When I became a professional and fully understood what was going on, I knew that with all the love and care and mentorship that someone like Professor James Herring had given us, was not based on gender; it was based on the notion that he wanted us to succeed.

There was a young man in our community who said he wanted to be a minister, and my father was trying to mentor him in the ministry, and something supposedly happened in town.And this young man was jailed. I remember my father lamenting and saying, well, regardless of what happened, he's human; he's human like the rest of us and he deserves, to be heard and to be seen.

Personally, I think that my father's ministry does have some effect on one. I perhaps thought I wasn't listening that well, but I could almost recite his sermons. He had the old-fashioned preaching style of chanting. He would explain a point and then there would be this pitch to excite the audience because people would eventually shout and respond to what he was saying.

There was no real gender definition in the sense of how you treat people in those days with gender differences. You avoided them. My parents always told me that you do not make fun of anybody, and so I didn't see anything funny about it.

I hadn't had any course work in ceramics. I had no courses in art education but I wasn't going to let this chance to have a job pass me by. I went out and learned and I stayed one step ahead of the students by reading and I got to be pretty proficient at throwing on the wheel and making my own glazes, ordering the chemicals and having the students go out and dig and process their clay, and doing things that they weren't teaching at Howard University. So Talladega College opened up my whole sensibility about experimental teaching.

Mary O'Neal used to say that I was teaching her course in disguise, as she said "in cultural disguise." What she meant was that this really was a very fervent kind of civil rights art course, not altogether art history. It wasn't altogether theory. She called it an action course.

My students used to say, one such as Mary O'Neal, that I identified the students by their boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. That was the way I knew them and keep up with them. Mary was the girlfriend of Stokely Carmichael. She later became a fine painter of distinction and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, and later became chairman of the Department of Art at Berkeley.