According to Salahuddin, as an African-American child the "most damage done" to him was the feeling he had that it was "an indecency, an insufficiency, certainly a shame not to be white". In 1963 he describes himself as having become politicized while watching news footage from Birmingham, Alabama, showing commissioner of public safety Bull Connor turn back civil-rights marchers with fire hoses and dogs, which caused him to develop "an implacable hatred toward all symbols of American authority". After graduating from high school, he attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., for one semester.