Interview With Courtland C. Lee, AMCD President (1989–1990)

✍ Scribed by Gargi Roysircar

• Publisher: American Counseling Association
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 81 KB
• Volume: 38
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0883-8534
• DOI: 10.1002/j.2161-1912.2010.tb00129.x

✦ Synopsis

Interviewer (I):

Please recall some critical incident(s) in your personal life that facilitated your journey toward multiculturalism.

Courtland C. Lee (CCL): Well, the most obvious one was being born Black and male in America. That certainly is one. Growing up in the 1960s, when I did coming of age in the 1960s, seeing [the] civil rights movement in this country, listening to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech when I was 13 years old, unfortunately hearing the news of his death when I was a freshman in college, and watching what happened at the end of the civil rights movement sort of colored the way I viewed the world, the way I viewed relationships with people, and the importance of inclusion and diversity and those kinds of things. Certainly a real strong influence on my life and my career was my mentor, who I met when I was working on my master's and really sort of pointed me in the direction that I have been following for most of my life and career.

I: What was your master's in?

CCL: It was in counseling. I went straight on after that to get my doctorate.