Mister Rogers' Neighbor

When his grandfather went missing during a flood, never to return, Clemmons grieved and held onto the cane for comfort, until his family, concerned by the depth of sadness in such a young boy, took it away. “When they took the cane away from me, I burst into song. It was like a wound opened deep inside of me,” he says. This formative experience taught Clemmons “you do what you have to do to survive.” For him, that has been enduring struggles through spiritual song.

“I have a calling to sing these songs and to be involved in the arts,” Clemmons says. From singing in church choirs in Youngstown, to traveling to St. Petersburg, Russia, with the Oberlin College Choir, to traveling the world with the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, Clemmons has honored the tradition of Negro African Spirituals.

During graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, while singing in the Third Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Clemmons met Fred Rogers. Rogers was immediately impressed by Clemmons’ powerful voice and essentially recruited him for the role of Officer Clemmons on his show.

At first, Clemmons shied away from the opportunity. “I didn’t like those puppets, it seemed ridiculous to me, a grown man doing it,” he recalls. But he couldn’t pass up the chance to sing on one of America’s most beloved television programs and to be recognized worldwide for his voice. While at first the prospect of playing a cop went against his every intuition as a Black man in America, he felt proud that his role on the show communicated a “powerful anti-racist message” to viewers. And the friendship and mentorship between Clemmons and Rogers proved to be the great spiritual salvation of Clemmons’ life.

Clemmons describes Rogers as a surrogate father, the first man to care for him unconditionally. “When you’re loved, you become a person,” he says. “Fred Rogers told me he loved me, and it made all the difference. I stood up, I stopped bending over and hiding my face.”

When Martin Luther King was murdered and the streets of Pittsburgh erupted with despair, Clemmons was inconsolable. He remembers feeling “a deep sense of loss of something that could never be replaced.” Rogers and his wife took him in. “‘You’re going to come with us because we want you to be safe,’” Rogers told him.

“It was a moment of acknowledgement that I needed to be cared for, the first time I really felt that a man stood up on my behalf and said, ‘This is what you need.’”

In the end, the values of the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood mirrored Clemmons’ own, an approach to living he hopes readers will take away from the memoir. “I wanted to be successful, hardworking, ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’” he says. ”Wasn’t interested in anything that didn’t belong to me, not robbing anything, and still have a full wholesome life.”

And no matter what, always singing through it.