Reaction to my father’s death reflects the role community mentors can play

Last week I went home to bury my father, William J. Weathersbee.

But what I saw through my tears, in the condolences on Facebook and in the stream of visitors to our Jacksonville, Florida, home, was how he wasn’t just a father to me and my sister, but a father to generations of African-American youths who benefited from his belief in them.

And my father, who spent most of his 31-year career as a coach and dean of boys at William M. Raines High School, showed this faith in black youths during a time when others wanted to see them as incorrigible or inconsequential.

My father, who died at age 88, was one of the reasons, that for many of the youths he worked with, that didn’t happen.

When Raines was built in 1965, it was during a time when Jacksonville’s school system was still defying desegregation orders. So while it was built to be the black model high school, grooming exceptional African-American students was a secondary purpose. The primary purpose was to keep black students from integrating nearby all-white Ribault High School.

My father, however, took that charge seriously. He saw the black students he advised and tough-loved (two swats or three days’ suspension) as diamonds in the rough, not stones in the streets.

When he died, the students who shined because of him showed up.

One of my former classmates, a star basketball player in high school who is now a successful businessman, told me about how he got into some trouble with the law while a teenager, and that he would have been locked up if my father had not intervened on his behalf.

Another classmate, a college mathematics instructor, recalled how my father often steered wayward boys into playing football or participating in a sport so that they could set goals and learn some measure of self-discipline, while another, who owns a maintenance and ventilation shop, thanked my father for his tough love, saying that “…it made me the man I am today.”

“Your father changed the direction of so many,” one former student wrote on Facebook, “and his legacy will live on forever.”

gathered at the rally.

“I don’t like going into the women’s bathroom because I don’t feel like I belong there,” the Central High junior said, “and I don’t want to go to the men’s bathroom because I don’t want to get beat up.”

Instead, she said, she’s devised a system to get around the lack of unisex toilets for students.

“Oh, I don’t use the bathroom at school, ever,” she said. “I pee right before I go to school, and I pee when I get home.”