By STEVEN JUPITER
MIDDLEBURY—As soon as you walk into François Clemmons’ apartment at The Residences at Otter Creek in Middlebury, you know you’re dealing with someone who’s comfortable with himself. Now pushing 80, Dr. Clemmons still exudes an immediate, disarming warmth that puts you at ease because the man seems so at ease with himself.
He’s decked out in silver-and-turquoise jewelry, and his living space is full of souvenirs of his extraordinary career as a performer, teacher, and writer. The effect is maximalist, like his life. Though he’s spent the last 28 years in this quintessential New England town—he arrived in 1997 as the Alexander Twilight Artist-in-Residence at Middlebury College—he’s adopted none of the usual Yankee reserve. He’s still big and bold, with a story he insists on telling.
For those of us who were kids in the 60s and 70s, Dr. Clemmons may be more familiar as Officer Clemmons of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” one of the most beloved children’s shows of all time. It was a role that Clemmons played from 1968 to 1993. A black man playing a policeman was still a novelty on TV and in itself a step forward in racial tolerance at the time.
“Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968. I was almost 23,” Clemmons recalled. “I was so distraught. I was beside myself. There were riots in Pittsburgh, where I was in graduate school at Carnegie Mellon and where ‘Mister Rogers’ was filmed. I lived in the bourgeois black neighborhood, which was spared. The less affluent black neighborhoods burned. Fred Rogers came to my house to get me because he didn’t think it was safe. I stayed with him for a week. I had no family in Pennsylvania. He became a surrogate father to me.”
Clemmons had just begun his professional relationship with Rogers, a soft-spoken white man who hobnobbed with monied Pittsburgh families like the Heinzes and the Mellons. But the pain of the black community in the wake of King’s assassination got to him, too. He told Clemmons that he wanted to help bridge the racial divide in America, a divide that caused serious social tumult after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
“Fred read Dr. King’s speeches and felt my human pain as deeply as I did,” said Clemmons. “He wanted to find a way to help.”
Rogers ended up sending Clemmons a script featuring the two men soaking their bare feet side by side in a plastic wading pool, sharing a single towel to dry off.
“I wanted a protest,” he said. “And Fred wasn’t giving me that. I couldn’t even articulate how disappointed I was. All we were going to do was play in a kiddie pool?”
Clemmons may have gone to the studio disappointed, but the symbolism of what he and Rogers did that day dawned on him immediately.
“I began to wake up to the deep meaning of a black man putting his feet into the water with a white man,” he said. “I grew up in a society where black people were considered inferior and I didn’t think I was worthy to put my feet in the same water as this wealthy white man. I was skeptical of white people’s sincerity when they talked about tolerance. I’d been talking to Fred for two years at that point. I felt he’d finally really heard me that day. That’s how I found my worthiness.”
Though Rogers was ready to make a bold public statement about race relations, he wasn’t quite so ready to take on another of the era’s taboos: homosexuality. He cautioned Clemmons to remain discreet about his orientation. For years, Rogers watched Clemmons struggle to keep his true self hidden.
“Fred didn’t want me to come out openly,” he said. “He saw I was tormented. And he saw he was asking a lot of me. Finally he said, ‘Maybe you just have to be yourself. You’ll always be in my life.’ All was possible because Fred loved me.”
The professional relationship between Clemmons and Rogers lasted for decades. The pair even recreated their iconic scene for Clemmons’ last episode of the show in 1993. But by then Clemmons had begun a new venture, the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble. Clemmons was a trained opera singer with degrees from Oberlin College and Carnegie Mellon University, and years of opera performances under his belt, but traditional African-American spirituals lured him away from that world. He formed his own nonprofit company and sang with luminaries like Jessye Norman all over the world.
“When I was around 55, I began to detect my own spirituality,” he said. He had felt like a spiritual disciple to Fred Rogers but by his own middle age began to realize the strength of his own spiritual powers.
“There’s a clear linkage to my ancestors when I sing spirituals,” he said. “It’s a wonderful gift that God has given me.”
As if to prove the statement, Dr. Clemmons began to sing. Even at 80, his voice is supple and strong, swooping upwards and downwards with grace and ease. Without a microphone, the sound fills the room. The pleasure he takes from the release of his own voice is obvious, as is the pleasure he takes in the thrall of his audience. He’s not shy with his talents.
And he’s still performing. On March 27, he’ll be giving a master class in singing at the Champlain Valley Unitarian Universality Society in Middlebury. He’s also hoping to organize a St. Patrick’s Day program of Irish songs right at The Residences. There’s a piano in his apartment and it’s clear music is as essential to his well-being as food and water.
In 2020, Dr. Clemmons published “Officer Clemmons: a Memoir,” which recounts the story of his childhood, education, and relationship with Fred Rogers. He’s working on a second book, to be called “Why Do Black People Pray So Much?” This second book will be more of an “inner exploration of who we are” and will delve into the philosophy of “smileology” that he’s developed over the years.
That positivity has held him in good stead in Vermont over the years.
“I’m often the only one around who’s not white,” he laughed. “They can’t resist me. God wants us to be one. The divisions are not the Spirit.”
In this time of divisiveness, when our differences often seem to outweigh our similarities, the lesson of the kiddie pool seems especially important.
“I trusted Fred,” said Dr. Clemmons. “But I didn’t think that gesture would be loud enough. But it’s still ringing all these years later. By being gentle, it made a lot of noise.”
