When the turbulent 1960’s hit, the country could no longer ignore that race was a problem to be solved. Coach Walters was 30, a teacher, a dad and Black. He knew what White people needed to learn and he was ready to tell them. He declared the truth about racism to all comers, like it or not.
Coach thrived as PE teacher in a heavily Black workplace was. At Illinois Youth Center he was praised for infusing respect and hope into the turbulent minds of angry incarcerated youth. His tool was sports.
When a local high school set out to integrate its faculty, Coach was ready to move on. He applied for the position. He was not only a skilled teacher, he had become known in the Black world for his winning Track and Field club, the Sundowners. It was a shoe-in resume, or so he thought. The job went instead to a young green Black educator, someone who “had not seen the world,” as Coach puts it.
For years that memory pressed a nerve like a pebble in a shoe. Then in his seventies Coach was looking through a new lens. He had not changed the world in the way his youthful self had planned, but the world was gradually making accomodations to race. “I was moving too fast,” he says now.
Coach is 96 when he tells me this story. Through a wry smile he says the high school back then made the right decision. They picked a young man who was ready to work with the world on its own terms. Of himself he says, “I was full of piss and vinegar.” Had they hired him, he would have pushed his truth too hard in a school full of kids from White families. May I live long enough to know myself the way Coach knows Coach.
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