BY HARRY COVERSTON, GUEST WRITER TO THE TIMES
ORLANDO – It is an incredible honor to be asked to contribute to The Orlando Times newspaper. In my first installment, I feel it is important to briefly introduce myself.
I am a sixth generation Floridian. Born in south Florida, I have lived in every section of Florida with the bulk of that time in Orlando. I was raised in Bushnell, Sumter County, the son of public servants, my father a teacher, my mother a USDA office manager. I grew up believing that public service was noble. I still do.
My great grandparents were named Reed and Wright. They were teachers. And I am the fourth generation of educators in my family. I have been a life-long learner with graduate degrees in law, theology and religious studies. I believe education is a right to which all are entitled, an essential aspect of a healthy democracy and a means to meeting the obligation all of us share to live into our highest capacities for ourselves and to contribute to our world.
But my teachers have not all been in classrooms. The Black woman who lived in our home during my childhood raised my brother and sister and I. She was one of my life’s greatest teachers. Henrietta had no diploma to show for her limited educational attainment, a reflection of the many dehumanizing restrictions placed on Black Floridians in the Jim Crow era. But what she lacked in formal learning she more than made up for in wisdom. I stood by her side at the stove as a child, listening to her stories, asking a million questions which she patiently answered as only she could. And it was her living example as the trustworthy human being we loved that exposed the lies that we were told about Black people during the turbulent period of desegregation of the public schools in 1967.
I also learned from my students, many of them in special education programs, from my public school teaching days in Inverness and in Gifford, a Black community on the edge of Vero Beach. When I left teaching for law school, I swore to do what I could to help kids like these who had run afoul of the law. As a public defender, my juvenile and Baker Act clients taught me much over the years and I continue tell their stories today through my writing and public speaking.
When I left the practice of law, I attended the Episcopal seminary in Berkeley, CA to become a priest. As a part of that process, I spent a good bit of time in Central America hearing stories from those enduring unbearable poverty, living in small towns ravaged by war. They, too, were my teachers.
Returning to Florida to get a doctorate in religion, law and society at FSU, I spent the last 19 years of my working life in college classrooms. Since my retirement from the UCF Philosophy Department, I have devoted my life energies to the Alliance for Truth and Justice, an affiliate of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery. Our work in the Orlando area has been to uncover the untold and buried stories of injustice to Black Floridians. I recently headed up a project commemorating the lynching of Arthur Henry in 1925. We dedicated an EJI marker last December in front of the Wells’Built Museum. Our research had located 43 members of the Henry family who were present, including the current mayor of Daytona Beach. Eight of them held doctoral degrees like my own.
I believe these stories are all of our stories. There is no Black history any more than there is White history. There is simply the story we all share. My goal is to insure that we know our story, all of it, the good, the bad and yes, the ugly as well. Without all of those pieces of the story, we simply don’t know who we are as a people. It is my hope that through my writing, you may come to know more of our story. And I look forward to the journey.
