that America could be on the verge of another Great Awakening that will be driven by hard-earned cynicism from Gen Z, but can be fixed by love, service and community.
“Disillusionment has a bad reputation,” he told the 2026 graduating class of Paul Quinn College in remarks obtained exclusively ahead of time by MS NOW. “But being disillusioned means being freed from illusions — to see reality. To know the truth. As painful as it may be, your disillusionment is a superpower. You can see the world as it is and dream of the way it ought to be.”
The speech didn’t shy away from the bleakness of the present moment. Instead, it leaned into it.
Talarico told the graduates they’ve “scrolled through more suffering, more division, more chaos than any generation in human history” and that the American Dream is “on life support” as a result of “50 years of the top 1 percent rigging this economic system and this political system for their own benefit — at our expense.”
“And we know that Black Texans have 10 times less wealth and are half as likely to own a home,” said the Democratic Senate candidate, who leads both of his potential GOP rivals — either incumbent Sen. John Cornyn or Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
His argument was that disillusionment, properly channeled, is not despair — it’s clarity.
The address was, by design, not a campaign-style stump speech. But the choice of venue most certainly was.
Talarico is running for the U.S. Senate seat in what could be the Lone Star State’s most consequential Democratic Senate bid in a generation. Republicans are holding a runoff to choose his general election opponent; a problem that’s splitting the party in Texas in two.
But Talarico also enters the general with unfinished business. In the Democratic primary, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Black congresswoman with deep roots in Dallas, drew overwhelming support from Black voters, a gap Talarico and his team knows cannot persist if he is to mount a credible statewide run.
The math is, at first glance, daunting. Black voters make up about 13% of registered voters in Texas. It’s a community concentrated in areas where Democrats will need to run up the margins in order to overcome Republican’s advantages statewide.
Since winning the primary, Talarico has been pretty methodical in his outreach. He held a town hall at Prairie View A&M, another HBCU. He has met with Black elected officials, business leaders, faith leaders and visited Black churches across the state. Saturday’s commencement was the latest, and perhaps most visible, stop on that circuit.
The speech came together quickly. Talarico’s team was contacted by Paul Quinn College representatives last weekend. Talarico, according to multiple people familiar with the process, wrote the first draft of the speech after a brainstorming session with his team last Sunday.
Then, Talarico told his team that he knew he would be speaking across multiple lines of difference: a white millennial man speaking at a historically Black institution full of Gen Zers.
It’s really the story of his candidacy. Working to sell a calmer politics to a country, a state, and a political party that wants to see rhetorical firebombs being thrown by their leaders. A white man asking disillusioned Black voters to come under his tent despite the frustrations created within the primary.
The speech leaned heavily on Paul Quinn’s own founding story and on the man who rescued it from the brink. Talarico invoked Dr. Michael Sorrell, who transformed a struggling institution into one of the most celebrated HBCUs in the country, as proof of the speech’s central argument.
“Paul Quinn was not built by politicians,” he said. “It was built by Black preachers holding classes in church basements and living rooms just seven years after emancipation came to Texas.”
Invoking scripture, he drew a direct line from that history to this moment: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. All who have been counted out, who have been left behind, who have been forgotten – the stones the builders rejected – will be the cornerstone. A revolution from below.”
He pulled from Langston Hughes, Bell Hooks, James Baldwin and Howard Thurman — a Black literary roster that signals exactly who he is trying to speak to and what tradition he wants to position himself within.
The closing was a direct call to action dressed in the language of a preacher at a Southern church revival: “Don’t conform to this world. It’s not healthy to assimilate in a sick system.” And then, quoting Sorrell, he told the graduates: “Get off your knees and start swingin’.”
It’s a message with obvious resonance beyond a commencement stage. Talarico was asking Black Texans, many of whom backed a different candidate, to believe that this particular white progressive from Austin — a Presbyterian seminary student who quotes scripture and Langston Hughes and knocks Jeff Bezos in the same breath — can be their champion in Washington.
Whether they ultimately believe him will go a long way toward determining whether Texas Democrats have a real shot at the Senate seat at all.
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