We celebrate Vermont Artist Dr. François Scarborough Clemmons who’s devotion to love and equality spans his incredible career.
Clemmons is a Grammy Award-winning opera singer, founder of the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, actor, composer, arranger, playwright, author, and activist. Clemmons was awarded an honorary doctorate of arts degree by Middlebury College in 1996. A year later, he moved to Vermont to become the director of the Middlebury College Choir. For seventeen years, he enriched the college community and its understanding of music, particularly the American Negro Spiritual. Clemmons retired from Middlebury College in 2013, but continues to share his artistry in music and in words throughout Vermont and beyond.
Read more in the Vermont Arts Council article : “I am a Vermont Artist: Dr. François Scarborough Clemmons”
In 1968, amid the civil-rights movement, Clemmons became one of the first recurring Black characters on a children’s TV series when he was featured on the iconic show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Between 1968 and 1993, Clemmons was a guest in 98 episodes of the show. In 1969, Mr. Rogers famously asked François Clemmons to soak his feet in a foot bath with him on a hot day. At the time, recreational segregation was widely enforced. “It was an invitation for Clemmons—but also for all Americans to stand in solidarity with the Black community.” - Chris Azzopardi.
In 2020, François Clemmons released Officer Clemmons: A Memoir which details his incredible life story, beginning with his early years in Alabama and Ohio, marked by family trauma and loss, through his studies as a music major at Oberlin College, where Clemmons began to investigate and embrace his homosexuality, to a chance encounter with Fred Rogers that changed the whole course of both men’s lives, leading to a deep, spiritual friendship and mentorship spanning nearly forty years.
To hear more about François Clemmons, you can listen to an interview on NPR’s StoryCorps.
You can also watch an interview with François Clemmons and Paul Larson from Mountain Lake PBS.