Dr. Edmund W. Gordon, SPA/MA '50, interviewed by Joy Thomas Moore, CAS/BA ’72, CAS/MA ’73 on March 3, 2022

So the first one we'd like to ask is during your time at AU what challenges were driving, were the driving forces, and how did you accept the challenge?

When I was a student at AU, I was also working as the assistant dean of men up at Howard University. I was primarily responsible for the men who were in residence, in dormatory there, but it was a job of counseling students. I had some responsibilities for activity, keeping them busy and out of trouble, and I did a freshman orientation seminar. Being exposed to those young men of color at Howard, my biggest challenges were theirs. Washington at that time was still a segregated area and I, as I recall, several of our students were challenging that circumstance, uh occasionally got into trouble doing so.

But if I think back to the things that we most worried about, I would say, aside from the usual academic concerns, the young men I was working with were most concer-, mostly concerned about segregation. However, being up on the hill up at Howard, we were, we could remain sufficiently separated from that experience for not to have been the consuming concern. I suspect it was more an academic concern. Reminded that segregation was a problem that we Black people were constantly confronted with. Now, I don't have any recollection of segregation having been a prominent experience on AU's campus and I hope I'm not cleaning up my memory as it were.

No, I don't.

I don't think we encountered any serious experiences at AU and it may have been that it was the policy of the institution that be the case.

Yeah because according to the records, there were something like 400 African-American students at the time that you were there. I don't know if you felt their presence or there was any camaraderie, you know, among you.

You know, I'm surprised that the number was that large. I would have, well, my experience was being one of a very few Black people on campus. It may be that the undergraduate college experience was a bit different than the graduate school. I think I was mostly on campus in the late afternoon and evening. Yeah, must have been because I was supposed to be working during the day, but I still don't recall racial segregation being a prominent issue there. Nor being there, having been any organized student effort at AU in response to it.

That would, that would make sense. Are you? So second question is, why at the beginning of your career and education were you focused on issues of inequity in early childhood education and youth education, that kind of thing? And how did that connect to AU, to what you did later did?

I'll treat that in two parts -- my concern with equity and my concern with early childhood. The equity concern came from my father and my uncle. My uncle Fernie[?] was a Philadelphia minister, very active in the Civil Rights efforts in Philadelphia. My father was the kind of titular head of the Black community in my hometown. He was, he was a physician. He was Jamaican in ancestry. Never let people forget that he carried a British passport which gave him some privileges that other Black people didn't have, but he didn't keep them to himself. He used them to help Black people, so when Black people got in trouble or needed something in Goldsboro they turned to Dr. Gordon and Dr. Gordon kind of worked it out for them.

So I went off to college and eventually to graduate school very much, a, I'd actually call it a Civil Rights person, very much a race activist working on issues of inequity. Now, I had somehow caught on growing up that people who grew up in more economically privileged families seemed to act differently and have a different resource, resources pile than poor people did. As soon as I got in position to do something about that I began to try to, began to be concerned with the education of young Black people. I had a favorite professor at Howard, Professor Doxey Wilkerson. He was my first professor of education and Doxey was a very progressive, educated Black man who never failed to remind us that he had been influenced by Du Bois and Du Bois believed that education was our salvation, and the earlier, it starts the better.

I think my inclination to serve Black people that I got from my father and my uncle combined with Professor Wilkerson's emphasis on the importance of the education of Black people and getting it to us, or getting to us early, were the two, the three forces that kind of culminated in my taking a special interest in early childhood education. The time, the years I was at, two years I was at AU I was much more concerned with adolescent and young adult education because that had been my responsibility at Howard, and I had gone to AU to continue my education in order to do that job better.

Okay, so that will explain why you made that, that trek up the hill as it were from.

Absolutely

Okay. Wow. And so, just as an off question why, why AU and not George Washington or Georgetown?

No, I don't really recall that one. It may be that AU was making a special effort to be receptive to Black people. I don't recall in those years any tradition of Black people going over to Georgetown or George Washington. I don't want to indict them and say that we weren't welcome, but, uh, my kinda general recollection is that it was a more comfortable environment, going to AU than to Georgetown or George Washington. I suspect now that you remind me that there were 400 of us Black folk already at AU. I suspect that as the young, excuse me, as a younger institution, it may have reached, reached out to Black people. And the word gets around in the community. It will be more comfortable at AU than at GW.

Yeah, I think that really has been one of the things, its legacy. It was founded, you know, by, by the Methodist Church, and I think that there was a real, a real effort to um, you know, to be inclusive and to you know, right some of the wrongs that have previously, you know happened that were going on in the country. And it's funny that you mention your, your great, your father being West Indian because I am also from Jamaica.

You're from Jamaica. Oh yes.

Uh-huh. And my parents as well. So it, I totally understand that because when my, when my dad got his, his Doctorate from Columbia, see there's so many parallels there, as we discussed. There was a special chair, unlike, not unlike the one you're in, and we had it home and Daddy was, was very clear that that was his chair. [laughs]

[laughs] Oh yes. oh yes.

He earned that chair.

[laughs] Oh right. What, what part, what part of Jamaice did he come from?

Well I know I was born in Low River it was on the, um, I guess the eastern side, um

Right

and his dad was a minister there Presbyterian minister and that

Ah! That was my father's

[laughs]

Father was a Presbyterian minister.

Well, you know, I will find out all that information and tell Cassandra exactly where, where his father had his church and we're dad actually preached there for a couple of years before he came here to go to school.

Oh yeah? Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

So, but I'll get all that information.

My dad's area was St. Catherine's Parish. Which, I kind of think that's away from Kingston. I'll think of the area, it's quite a popular name, but that's but beside our interview.

[laughs]

I was going to say with respect to my experience at American. As we began to talk about segregation and desegregation. I recall at least two of my professors, making a positive thing of both my being there and being in my class, a woman it was a compound name like Saint Joy, [?], Mary Mc[?]. A Black woman named like, it would be Mary McLeod Bethune. But this woman Catheryn somebody, anyway, she went out of her way to look out for me. If there were a missionary spirit behind the college, she certainly demonstrated it towards me. To this day, I remember her, apparently, extending herself to make sure that I felt welcomed. Because in that class I think I was the only Black person, only person of color and she went out of her way to make sure that I was provided for. Right.

That's wonderful. It really, really is and and I think that tradition of the professor's being there for students has carried, you know, throughout, throughout its history. And even more so, with sort of the, the new, the new emphasis on changemakers and the new administration we have a new president that's wonderful.

Yes, I met her the year they gave me an alumni award, I think. Right.

She's the real deal. She, we just, just love her. She's wonderful.

I was very, very favorably impressed.

Okay, I have one more question for you and I will give you an opportunity to add anything else that you would like after that. What advice would you give current and future AU students on what they need to take from their experiences at AU to help make them the changemakers of tomorrow?

I'm not sure that I have advice that is specific to AU, but one of the things that I began to pay attention to there, and it may have come from some particular professor, but I have an impression that when I arrived at AU I was too respectful of knowledge and books. And how are you too respectful of knowledge and books? If you realize that knowledge is not meant to just be absorbed, but it is meant to be understood and in the process of trying to understand, you probably have a better chance of understanding if you also challenge. If you're only absorbing, if you're only listening, if you only take in what's there and not examining it critically you are likely not to fully understand it.

In my hundred years now and I'm calling attention to that because I might not have had this insight when I was at American, although I might have begun to learn it there. One needs to be open to absorb knowledge. Somebody says, you learn more with your eyes and ears open then with your mouth open, so you're not be talking so much that you can't take in what's happening. But if you're only taking it in and not processing it, if you're not challenging it and trying to understand how it relates to different circumstances and where it might have come from, and how the knowledge interests of the knowledge carrier, that knowledge producer influences knowledge the itself. So if you don't understand where your knowledge has come from, again, you may not fully understand it.

Certainly as I matured, by the time I reached my experience with Du Bois, I was a critical listener. I tried to listen and see everything I could, but then I had to digest it, I had to massage it, i had to make it my own, I had to criticize it. But I would say that I think I began to have that sense, that awareness in those days at AU. There was a professor of psychology, I think he taught me one of my early courses in developmental psych. And if I tried hard enough I could remember his name, but he was saying just because it's in the book doesn't mean that you've gotta receive it in the same way that it's in the book. You bring your own experience to bear on it. You seek out the opinions of other people. You read, more importantly, to see what other books say. And then you make the information your own by critiquing it.

So I would say to people who are coming along now and even people who have passed that stage but still developing, that knowledge is to be absorbed. You're supposed to learn knowledge, but most importantly is supposed to understand it. Now later in my career, I must have been in my 40s certainly, by the time I met Du Bois. Du Bois insisted that knowing wasn't enough. He insisted that if you know something, ff you understand it, if it's your own, you have a responsibility. He used the word deontic D-E-O-N-T-I-C. You have a moral responsibility to use knowledge, to apply it. And he added, as a kind of footnote, in the service of others. Use knowledge in the service of others.

Wow. You know, I could actually sit here and listen to you, you know, can I just sit at your feet for this? [laughs] It has been such a pleasure getting to know you in these few interviews. Thank you,

Well, I'm very appreciative for the opportunity. I enjoy pontificating.

[laughs]

My youngest daughter Johanna says if you ask dad a question, he'll tell you a lot more than you want to know. Yes, I do. I do enjoy sharing the little bit I know and certainly sharing what I have done with it. And maybe it is continuing Du Bois' admonition, maybe it's my way of doing something, but whatever the knowledge I have, ellaborating it.

Anytime you want to share any more of that knowledge Cassandra has my number [laughs] we will make it happen.

Well if you're in this neighborhood, look me up. Let's hope the pandemic will be far enough along for my crew to let you in. In the last two years, I think I can count on two hands and not use all my fingers, the people that I've seen in person. Most of my contacts are like this through Zoom or something. They claim that it's because people my age are more susceptible to the, to the virus. So they, if you were here, you'd have to have a mask, a mask on and they'd put a mask on me and turn on the exhaust fans to keep the air moving. But it has worked, something has worked. I've made it through this two years with no, no illness but it is been devoid of in person in encounters.

Yeah. Well they've taken. [cross-talk] I'm sorry?

We'll get [?] a chance one day to meet, meet in person.

I hope so. And because I know everything that they have done over these past two years have been out of love for you and the rest of us are internally grateful that they have taken such great care of you so that you are now able to share this incredible knowledge. So thank you. Now before we sign off, is there anything at all that you'd like to add that we haven't covered? Um

I suppose certainly people in graduate school now at AU probably are paired off, they've found partners, undergraduates still in the search and capture mode. But I never like to ignore the importance selecting a good mite, a good mate, has been for me. I was out of college. Yes, it was about the same time I went to AU that I met and married my wife. When she died we had been married about 70 years. But having a partner to share your life with, to share your ideas with, to learn from, to tell you when you're making a mistake, to praise you when you're on, on course. I think it's a secret of a good life, at least for me it was. And I like to remind people of how fortunate I was to have married Susan and to had, you know, 70 years with her.

Huh. Now that's a love story. And we should do that in a podcast or something. [laughs] Have it, maybe do it around Jan, you know.

[laughs] Well, I could talk about that all day. We had many great years together.

That's wonderful.

So thank you much for being interested in me and for capturing my story.

Thank you.

If you need, need another segment, give me a call and we'll try to work it out.

All right. Thank you. May take you up on that. Thank you so much, Dr. Gordon and thank you, Cassandra. [cross-talk ?] grandson.

Will do so. All right. Bye-bye.