JW: Well, as you know I've been out of graduate school almost 46 years now, so I'm the oldest one around. And I think there were three things that would define these 46 years. One was commitment to be a voice for social change both within the profession and within the society, so that I tried to open up wider opportunities for ethnic folks, especially young folks in American society, civil rights, that whole nine yards. Second, I guess as I look back now, I tried to make the profession of psychology more inclusive-not only in terms of bringing more young Ph.D.s in, but in the literature, the editors, the staff at APA, and professors in universities, so I tried to make psychology at all levels look like America. And, the third thing was to articulate a vision first of a Black psychology-that's where I started back in the late 60s-and then, I evolved toward a multiethnic psychology model but first I wanted to articulate a vision of Black psychology. Those were the three things that I think would define me as a person and as a professional. During the interview we'll probably add one more, and that is I've spent a lot of time mentoring the next two generations.

JW: I think the most distinctive thing about the contribution was I tried to go beyond where most society was and where psychology was back in the 60s. So psychology starts in America from 1892 up to say the mid 60s. What happened is I looked over psychology in the mid 60s-Black folks were invisible. We were invisible in the theories, we were invisible as professors, as graduate students, invisible within APA, and my job was to make us visible. That was the first thing I wanted to do was to say that we did exist both in the profession and in society.

The second thing was that in both the profession and the society, when we did appear on the screen, we appeared from a deficit-deficiency model. There was something wrong with us. We were inferior, couldn't do a complex cast, couldn't delay gratification, were impulsive, and oversexed. So, there was the negative imagery within the society and within the profession, and I challenged that because for example, I was raised in a one-parent home, with a mom with two other siblings. We had a high school education, and I watched her do complex path, raising us, keeping us clothed and fed, and so I didn't buy that at all.

I further did research and found that some of the giants of psychology had actually testified before the Armed Services Committee in both World War I and World War II, saying that Black young people shouldn't be flying airplanes, operating complex machineries like radar and so forth. So this thing was pervasive, and I felt that I wanted to challenge that.

JW: The invisibility was.. well, if you go back from 1892 to roughly early 1970s, you can pick up any textbook in psychology and look up the word African American, colored, Negro, whatever, Black, and generally you'll come out with a big zero. They write the whole textbook on motivation, physiology, cognition, and so forth, and Black folks aren't present in that textbook. You walk through the old building of APA and you look up and down the hall and you see no Black folks. I went to my first APA convention, I think in Kentucky, not Kentucky, Cincinnati in 1960-somewhere up in there-and there was only one other Black person there, and that was the late Charles Thomas. I think Kenneth Clark was around there somewhere but I didn't see him, okay. So it was just a sea of whiteness. And, by the 1960s over half of the graduate schools in America had never had a Black graduate student, and none of them had any Black professors. So for me as a child growing up in America, the first Black psychologist I ever saw was when I looked in the mirror the morning after my Ph.D. orals, my dissertation orals, and I saw myself; that was the first Black psychologist I ever saw.

Blacks were not in California-none in the biggest educational system in the country, which was in California. I never had a Black teacher, so we were just invisible. You say psychology and there's zero Blacks. So now, having grown up in a Black neighborhood, I knew that Black people existed. So they weren't invisible to me 'cause I had been around them growing up.

So I wanted to establish that they number one, did exist, and I wanted to talk something about their psychological functioning in a positive, constructive way. That was long before positive psychology. See back then not only was psychology pathology for Black folks, that was the deficiency, but they had that pathology model trailing it for just about everybody in a way, coming from the old Freudian psychology and abnormal psych, so I wasn't going to build a negative psychology of Black folks. I was not going to define myself and my momma in a negative way.

JW: So I then, since there were no textbooks, or anything else to read about Black folks, I followed Freud's trail. When he started, since there were no textbooks, he went to the literature and he read Gibson and all those other dudes and so forth. So I figured I'd go find some Black literature like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, a drama play likes Raisin in the Sun, and I would kind of check out themes and the literature and then I would do some anthropology 101 and Ethnography—I didn't even know what that was—and go around the community and just sit in churches, parties, funerals, card parties, whatever, and keep asking myself what were the reoccurring psychological themes that I think I experienced as I interacted with the people, and then I wrote it down.

JW: Right, and well it was mostly Black, but it was a mixed race, let's say Black and some poor Indians, and Chicanos.

JW: Well two things, luck and chance was one, and, then, an extremely strong maternal figure. See, I was raised in a single-parent home, with a Mom who continued to tell me that I could make something from nothing. I mean that was her mantra. I never could understand it because to me, zero plus zero equals zero. But she kept saying you can make something from nothing. So with her urging and, then, by happenstance chance, you know there's a psychologist over there at Stanford, John Crumbholz who talks about a lot of vocational and professional involvement doesn't occur in a linear direction, sometimes your position and certain things happen. So she positioned me by, number one, not sending me to the public high school in the neighborhood; she sent me to a Catholic high school, where there were only two Black students. I rebelled, but she held her ground and, unbeknownst to me, the high school was all college prep.

JW: So I left high school with a college prep education. Not intending on going to college, because I wanted to be a waiter on the train. That's what I liked, waiting tables and serving out food. So I had worked on the trains in the summer, and I was a waiter in a big old hotel in Minneapolis, and that's what Black people did, so that's what I intended to do. But my mother intervened and shipped me from Minneapolis to California. This is a long story but when I got to California, the Korean War started; right after I graduated from high school, two weeks later... So even a homeboy like me could figure out where I was going if I was staying out on the street and not in college. That was not rocket science. So fortunately for me I was in another Black neighborhood, called Filmore, in San Francisco, because of restricted housing codes and everything. You couldn't buy a house outside of there. And the first kids I met were going to San Francisco State, which was only ten blocks away. So they told me that to delay going in the military for four years, I'd have to go anyway but to delay it, and maybe the Korean War would be over, I would be going to college. So they took me up to San Francisco State and I was a week late, but some old White lady looked out after me and called my high school principal and got my grades, and that was the first time I knew I was in a college prep thing, because I saw her writing on a sheet that I had everything, the languages, the science, the math, and so forth. And I'd already taken the SAT or the ACT in high school, so they had my scores. So the lady admitted me, got me a job in the recreation department, cause I had been an athlete in high school, and so I was going to college.

JW: Right! So I began to see that there are talented kids out there, I mean I saw it in myself, and if the door is open, so then later I would try to open up the doors for other people. But there's one more piece in here and that was I was always a C+, B-, kind of middle of the road student; and I repeated that my first year in college, but somewhere I think it was in the beginning of the sophomore year, I took my first psychology class. That was it. That whole thing fascinated me. That conditioning of dog business, of social conditioning, you know where you're ringing the bell and the dog starts to salivate; I said well that's the way they treat Black people. They say you're bad, terrible, you know you're dirty and you're ugly and then a White lady sees you on an elevator and gets scared as hell, but she's been socially conditioned. And then read the theories of Freud and the professor talked about the defense mechanisms that you can be looking dead at something and can't see it. So I said no wonder we're invisible in America, the man's got defensive mechanisms to prevent him from seeing how bad he's been treating us. No wonder we're invisible and so forth. So that just fascinated me; and once a student becomes fascinated, then the internal motivation begins to crank up. So that's another thing I've tried to do as a mentor, is to try to tap into the student's internal motivation. I mean, I got turned on and from then on nobody had to tell me to go to class, take notes, hang with the A students, read everything two or three times, read extra readings, because I was fascinated with this whole thing.

JW: So I went from a C+ student to an A student, because my advisor looked at my grades and said, son if you want to go to graduate school you're going to have to come up with more than these little old C-, or, C+, or whatever; you're going to have to make almost straight A's to graduate with honors. So I told him okay if that's what it is, and then he said, furthermore there's no Black people in psychology, or colored, or whatever, so we can't guarantee that you're going to get in, so you'd better have some kind of backup plan of whatever, you know, to go to med school or to law school, in case you don't get in. So I followed that advise and I finished that four years; and, then I got another break, the war was over, so I didn't have to go get shot at, but the GI bill was still in effect. So when I came out of the Army at 23, I had four more years of education, government sponsored, and I had a BA degree.

JW: So that helped. I had the BA and I had four years of education. Now, I didn't get in a Ph.D. program the first time around because I didn't have any kind of mentoring. I only applied to one school, and that was Cal- Berkeley, 'cause I lived in the Bay area. And they had 400 applicants for 5 clinical slots. So I didn't realize, you know, all of what goes into a graduate school application. So I was going to walk away and go to law school, but my mother intervened again and told me not to give up my dream, and to try again. So they brought me back to San Francisco State; they'd just started a masters program and they knew me. So they said, "Well come on back here, and stay for two years and try again." So that's what I did. I tried again and the second time, bingo, I got in four of the five schools I applied to.

JW: The most salient one in my own mind was when I found something that fascinated me, and psychology fascinated me, so that took me to the next level.

JW: And, at that next level, since it fascinated me, and I wanted to be a professor and a whatever, you know, then I made a pledge to myself that nobody was going to outwork me.

JW: So if I was driving past the psychology building at Michigan State and I saw the light on in the graduate library at 10:00 at night, I would turn around and go in that library, and study until that student left, 'cause nobody was going to outwork me. And somebody may have been more brilliant than me, but they were not going to outwork me.

JW: Well to start with-and this is a two-parts-I got out of graduate school in 1961 and the civil rights movement was cranked up big time. I mean people were out there marching and demonstrating and picketing and I was trying to follow in the footsteps of Piaget and Carl Rogers. I was at stage one of identity development; I was in the pre-encounter state. And I was the first Black psychologist in Lawman State, and I was the second Black professor appointed on the faculty. So anyway, I had trouble renting a house, or buying a house and getting an office, and I had to file a bunch of law suits and so forth. Pretty soon, an awareness began to come over me that something is very wrong in America, much deeper than I had imagined. And then after I had been out of graduate school four years, I was living in Long Beach, working at Lawman State. Then they had that first big old Watts riot, where the people burned up the community for four and a half days and that really got to my awareness. Then, they came and interviewed me that fourth day, because they interviewed the White social scientists first and then it dawned on them that they should find a Black social scientist. So they looked all over and found me and asked me why were the people burning up the community? And it just started flowing out of me at how angry the people were and how angry I was.

And then I decided I was down with the brothers; I'm committed now, never mind Piaget and Carl Rogers, that was all great, but there's something else that I have to do in this world. And people had started calling me before that, you know every time something like Upward Bound, Head Start, or anything else happened to do with Blacks, Chicanos, or whatever, people would get to call me. So they were already beginning to pull me into a perception that I was an expert on minority folks. And I had kind of resisted it, but after that, that resistance just melted away and I figured, you know, that there was another job for me to do in this world and there was no point in resisting it any longer. So I jumped into the immersion stage of identity development and then just stayed with it.

JW: Well, I think that right now, in terms of multicultural, multiethnic, social justice aspects in the profession, we are still on the periphery and on the margins. We're still struggling with how to move from a traditional model in psychology, Euro-American model, to a more inclusive model that brings in the ethnic psychologist or what some people call the multicultural movement. And the traditional people hold the power. And the newcomers are wanting to move in to become full-fledged members of the family. There are some of us who are trying to make it a central part of the professions identity, especially the new young people coming into the field, but the people who are already in the field, they were trained in the 20th century and some of them didn't get any of this in their training. I'm talking about people that are now the full professors, 50, 55, 60, they didn't get any of this. So here we come now, after their identity is already formed ,and we're trying to shift the ground in the profession to make it a more inclusive kind of profession and so, sometimes, they think what we're talking about is not the real psychology; or what I'm talking about it's not the real psychology, so not only is it an ethnic battle, but it's also a generational battle. In addition, we're talking sometimes a foreign language; we're saying, look here, all those A+'s you got and all those publications you got, you full professor, now we want you to change; and they didn't get to where they are by thinking the way I think. So now I'm telling, now I want you to think differently. And so, you got conflict.

In this conflict what we haven't yet been able to do is find common ground. So that's where we are today. We're trying to shift the identity of psychology and the traditional psychologists are trying to hold on to an identity that they were taught and internalized in their 20s and 30s.

JW: Well, I think in the future two things need to happen. One is we need to kind of sometimes decrease the intensity and help people find common ground. I think that there is a common ground between the ethnic psychologist and the non-ethnic psychologist, or the multiculturals and the traditionals, but it's going to take a while for the intensity to wear down so we can find common ground.

JW: Yeah, part of the conflict resolution will occur as we seek the common ground rather than argue about the dichotomies of who is right and who is wrong and who is going to retain power and who is not going to have power. And I think that we're not yet there for the reconciliation, we may be trying to get there, but we're not there yet.

JW: I mean that, for example, in the past 20 years concepts from ethnic psychology have filtered into traditional psychology. We've got what, spirituality is coming back around, resilience is coming back around; these all started with ethnic psychology. Connectedness to others rather than individuality is coming back around. Humor is coming back around. So there are a number of concepts that started with ethnic psychology that are filtering back. Also, there's a paradigm shift in the core models, because you had in the traditional models, you had the linear models of Freud and Erikson's, you know, this is stage one, stage two, stage three through the lifetime. Whereas we're saying no, no, no, the stages are circular, that trust and mistrust occurs throughout the lifespan. That initiative and guilt occurs throughout the lifespan, and on and on. And that you come to a deeper and deeper awareness of the same thing as you move through the lifespan, rather than this stops at 6 years old and this stops at 12. And also we've brought the positive model into psychology because the ethnic psychologists said they weren't going to build a negative model of themselves. When they said that, they won every one of them, Asian American, Chinese, African American, Latinos; and brothers like me I said that flat out. So now they're saying that positive psychology is coming back. The thing is that these psychologists now with these newer concepts don't recognize that they came through us. And that's going to take them a little while just to figure that out. But they think they invented it themselves. And then the narrative method of qualitative or whatever, you know, that we were all taught the empirical statistical methods, then when we said no, no, no, that epistemology and truth can come from narratives and stories, and so forth, they said no, no, that's non-scientific, now they done brought it back around.

JW: That's right, and then when I said way back in the day that we wanted to write the psychology so that it could be understood by the people, you know, so now they're running around talking about how they want to give psychology back to the people, and we said that from day one. We wanted to write the psychology so it could be understood with people that had 10, 11 grade education. And that's why I put that first article in Ebony Magazine. And, then I got criticized for that at the university because they said, well is this a referee journal and then we got in a big old argument because I said, you know God damn well Ebony is not a referee journal. Why would you ask me something like that? But fortunately I was already a full professor, so I didn't have to go through that, cause I was never rebuked at any level. And that was another lucky thing, I never would have got away with stuff I've done if I hadn't been a full professor.

JW: I have three pieces of advice. One is they have to make an internal commitment that they want to do this. We can exhort them and write articles and the American Psychologist and have APA do this and that, but the professional himself or herself has to make a commitment that this is something important for their professional identity in the 21st century. The second thing, they have to understand is that the learning is not linear; we cannot give them a book and say this is the ABCDEFG of how to treat a 22 year-old Black male who comes in depressed. Learning is cyclical. You will go through periods where you still might be moving forward, other times where you feel stuck and so on. So that it's a cyclical learning process and then they have to move to number three. Move out of the comfort zone and get out into the behavioral environment where these ethnically different people live and begin to experience their lived experience, because how can you have empathy for somebody if you haven't experienced some of what they've experienced.

JW: Yes, sometimes they want us to hand them a clear how-to-do book, a handbook, this is the ABC; and you say, no, no, no this is not the way you learn. And then they need to experience, you know, read some novels, go to plays, you know, then go to churches, get the feel of the vibe.

JW: Oh yeah, I'm still passionate.

JW: Well, I think the process that pushed me really over the hump was when I got out of graduate school and the civil rights movement was going on. And when I got out of graduate school, I somehow in my first 28 years had deceived myself subconsciously to the belief that if I got a super education, got all my tickets punched, that America would let me be and I could go live my life. So I devoted the first 28 years to happenstance or whatever, to doing everything I thought was the right thing. I got a Ph.D., I got married, I did two years of military service with an honorable discharge, I had three pre-school children, and I had a great education. And I thought I was ready for the American dream. And then personally when I couldn't find a house and I couldn't rent an office, and then the civil rights movement was going on all around me, I had to reassess my belief system. And then I started both looking backward and forward. I looked at how society had treated my mom and my dad, and my grandparents and the people in the neighborhood I grew up in, and so forth, and I just got real angry about the whole thing.

And then I watched Martin Luther King and they pay much more dues than I did, I only went to jail once, or twice, but they went to jail all the time, and he ended up getting assassinated and so forth, and then I remembered what Malcolm X used to tell me when I was in graduate school, 'cause I knew his brother and Malcolm used to come and talk to us, and I just went through a whole big awareness, and I guess I still have it. But I think the first 28 years of my life I subconsciously believed that if I had the right stuff and worked hard, that America would let me be. And I found out that wasn't true. And people tried to tell me that wasn't true, but I wouldn't listen to them.

JW: Well, as you know or as I'm saying right now, I was the only Ph.D. licensed psychologist in California, the biggest state in the Union. So when I began to go through this metamorphosis I ended up alone. And I was very lonely in the sense that I didn't have any peers, and I went through a divorce, that got worse, and this and that, and so without really thinking it through, begin to reach outside of psychology for my first support system. And so I had gone to college with a bunch of pretty dynamite dudes, who became lawyers, doctors, that kind of thing, Willie Brown became a politician, so I found a brotherhood outside of the profession, but that was ethnically connected to me. And they encouraged me. They didn't know psychology, but they knew that something needed to be rearranged, you know, in education, psychology and social services, so they gave me a lot of support.

Then, at Michigan State I brought two people there with me, actually three, and they had gotten out of graduate school a few years after me, so they were beginning to come around just like I did, even though they didn't live in California, and one of them was in Martin Luther King's inner circle, Robert Green. So I can always get a message to Martin Luther King through Robert Green. Then I got involved in politics and slowly a few more Black psychologists began to surface so by the time we got to San Francisco in 1968 and had that big old confrontation with APA, there were about 13 of us, Ph.D.s and people who were in counseling. So even though they didn't live in California, I did have a certain connectedness to some others that I would call up on the phone, or see when we went out speaking, or this and that.

JW: Well, I felt that I didn't want anybody to have to go through some of the lonely passages and blind alleys that I went through. And so one of my goals then was to (I didn't know the word mentoring) facilitate the development of other young people so that they could skip some of the steps and not have to step in all the blind alleys. All young people got to step in a few blind alleys, but I figured if I could help them develop their foundation then they wouldn't have to go through, you know, all the dark passages that I went through. Now also I felt that these kids were talented so they could help us build this ethnic psychology, since I couldn't find many peers, I figured I'd just created them in the next generation. Which has happened, right?

JW: Yeah, and these kids can do a lot. You see them, they write articles and papers, and so forth. They are expanding; so since there was nothing there, I figured these young people had talent so they could help me build it. And they wanted to do it.

JW: Yes, and because of what was happening in California, I had the opportunity to create college admissions programs. So we created the educational opportunity program in the Cal State system and we've admitted over 300,000 youngsters in the last 40 years, since 1965. And some of those kids have gone off and become legislators, and this and that. And then that's helped me too because then I've got backup.

JW: I think that the next generation of psychologists who are out there doing their teaching and preparing the graduate students, and so forth, they're going to have to be very innovative; and, what's that word I use, improvisation, since the whole theoretical models and the skill development models aren't built out there, they're going to have to piece together, a little bit here and a little bit there, you know go to the conferences, go to the workshops, talk to people like you, Tom Parham, and draw on the creativity of their students. But there are bits and pieces out there, I mean several of us have produced some, people writing the textbooks are producing some, so there are bits and pieces of training models out there. But a professor would now have to pull all that together, he or she and their graduate students, and then try to make sense of it.

JW: Of course; now I'm a nickel and dime all purpose minority speaker and consultant. I retired 13 years ago, but I was sweet talked into writing a book on Black males. They sent me out on tour, people saw that I wasn't dead, and I could walk... so then they started calling me up on the phone. Since I'm the oldest one out there they figure I know everything about ethnic folks, right. So now I work as a consultant, and ironically this is something... the African proverb say that life moves in a circle. So ironically now 57 years after I graduated from high school in Minneapolis, and left Minneapolis, I'm back there every 6 to 8 weeks working in a comprehensive health care delivery system, located in a blue collar ethnic neighborhood. So now I've come complete circle. Came back from whence I came. So I work out there, that's my primary job, but I'm back where I grew up, and the girls I went to pre-school with are now great-grandmothers. Can you believe that?

I retired 13 years ago and thought I will go home, set out a yard, and wait to die, but about 6 years I came back in the game, so I'm back, working again!

JW: Yes, two out of my three children follow me into higher education. One is a professor of geology and an associate dean, and the other is an associate VP of students affairs.

Also, I grew up right across the river from the University of Minnesota; it was four blocks away, just walk across the bridge. There it was, this big university setting in my backyard and I never attended one day, and they have a junior college build within it, called the General College, but nobody ever told me about, so nobody told me about going to college. Now, here we are, 57 years after I graduated from high school, and the Regents have giving me an honorary doctorate!

JW: Keep the faith.