Tyler Perry’s Powerful Oscars Speech Asks the World to ‘Refuse Hate’

Tyler Perry urged the global Oscars audience to “refuse hate” and work harder to uplift those on the margins as he accepted the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award on Sunday night at the 93rd annual Academy Awards.

Perry, the mogul who built a thriving studio in Atlanta from humble beginnings that include periods of living out of his car, spoke of the lessons he learned from his mother who grew up under harsh conditions in Mississippi in an earlier generation of civil rights strife such as the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and bombings in Alabama during the integration struggle of the 1960s.

“She taught me to refuse hate and blanket judgment,” Perry said of his mother. He contrasted those lessons to the contemporary hyper-active media and social media cauldrons.