There were thirteen of us from South Sumter High School who had
come to the funeral of L.C. Coney in Leesburg. He was our high school
band director in a time when everything seemed to be up in the air. He replaced
a long time beloved band director whose progressive difficulties from a stroke
had made it impossible for him to continue. And he came as one of the many
teachers from the local black high school which had just been closed and merged
into the white high school we attended in 1967.
There was nothing certain about the world we inhabited in
the time following desegregation. And that impacted everyone from administrative
staff to teachers to students. What was going to happen? That was the question
on everyone’s minds.
Then this man stepped into the lurch.
They Called Him a Legend
At the funeral, they called him a Legend. That was
probably an understatement. He could pick up any instrument in our band hall
and play it adeptly. His ability to bring forth the love of music in his
students was remarkable. But his role as a mentor, an exemplar of the fully
human being, is not captured by the references to his work as a music teacher.
What I remember about Mr. Coney was his ability to touch my
soul. Beginning with music. It helped that he had played my instrument, E flat
alto saxophone. He demanded that I learn to play the saxophone as best I could.
And I would play it six years in the band, in contests he insisted we attend,
and into community college where I played in the pep band at basketball games.
But musical education was just the tip of the iceberg when
it came to Mr. Coney. It was his ability to step into highly charged racial
dynamics and bring all of the parties to a place of seeing each other as human
that astonished me. “I stopped you from singing that song because they (our
black classmates) had a song they were ready to sing in response. Everyone
would have been at each other’s throats at that moment. So I stopped it.”
It was important to me to hear that our black classmates
were feeling walked over. That was not something I thought much about. Indeed,
we were trained not to think about that. But it was more important to
have a teacher say to me, “Look, your behaviors have impacts on others.”
It was important to me that a teacher recognized my value as a human being but
insisted that I extend the same to the black classmates and teachers who were
going to share our lives together.
In the end, I learned much more than music from this man.
Lessons in Courage and Tenacity
I often say that Mr. Coney held our school together in
those tense times of desegregation, when our school mascot was the Rebels and
our school song was Dixie. In retrospect, I can only imagine how hard that was
for him and for all our black teachers and classmates who had just lost their
own beloved school and now were forced to attend the one that I had always
taken for granted. In time, we would change the school mascot to the Raiders
and Dixie was never played again. As much as I resisted that at the time, I
recognized in retrospect that I was wrong, it was absolutely the only path
forward.
Over the years, I came to trust Mr. Coney. That was saying
a lot. I did not trust the white men who were coaches and former coaches turned
administrators who ran our school and whose world I would never share. But, Mr. Coney was real,
candid, honest. He spoke to me as a human being, one on one. And I learned very
quickly that when he said something, I needed to take it seriously.
What was most important was the human being he presented to
us. I say us. I mean white people. We had been taught to see black people as
less than human. That included the teachers who came from the black school.
Surely they were less than proficient teachers. The federal government may have
required us to deal with them but we all knew they weren’t real teachers.
But they were. I think back about all the teachers who came
from Mills High School in Webster, the former black school, to their newly
integrated and instantly overcrowded high school at South Sumter. Each one taught me something of value. And
that was often in the face of enormous pressures from white kids and their
parents who presumed Black teachers had nothing to offer their children. But
they did, in spite of that enormous pressure. To this day, I honor their
courage and their tenacity.
What It Means to Be Human
Mr. Coney, however, was in a class unto himself. The many speakers at his funeral from fellow FAMU alumni to the Florida Bandmasters Association who read resolutions and acknowledgements honoring him evidenced that. The many people who came to bid him farewell evidenced that. The eleven of us students from South Sumter – the handful of white attendees in a sea of black mourners - were there to testify to the incredible gift we had received from this teacher.
What Mr. Coney had exemplified was the humanity of a black
man who appeared to us in the form of an incredible teacher. We saw in him the
fullness of what it means to be human, a man with incredible talents, a man
intent on sharing those with the world, a man who insisted his students become
all they could be, a man who cared deeply about all his students as persons and
would settle for nothing less than them learning to engage each other in their
full humanity.
Bear in mind, our admiration of Mr. Coney was a stark refutation
of the racist constructs with which so many of us had been raised. The idea
that a black man was fully human was anathema to the cultural understandings in
which we had been steeped both consciously and unconsciously from the beginning
of our lives in a deeply racist culture.
But this man broke apart all those stereotypes. We came to
trust him. More importantly, we came to love him. And, before it was over, we
came to revere him. As a result, we began the long, painful process of dealing
with the cognitive dissonance that told us that what we had been raised to
believe was wrong. And incredibly destructive.
We all had a lot to unlearn back then. And we are still
unlearning it today. But thanks to our beloved teacher, we got a head start.
Our hearts ached as we said goodbye to him. But our spirits
soared as we realized how fortunate we had been to know him, giving thanks to a
generous Creator who allowed us to experience a Legend if only for a short
while.
G-dspeed, Mr. Coney. May your Legend live on in us.
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
If the unexamined life
is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or
political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in
sound bites.
Those who believe
religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi
For what does G-d
require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with
your G-d? - Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures
Do not be daunted by the
enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly
now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to
abandon it. - Rabbi
Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry
Coverston, 2022
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