Interviewer (I):
Please recall some critical incident(s) in your personal life that facilitated your journey toward multiculturalism.
Clemmie Solomon (CS): Critical incidents in my personal life. I have to say, I have to take this back to my impressionable years when I was an elementary school student in northern New Jersey, back during the time [of] school desegregation and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. At that particular time I was starting elementary school. I lived in an all-Black neighborhood, but I was living on the side of the street that was in one school district. On the other side of the street was another school district. I was a kid, beginning elementary school. I was being assigned to the school district on the opposite side of the street, and all the kids there went to a school that the Black children went to, but technically I was supposed to go to the school, School #4, where it was an all-White school. My father, being involved in the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] and a union organizer, challenged the decision to send me to the predominantly Black school, and so I ended up, with his efforts, me and my sister, desegregating the all-White school. That was an experience. You can imagine being the only African Americans in the school. We were just little kids. We underwent quite a bit of harassment and discrimination. It was a painful experience, which had a lot to do with me understanding, having an awareness of cultural/racial differences, because it was obviously presented to me through that experience. [I] had some rough times trying to get home from school and fighting my way home . . . So I would say that experience made me very sensitive to differences in diversity. I've always had that in the back of my mind-that experience. But I survived. And I was successful, graduating high school and then going on to a predominantly Black school, which gave me another experience-going to a college in Ohio called Central State University, which helped me to develop and better my own cultural identity and appreciation for my cultural background. I went on [and] got a master's degree at a predominantly White institution, University of Dayton, with a little over 100 African American students out of about 10,000 students. I left there and went later on and got my PhD at University of Maryland, a large institution, but I was the only African American male to graduate in my class with a PhD. So there have been those experiences, I think, kind of capture some real critical incidents where I had to really adjust and be flexible in my own sense of identity and who I was, and be able to adapt to the situation and circumstances that I faced. I could write a book on this, but this is an interview and you have other questions.