The cheers may have sounded louder because the ceremonies were indoors.
But the enthusiasm was clear Saturday morning as 434 Lincoln University students walked across the Mitchell Auditorium stage as new college graduates or master's degree holders.
"While Commencement is a formal academic ceremony in which degrees and diplomas are awarded, it also signifies a new beginning, a new start, a new day and a new dawn," LU President Jerald Jones Woolfolk said at the beginning of the 2-hour ceremonies.
"It is a time of triumph, a time of excitement, a time for forward movement in search of your destiny."
Some graduates marked their brief time on the stage with waves to their family and friends - or with celebratory dance moves - before receiving their diplomas from Woolfolk and other school officials.
And one young mother shared the spotlight with her baby as she crossed the stage.
Keynote speaker Bakari Sellers told the graduates gathered in Mitchell Auditorium: "I know that it's the tradition of the commencement speaker to impart some wisdom to the graduating class, that prepares you for the future that lies before you - and what that means is, I'm supposed to give you some advice on what you should do with your life.
"But the only real advice that I have is - you shouldn't take advice from people who tell you what you should do with your life."
Instead, Sellers said: "The best I can tell you to do is find something that you want to do, work like hell to get good at it - and someone's bound to pay you to do it."
Sellers, now 34, is a South Carolina lawyer who, in 2006, when he was 22 - and just a year after he had graduated from Morehouse College - defeated a 26-year incumbent for a seat in the South Carolina legislature.
In 2014, he was the Democratic Party's nominee for the state's lieutenant governor - but lost to Republican Henry McMaster, who became South Carolina's governor in 2017, when Nikki Haley resigned to become the Trump Administration's U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (a post she since has left).
In addition to his legal work, Sellers remains active in the Democratic Party and is an analyst and contributor to CNN.
Woolfolk began the day's program with a reminder that: "Today, we also celebrate that Lincoln University continues to fulfill the dreams of our founders who, as members of the 62nd and 65th regiments of the United States Colored Troops, committed themselves to providing the opportunity for education for fellow freed slaves in the state of Missouri."
Sellers offered the LU graduates a peek into the soldier's Civil War world.
"Imagine you've faced every manor of bigotry and hate in your march through the Civil War," Sellers said, "from a War Department that didn't know what to do with you, to commandants and drill sergeants who didn't want to train you, to quartermasters who refused to clothe and arm you, to the enemy who had orders to kill you rather than take you prisoner.
"And you faced it all for $7 a month, knowing your white counterparts were paid almost twice as much. But yet, you persist."
And at the end of the war, as the soldiers were in Fort McIntosh, Texas, waiting to be released from service, Sellers noted, they didn't just head back "home to Missouri where, if you're lucky, you'll work for another man on his land as a sharecropper (or) you'll open a 'five and dime'" store.
Instead, the soldiers of the Missouri 62nd Colored Infantry started "talking with the other men in the regiment and together (pulled) all (they had) from those $7 a month (paychecks) and all those insults that (they) had and took some of (their) friends in the 65th Colored Infantry regiment, and together, (they) came up with $6,400."
An inflation calculator says that initial pledge of money to start what now is Lincoln University would be worth more than $102,320 in today's dollars.
Sellers said he's confident LU's founding soldiers expected the school still to be serving and educating students today, 153 years later.
"I think that you are exactly what those black men in blue uniforms had in mind in 1865, because this is fertile soil on the banks of the Missouri River," Sellers said, "and you, my friends, are the seeds of dissent.
"You are living, breathing examples that the age of miracles has not passed - that this is still the land of opportunity, even if you have to work longer and harder to find it."
Sellers warned the students that life isn't fair - and never has been. But it's not "fixed," either.
"You are the dream of freed slaves and Buffalo soldiers, and you find yourselves here, and now you possess the single greatest catalyst for success and change there ever was," Sellers reminded the graduates. "Now you own an educated mind.
"And now is your chance to use it."
LU Curators President Frank Logan told the graduates: "No doubt, there were times when you questioned if this day would ever arrive. The degree that will be conferred on you today will not guarantee success.
"What is guaranteed, however, is your opportunity to achieve success."
Because of the rain, only some of the graduates' family and friends were in the auditorium, while others were in the overflow crowd at The Linc Wellness Center, where they could see a closed circuit television feed of the ceremonies.
At the end of Saturday's ceremonies, Woolfolk presented the family of D'Angelo Bratton-Bland with an honorary Bachelor of Science in Education degree - the degree he was working on when he was killed last December while walking in the 200 block of Dawson Street.
Police have said he was a victim who did nothing to contribute to his death, and two men have been charged with second-degree murder in his death.
Woolfolk noted he was one of the first people she met when she came to LU last June.
"I knew immediately I had a friend in D'Angelo, with his infectious smile and his bold personality - while being humble and meek at the same time," she said. "Lincoln University lost a student, a leader and a warrior" when he died.
"I know he is somewhere in heaven, telling all the angels about LU," Woolfolk said, adding an endowed scholarship created in his name earlier this year has received "over $10,000 from donors who wish to remain anonymous."
She added: "An endowed scholarship means that D'Angelo's legacy will live on at Lincoln University, forever."