Gwendolyn Puryear Keita and Tressie Muldrow
A black woman born and reared during an era of racism and sexism, Carolyn Robertson Payton became a leader in cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology and an early pioneer in the push for special training in psychotherapy with ethnic minority clients. She has been instrumental in training hundreds of clinicians. The first psychologist to become director of the U.S. Peace Corps, she was also the first woman and the first black to hold that presidential appointment. As a mentor and advocate of social justice, she influenced the lives of numerous individuals, especially ethnic minorities, women, and the disadvantaged.
Carolyn Robertson was born on May 13, 1925, in Norfolk, Virginia. Her parents were Leroy Solomon Robertson, a chef and restaurateur, and Bertha Flanagan Robertson, a seamstress and homemaker. There was one other child in the family, her older sister, Jean Robertson Scott, who became an elementary school supervisor. Robertson's early years were spent during the Depression. However, the nature of her parents' employment (cook and seamstress) meant that she did not experience the deprivation of food and clothing common during that period.
Though Carolyn Robertson was spared the obvious consequences of poverty in her childhood, she experienced the full effects of racism. In her later years she did not forget the unpaved streets and sidewalks in her segregated neighborhood. She also did not forget that her elementary school--a school that had been condemned for whites many years prior to her attendance there--was equipped with outdoor toilets. Nor did she forget that she was able to see the animals in the city zoo only in passing, for admission was off-limits to blacks. Chief among her early influences was the continued reinforcement of her status as a black person, with all of the slights and subtle putdowns as well as the blatant hostilities, including the "for whites only" signs that she regularly en-
-266-
