Hopefully you all caught Dr. Diddy’s Howard commencement speech here live. If not, we have some key points that he spoke on. Two special ones were finding out the details of his father’s death, and the relationship it formed between he and his mother. Another was on his unscheduled departure from Uptown Records and the financial situation it place him in. Check them out after the jump.
On finding out about his father Puff recalled,
“On my second day of school I learned something that would change the course of my life forever. I don’t talk about this often. I was raised by a single mother in Harlem. My dad, Mr. Melvin Combs died when I was three-years-old. My mother always told me that he died in a car accident. But something about that it just didn’t feel right. Something was in my soul that was telling me otherwise. So, as soon as I got here I went to the library and I did some research. I used the microfilm at Founders [Library] to search through all the newspapers. And when I typed in my father’s name and the day he died, I read in the Amsterdam News that he had been murdered in a drug deal gone bad. Right there in that library I realized there’s nothing greater than a mother’s love and desire to protect her child.”
When it came to being fired from Uptown, Diddy mentioned that his girlfriend of the time was 8 and 1/2 months pregnant and he had just purchased a home he now couldn’t afford.
“So, I found myself sitting alone in my bedroom and asking myself the question that sometimes we all ask each other. ‘What are you gonna do now? What are you gonna do now? You should’ve kept your mouth shut and just did what Andre told you to do, but you wanted to act like you was making hit records. Now look at you. What are you gon’ do now?’ So, I had two choices. Either I was gonna sit in that failure and give up or I was gonna make a decision to step out of the darkness. You see when you in that darkness you want to sit there and wait for that light to come. When you in that darkness it feels uncomfortable, but you can’t wait and sit in that darkness. The only way out is to step forward. To face your fears. To become your own light.”
