Interview With Victor E. Bibbins Sr., AMCD President (2000–2001)

✍ Scribed by Gargi Roysircar

• Publisher: American Counseling Association
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 107 KB
• Volume: 38
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0883-8534
• DOI: 10.1002/j.2161-1912.2010.tb00133.x

✦ Synopsis

Interviewer (I):

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

Victor E. Bibbins Sr. (VEB): A critical incident in my life that propelled me toward multiculturalism. Well, I went to a[n] undergraduate institution in Michigan, Western Michigan University, which was a teachers college, and at the prime age of 17, I found myself in a community of about 15,000 students who were basically predominantly White and among 125 African American students that, many of which, they were the first generation to go to college. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and was raised predominantly in an African American community and had not had much exposure to Caucasian students so I didn't know what to expect. That didn't bother me because I was pretty much a people's person, and I knew intuitively, I didn't know directly, that I was sent there to compete. I was a part of the generation that was proving the concept that if you give us the opportunity we can compete on the same level. Two years prior to that, James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi, during that time, and so I was a part of that whole movement. What disturbed me in my 4 years there as an undergrad was that when I did A work I got a B, when I did B work I got a C, and when I did C work I got a D, and so I had to work twice as hard and be twice as [good] just to break even. That was very frustrating. That created a lot of anger. I think that anger came to a pivotal point when I witnessed the death of Martin Luther King in 1968. At that point, I was student teaching and I happened to be at an evening program where it was a parent-teacher conference. I was the only African American student or teacher, student-teacher at that time in that school and they came to tell me, "We hate to tell you this, but Dr. King has been assassinated." And I think from that point on, I had made a commitment that I was going to make a difference in terms of the environment that I participated in and the things that I did, and that kind of propelled me with a perspective that sent me toward multiculturalism. Actually, multiculturalism, as you know, is an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, and I was very much a part of the civil rights movement, as I have explained to you earlier. Unconsciously first, because I was placed into that kind of environment-it was my counselors and my parents, people that were all pulling for me. We could not fail. But we had these challenges of racism and these challenges of bias, we had these challenges of dual standards and we overcame all those. So those are probably some of the things that challenged me toward multiculturalism, actually propelled me into the civil rights movement. Little did I know in terms of the things that had happened to me as a younger