I always said, you have to have a goal and an objective in life.

Even when I became cognizant of this societal problem in this country, I asked my father and my mother if they knew anything that had been passed on to them, about slavery, and my father was very reticent about it. He often said, "No, I don't know anything about it, and it was bad, it was awful and it's over and we want to get on with our lives."

We were told, no, you don't do. There was this high standard of morals and a sense of responsibility. That didn't mean that everybody stuck to those laws, but we were cognizant of the importance of trying to live up to that code.

I always said, you have to have a goal and an objective in life.

I established relationships with so many of those Iran students that went on for years.And they were so different from American students. They seemed to worship their teachers. The professors were major to them. They wanted to give gifts, and you'd have to say, oh, no, no, you can't do that.

James Porter said to me once, when I was talking about painting, he said, well, that's fine, he said, but you have a good mind so you can't just be a painter; you're going to have to help define the field and keep the tradition going. And he meant walking in his footsteps in a certain way.

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.