Tag: Whitehaven High School

Categories
News News Blog News Feature

George Floyd Book Event at Whitehaven High Squeezed By Tennessee Law

Students at Whitehaven High School in Memphis attended an assembly with the authors of “His Name Is George Floyd,” but restrictions associated with Tennessee law prevented them from hearing excerpts of the book. (Courtesy of Memphis Shelby County Schools)

Students at Memphis’ Whitehaven High School got a chance last month to hear from journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, authors of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on George Floyd — his life, his brutal killing by police in 2020, and its aftermath. 

But the students didn’t get to hear any excerpts from His Name Is George Floyd, and they weren’t allowed to take home copies of the book from school. The authors had to give their presentation without going too deep into the book’s main theme of systemic racism. 

Who determined the restrictions and why is unclear. The organizers of the event, a local partnership called Memphis Reads, said their instructions to the authors were based on guidance from the school district on complying with Tennessee law that requires that books used in school be “age appropriate.”

Memphis-Shelby County Schools officials disputed their account, but repeatedly declined to answer questions about what they told the organizers or how they interpreted the law. In an email to the authors after the event, district communications chief Cathryn Stout said MSCS did not run the book through its review process before the visit. 

In the end, the authors told Chalkbeat, the students who gathered at Whitehaven that day were shortchanged by restricted access to the book and a censored experience. 

“Neither Tolu nor I know who to cast blame on,” Samuels said. “I’m not sure we could, or we should.”

But the ambiguous restrictions in this and other Tennessee laws have caused concern at the local level about compliance, Samuels said, resulting in “messy, potentially explosive debates between entities that usually get along.”

Floyd was killed during an arrest in May 2020, when a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee onto Floyd’s neck for several minutes. An onlooker’s video recording of the event went public, triggering a huge outcry and calls for and policing reform. The officer was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder.

Samuels and Olonnuripa’s book, written while both were reporters at the Washington Post, looks not just at the incident but also at how pervasive racism in education, criminal justice, housing, and health care systems shaped Floyd’s life. “We learned about the man himself … and much more than how he died,” Samuels said during a forum at Rhodes College.

They also wrote about what happened afterward: a season of demonstrations, dialogue, and unrest during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by what they call a “burgeoning backlash” to the racial justice movement, resulting in state laws across the country that stifled classroom discussions on race.

Tennessee was among the first states to legislate what public school students can — and cannot — be taught about race, gender, and bias. And the penalties are steep. Educators who violate the law may have their teaching licenses suspended or revoked. Districts can be fined for repeat offenses.

MSCS officials and the Memphis Reads organizers did not specifically cite this law as a factor in what ultimately happened at Whitehaven, but the law nonetheless hangs over educators’ decisions about what topics are appropriate for classroom discussion. Two Memphis teachers are among five in Tennessee challenging the law in federal court.

Tennessee’s Age Appropriate Materials Act, meanwhile, requires schools to publish a list of what’s in their library collections online and develop policies to review and remove books that aren’t appropriate — a term that the law leaves undefined. 

MSCS has leeway to interpret this law, but longstanding tensions between the majority-Black, Democratic-led city and the mostly white, GOP-dominated state government mean the district can ill afford to risk a fight with the state over the nuances of race and books.

Christian Brothers University runs the Memphis Reads program in partnership with other community groups. In communication with Chalkbeat, CBU cited the Age Appropriate Materials law as the reason it understood that books and materials couldn’t be distributed at the Whitehaven event and said that the guidance came from the Memphis school district.

CBU and other Memphis Reads partners “were under the instruction of MSCS leadership when completing the formatting and regulations concerning the Age-Appropriate Materials Act,” Justin Brooks, the CBU community engagement director who heads Memphis Reads, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat. 

MSCS officials wouldn’t confirm that to Chalkbeat, or explain whether Tennessee’s law regulating classroom conversations about race influenced any restrictions.  

In the email to the authors after the event, shared later with Chalkbeat, Stout wrote that time constraints prevented the district from going through its own process to approve the book. Stout wrote that the district regretted that their “experience was anything less than welcoming.”

“Given the new, more detailed process, it will take some time to coordinate, but please know that ‘His Name Is George Floyd’ is now under consideration to be added to the Whitehaven High School library collection,” Stout wrote to the authors, “and we look forward to having conversations with other school communities as requests arise.”

Separately, Stout shared with Chalkbeat a copy of a description from library book distributor Baker & Taylor that categorizes the book as “adult” and among the American Library Association’s “Notable Books for Adults.”

Stout also wrote in a public social media comment explaining the district’s position that the American Library Association labeled His Name is George Floyd as “adult literature (18 and older).”

ALA spokesperson Raymond Garcia told Chalkbeat that the group “does not rate books” for age appropriateness. 

Booklist, a book review magazine published by the ALA — and listed among resources for librarians in an MSCS manual — uses its “adult” label not to be restrictive but to signal that a book would be of interest primarily to adults, Garcia said. 

His Name is George Floyd is also categorized as “nonfiction” and “social sciences.” 

If the label was a factor in the decision not to allow Memphis Reads to distribute the books at Whitehaven, then that’s an “inaccurate understanding” of the purpose of such book labels, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association.  

“We can think of any kinds of works of literature that would have been originally rated as of interest to an adult reader that are absolutely fine for young people to read, and it’s not too controversial,” Caldwell-Stone told Chalkbeat, citing “To Kill a Mockingbird” as an example.

Nonetheless, the ambiguity in Tennessee’s standard of “appropriateness” creates gray areas and heightens the stakes for local districts concerned about avoiding a violation, Caldwell-Stone said. 

If a person or district cannot risk breaking the law, “then you’re going to be very thoughtful about what books you offer,” she said, “and thereby limit the opportunities to learn and engage with all kinds of ideas, even controversial or difficult ideas.”

A spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Education says MSCS did not reach out to the state for guidance, and MSCS didn’t respond to a question from Chalkbeat about that issue.

Thanks to a donation from the publisher, Viking Books, students who want a free copy of the book will be able to get one from Respect the Haven, a community development group in Whitehaven that’s part of Memphis Reads.

Whitehaven High School serves some 1,500 students and is known among Memphis for its school pride and focus on students’ post-secondary scholarship achievements. Almost all of its students are Black, and about half of them are from low-income families.

“This event basically got censored out of fear of violating some law,” said Jason Sharif, head of Respect the Haven. “With us being a predominantly Black city, a predominantly Black school district, you cannot keep books like this or stories like this from being told to Black students.”

By the time Samuels and Olorunnipa arrived at Whitehaven High School for the event on Oct. 26, they knew some of the restrictions they would have to operate under. The two reporters were prepared to tell students about the journalistic work that went into writing the book, but to avoid going into depth about many of the issues it raised.

Brooks, from Memphis Reads, had told them they wouldn’t be able to read directly from the book, or talk about the book’s discussion of how systemic racism created many barriers for Floyd, long before his arrest and killing. MSCS was involved in setting these restrictions, Brooks said. The district did not comment on its role. 

Instead of an open question-and-answer period, five students were pre-selected to ask Samuels and Olorunnipa prepared questions, which was different from the open conversations at the two other panels that Memphis Reads organized. This was in line with MSCS protocol for events, Brooks said.

Brooks said it was CBU’s call to keep the event closed to media, out of concern for student safety. A Chalkbeat reporter attended two similar events at the college level.

Stout said Brooks and Sharif had created a narrative about the event that is “inconsistent” with the district’s point of view and its own initiatives. She highlighted a Memphis school integration curriculum and a social emotional learning curriculum involving the death of Tyre Nichols, a Black man who was fatally injured by Memphis police after a traffic stop in early 2023. 

MSCS told Chalkbeat that it was glad Whitehaven students had the opportunity to hear the journalists speak, as did CBU in its own communication. 

And Samuels and Olorunnipa, who had early doubts about being part of an event with restrictions on their speech, said they were grateful for the opportunity, too. They were approached at the end of the event by a Whitehaven high schooler with a notebook full of questions who said he wanted to be a journalist. The authors relished the chance to expand what the student imagined for his future. 

“Even through this period of backlash, we think it’s important to continue to push forward and continue to make a pathway for people who are caught up in the back and forth,” Olorunnipa said during another forum. 

“A lot of these kids have nothing to do with the politics,” Olorunnipa added. “They are just trying to make it. They’re just trying to live their best lives. And sometimes they become pawns in our political fights.” 

Laura Testino covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Laura at LTestino@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Categories
Cover Feature News

School Grooves: The Glory Days of Memphis High School Music

Paul McKinney, director of student success/alumni relations at the Stax Music Academy (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)

The young student knew how far the guidance of a good music teacher could take him. “It was assumed that you would play jazz,” he wrote many years later. “Memphis’s young musicians were to unwaveringly follow the footsteps of Frank Strozier or Charles Lloyd or Joe Dukes in dedicating their lives to the pursuit  of excellence.” The young man had a jazz combo with his friend Maurice. “Because he cosigned the loan for the drums, loaned us his car, and believed in us, Maurice and I were both deeply indebted to Mr. Walter Martin, the band director. You could hear a reverence in his voice when he spoke Maurice’s name.”

Yet he gained more than material assistance from his high school education. “I took music theory classes after school. Professor Pender was the choral director at Booker T. Washington, and like the generous band directors, Mr. Pender made an invaluable contribution to my musical understanding.” Pondering his lessons on counterpoint, the student thought, “What if the contrapuntal rules applied to a twelve-bar blues pattern? What if the bottom bass note went up while the top note of the triad went down, like in the Bach fugues and cantatas?” And so, sitting at his mother’s piano, he wrote a song.

He had only just graduated when the piece he composed came in handy. Though it was written on piano, he suddenly found himself, to his amazement, in a recording studio, playing a Hammond M-3 organ. He thought he’d try his contrapuntal blues on this somewhat unfamiliar instrument. Why not? 

That’s when the magic went down on tape, and ultimately on vinyl. It was an unassuming B-side titled “Green Onions.” To this day, the jazz/blues/classical hybrid that sprung from a teenager’s mind remains a cornerstone of the Memphis sound. The teenager, of course, was Booker T. Jones, co-founder of Booker T. and the MGs. As he reveals in his autobiography, Time is Tight: My Life, Note by Note, his friend, so revered by the band director at Booker T. Washington High School, was Maurice White, future founder of Earth, Wind & Fire. Their lives — and ours — were forever changed by their high school music teachers. 

It’s a story worth remembering in these times, when the arts in our schools are endangered species. And yet, while you don’t often hear of band directors cosigning loans or handing out car keys anymore, they remain the unsung heroes of this city’s musical ecosystem. The next Booker T. is already out there, waiting to take center stage, if we can only keep our eyes on the prize.

Mighty Manassas
The big bang that caused the Memphis school music universe to spring into being is easy to pinpoint: Manassas High School. That was where, in the mid-1920s, a football coach and English teacher fresh out of college founded the city’s first school band, and, right out of the gate, set the bar incredibly high. The group, called the Chickasaw Syncopators, was known for their distinctive Memphis “bounce.” By 1930, they’d recorded sides for the Victor label, and soon they took the name of their band director: the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra. They released many hit records until Lunceford’s untimely death in 1947.

Paul McKinney (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)

Nearly a century later, Paul McKinney, a trumpet player and director of student success/alumni relations at the Stax Music Academy (SMA), takes inspiration from Lunceford. “He founded his high school band and took them on the road, with one of the more competitive jazz bands in the world, right there with Count Basie and Duke Ellington. And I’ve tried to play that stuff, as a trumpet player, and it’s really, really hard! And then one of the best band directors in Memphis’ history, after Jimmie Lunceford, was Emerson Able, also at Manassas.”

Under Able and other band directors, the school unleashed another wave of talent in the ’50s and ’60s, a series of virtuosos whose names still dominate jazz. One of them was Charles Lloyd, who says, “I went to Manassas High School where Matthew Garrett was our bandleader. Talk about being in the right place at the right time! We had a band, the Rhythm Bombers, with Mickey Gregory, Gilmore Daniels, Frank Strozier, Harold Mabern, Booker Little, and myself. Booker and I were best friends, we went to the library and studied Bartok scores together. He was a genius. We all looked up to George Coleman, who was a few years older than us — he made sure we practiced.”

Meanwhile, other talents were emerging across town at Booker T. Washington High School, which spawned such legends as Phineas Newborn Jr. and Herman Green. It’s no surprise that these players from the ’40s and ’50s inspired the next generation, like Booker T. Jones, Maurice White, or, back at Manassas, young Isaac Hayes, yet it wasn’t the stars themselves who taught them, but their music instructors. Although they didn’t hew to the jazz path, they formed the backbone of the Memphis soul sound that still resounds today. As today’s music educators see it, these examples are more than historical curiosities: They offer a blueprint for taking Memphis youth into the future.

Paul McKinney with his father Kurl, a retired music teacher, and his brother Alvin, a saxophonist (Photo: Yuki Maguire)

Making the Scene
And yet the fact that such giants still walk among us doesn’t do much to make the glory days of the ’30s through the ’60s within reach today. For Paul McKinney, whose father Kurl was a music teacher in the Memphis school system from 1961 to 2002, it might as well be Camelot. And he feels there’s a crucial ingredient missing today: working jazz players. “All the great musicians that came out of Memphis in the ’50s and ’60s were a direct result of the fact that their teachers were so heavily into jazz. The teachers were jazz musicians, too. We teach what we know and love. So think about all those teachers coming out of college in the ’50s. The popular music of the day was jazz! And the teachers were gigging, all of the time.”

Kurl, for his part, was certainly performing even as he taught (and he still can be heard on the Peabody Hotel’s piano, Monday and Tuesday evenings). “Calvin Newborn played guitar with my and Alfred Rudd’s band for a number of years,” he recalls. “We played around Memphis and the surrounding areas.” That in turn, his son points out, brought the students closer to the world of actual gigs, and accelerated their growth. In today’s music departments, Paul says, “there are not nearly as many teachers who are jazz musicians. As a jazz trumpeter and a guy who grew up watching great jazz musicians, that’s what I see. Are there a few band directors who play it professionally? Yes. But there aren’t many.

Trombonist Victor Sawyer, who works with SMA and MMI (Photo: Victor Sawyer)

Trombonist Victor Sawyer works with SMA but also oversees music educators for the Memphis Music Initiative (MMI). Both nonprofits, not to mention the Memphis Jazz Workshop, have helped to supplement and support public music programs in their own ways — SMA by hosting after school classes grounded in local soul music, MMI by helping public school teachers with visiting fellows who can also give lessons. Sawyer tends to agree that one important quality of music departments past was that the teachers were working jazz musicians. “All these people from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and before have stories of going to Beale Street and checking out music and having the opportunity to sit in. I feel like the high schools in town today aren’t as overtly and intentionally connected to the music scene. So you’re not really seeing the pipelines that you did. When you don’t have adults who will say, ‘Come sit in with me, come see this show,’ you lose that natural connectivity. So you hear in a lot of these classes, ‘You can’t do nothing in Memphis. I’ve got to get out of Memphis when I graduate.’ That didn’t used to be the mindset because the work was here, and it still is here; it’s just not as overt if you don’t know where to look.”

Music Departments by the Numbers
A sense of lost glory days can easily arise when discussing public education generally, as funding priorities have shifted away from the arts. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls the years after the 2008 recession “a punishing decade for school funding,” and Sawyer contrasts the past several decades with the priorities of a bygone time. “After World War II, there was a huge emphasis on the arts. Every city had a museum and a symphony. Then, people start taking it for granted, and suddenly you have all these symphonies and museums that are struggling. The same for schools: There’s less funding. When STEM takes over, arts funding goes down. The funding that the National Endowment of the Arts provides for schools has gone down dramatically.”

Simultaneously, the demographics of the city were shifting. “Booker T. Washington [BTW], Hamilton, Manassas, Douglass, Melrose, Carver, and Lester were the only Black high schools in the late ’50s/early ’60s. So of course people gathered there,” Sawyer says. “You’d have these very tight-knit cultures. Across time, though, things became more zoned; people became more spread out. Now things are more diffuse.”

Not only did funding dry up, enrollment numbers decreased for the most celebrated music high schools. Dru Davison, Shelby County Schools’ fine arts adviser, points out that once people leave a neighborhood, there’s not much a school principal can do. “What we’ve seen at BTW is a number of intersecting policies — local, state, and federal — that have changed the number of students in the community. And that has a big impact on the way music programs can flourish. And more recently, it’s been an incredibly difficult couple of years because of the pandemic. Our band director at Manassas, James McLeod, passed away this year. So we’re working to get that staff back up again, but the pandemic has had its toll on the programs.”

Davison further explains: “The number of the kids at the school determines the number of teachers that can work at that school. So at large schools like Whitehaven or Central, that means there are two band directors, a choir director — fully staffed. But if you go to a much smaller school, like BTW and Manassas, the number of students they have at the schools makes it difficult to support the same number of music positions. That’s a principal’s decision.”

A four-time winner of the High Stepping Nationals, Whitehaven High School’s marching band plays at a recruiting rally. (Photos: Justin Fox Burks)

The Culture of the Band Room
Even if music programs are brought back, the disruption takes its toll. One secret to the success of Manassas was the through-line of teachers from Lunceford to Able to Garrett and beyond. Which highlights a little recognized facet of education, what Sawyer calls the culture of the classroom. “When you watch Ollie Liddell at Central High School or Adrian Maclin at Cordova High School, it’s like, ‘Whoa! Is this magic?’ These kids come in, they’re practicing, they know how to warm up on their own. But it’s not magic. These are master-level teachers who have worked very hard at classroom culture. The schools with the most thriving programs have veteran teachers who have been there a while, so they have built up that culture.”

In fact, according to Davison, that band room culture is one reason music education is so valuable, regardless of whether or not the students go on to be musicians. “I’m just trying to help our teachers to use the power of music to become a beacon of what it means to have social and emotional support in place. As much as our music teachers are instilling the skills it takes to perform at a really high level, they’re also creating places for kids to belong. That’s been something I’ve been really pleased to see through the pandemic, even when we went virtual.” Thus, while Davison values the “synergy” between nonprofits like SMA or MMI and public school teachers, he sees the latter as absolutely necessary. “We want principals to understand how seriously the district takes music. It’s not only to help students graduate on time but to create students who will help energize our community with creativity and vision.”

Kellen Christian, band director at Whitehaven High School (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)

And make no mistake, the music programs in Memphis high schools that are thriving are world-class. By way of example, Davison introduces me to Kellen Christian, band director at Whitehaven High School, where enrollment has remained reliably large. With a marching band specializing in the flashy “show” style of marching (as opposed to the more staid “corps” style), Whitehaven has won the High Stepping Nationals competition four times. (Central has won it twice in recent years.) Hearing them play at a recruiting rally last week, I could see and hear why: The precision and power of the playing was stunning, even with the band seated. Christian sees that as a direct result of his band room culture. “Once you have a student,” he says, “you have to build them up, not making them feel that they’re being left out. So we’re not just building band members; we’re building good citizens. They learn discipline and structure in the band room. That’s one of the biggest parts of being in the band: the military orientation that the band has.”

Lured into Myriad Musics
But Christian, a trumpeter, is still a musician first and foremost, and he sees the marching band as a way to lure students into deeper music. “Marching band is the draw for a lot of students,” he says. “When you see advertisements for bands from a school, you don’t see their concert band, you don’t see their jazz bands. The marching bands are the visual icons. It’s what’s always in the public eye.” But ultimately, he emphasizes, “I love jazz, and marching band is the bait. You’ve got to use what these students like to get them in and teach them to love their instrument. Then you start giving them the nourishment.”

As Sawyer points out, that deeper nourishment may not even look like jazz. “Even with rappers, you’ll find out they knew a little bit about music. 8Ball & MJG were totally in band. NLE Choppa. Drumma Boy’s dad is [retired University of Memphis professor of clarinet] James Gholson!” Even as Shelby County Schools is on the cutting edge of offering classes in “media arts” and music production, a grounding in classic musicianship can also feed into modern domains. True, there are plenty of traditional instrumentalists parlaying their high school education into music careers, like David Parks, who now plays bass for Grammy-winner Ledisi and eagerly acknowledges the training he received at Overton High School. But rap and trap artists can be just as quick to honor their roots. “Young Dolph, rest in peace, donated to Hamilton High School every year because that’s where he went,” notes Sawyer. “Anybody can do that. Find out more about your local school, and donate!”

Reminiscing about his lifetime of teaching music in Memphis public schools, Kurl McKinney laughs with his son about one student in particular. “Courtney Harris was a drummer for me at Lincoln Junior High School. He’s done very well now. Once, he said, ‘Mr. McKinney, I’ve got some tapes in my pocket. Why don’t you play ’em?’ I said, ‘What, you trying to get me fired? All that cussin’ on that tape, I can’t play that! No way! I’m gonna keep my job. You go on home and play it to your mama.’

“But I had him come down to see my class, and when he came walking in, their eyes got as big as teacups. I said, ‘Class, this is Gangsta Blac. Mr. Gangsta Blac, say something to my class.’ So he looked them over and said, ‘If it hadn’t been for Mr. McKinney, I would never have been in music.’” Even over the phone, you can hear the former band director smile.

Categories
We Recommend We Saw You

Barbara Santi: Touched by Angels

CREDIT: Clement Santi

Clement Santi

Barbara Santi and some of the angels from her collection.



Sometimes it takes just one angel.

Barbara Santi saw a little angel statue in a mail-order catalog about 20 years ago. “She was kneeling with her hands folded,” said Santi, 81. “And I thought I wanted that. So, I ordered it. Twelve dollars and 95 cents.”

That was her first angel. Friends, relatives, and people she’s babysat for began giving her more angels. By her estimate, Santi now has some 9,000 angels in her collection.

“One day, I was just really going to be a smarty, you know. I said, ‘Today, I’m going to get some sticky notes and start counting my angels.’ I started counting those angels and I got to 1,000 before I got around the corner. Then I thought, ‘You know, I’ve got more to do with my time than count those angels.’ So, I quit.”

Santi’s angels are in the den, living room, and kitchen at her Collierville home. “I’ll start on this shelf. They’re sitting there holding their hand out like they’re blowing you a kiss. Two shelves of those. This other shelf is all animals. You know, there are angel animals.  Let’s see, I’ve got dogs and cats. I have some of them pretending to pour tea. I do enjoy stopping sometimes and just look.”

Her first angel holds a place of honor. “I’ve got her sitting on a little pedestal next to my bookcase. That’s where she stays all the time.”

Except for a large concrete statue outside, the largest angel in her collection stands 23 inches tall and is her “prized possession,” Santi says. It was given to her by her aunt, who also was her godmother, “She made it out of plaster of Paris. She made that for me for Christmas and gave it to me. And she died in January.”

Santi, who is a Catholic, didn’t know much about angels growing up. “I knew I had an angel, but it was never referred to.”

She learned more about them after she got a catechism in religion class when she transferred from Whitehaven to St. Paul’s in the sixth grade.

Santi met her husband at Whitehaven grade school. “He lived on a farm that adjoined ours in Whitehaven.”

She knew she was going to Whitehaven High School after she graduated, but his parents wanted Robert, who was two years ahead of her, to go to Christian Brothers High School. Santi says he told his parents he wasn’t going to go to CBHS: “He said, ‘I’m going to Whitehaven, back with Barbara.’”

“When it came time for him to go, she (his mother) got him in that car and took him to Christian Brothers High School. He beat her home. I don’t think his family was too happy with him. He hitchhiked. He came on to Whitehaven.”

She and Robert were best friends in high school, she says. “We never did actually date in high school. But we were together all the time.”

And, she says, “When I’d go on a date or something, he’d always bring me back.”

They kept in contact after he joined the service. “While he was in the Marines, he was writing me the whole time. One day, out of the clear blue sky, he said, ‘Marry me. Go talk to Daddy. Marry me.’ I said, ‘Hmmm.’ So, I went to see Mr. Santi. I said, ‘Mr. Santi, your son has come up with a brainy idea. He wants to marry me.’ And he said, ‘Forget that idea.’”

Robert sent her back again to ask him and his father gave her the same answer. When she told Robert, he said, “You will either marry me or else. ‘Cause I love you.’”

“And I said, ‘Okay.’ So, we got married.” 

As for her father-in-law, Santi says, “He was elated that I was  his daughter-in-law. And I did a lot for him and he knew it. He was very appreciative.”

Robert worked as a fireman for the railroad until they did away with firemen on trains, Santi says. “He drove a truck for the rest of his life.”

She and Robert were married for 44 years. They have three sons —  Clement, Bobby, and Johnny.

Robert died in 2003. Santi says, “He thought I had too many angels. But he loved to show them to people.”

About four weeks ago, Santi was diagnosed positive with COVID on December 4th. Her symptoms included sore throat, cough, fever, and loss of sense of smell and taste. She stayed at home. “You don’t get scared when you’ve got something,” she says, “It just happens and you got to accept it. I got the virus. That’s a big mystery. I’ll never know how I got it. But I got pretty sick.”

Then, she got well. “I was taking all this stuff. I got over it. And, you know what? I knew when I got over it, too. I just knew it. I felt it. And I didn’t say a word until I (knew) it for one day. And then I told the doctor, ‘You don’t have to worry about me anymore.’”

She took another test on December 15th and it came back negative the following day.

Her son Clement brought her the good news in the medical certificate. “He said, ‘Here you go, Mama.’ And I said, ‘What you got for me?’ And he says, ‘You ain’t got it no more.’”

Santi believes her guardian angel had something to do with her getting well. “Because you have feelings. When you can’t eat anything and you’re just there and when you get that feeling you got to have something to eat, you know where it’s coming from. From the angels. You have to really realize that there are angels. People don’t believe and I don’t try to make them believe. I believe everybody’s got an angel. You need to listen to them. A lot of people these days don’t listen to them.

“We didn’t have a Christmas tree this year. In life, you don’t get everything you want.”

But it doesn’t hurt to get a little help sometimes. Sometimes it takes just one angel.

Clement Santi

Barbara Santi

Clement Santi

Barbara Santi

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Memphis Preps: A Full-Time Coach

Coach Rodney Saulsberry

Whitehaven Tigers fans watched their team come from behind and beat previously undefeated Ridgeway at Halle Stadium in East Memphis. The Tigers improved to 6-0 and would have an open week before meeting up with East. Let the extended celebration begin … for everyone except Whitehaven Head Coach Rodney Saulsberry.

He had film work to do, not just for East, but for his own players. Saulsberry can appreciate a win as much as the next coach, but he values getting his guys in college even more. He knows the dream of every kid playing football is to one day suit up with a big time college program.

But he is also well aware of the numbers. According to a 2013 report from the NCAA, 6.5 percent of all seniors playing high school football will play football in the NCAA.

He knows football is a game of inches, and not just on the field, but also a player’s measurements. Saulsberry offers Memphis Tigers defensive lineman Terry Redden as proof. Redden, a Whitehaven graduate, initially wanted to play at Tennessee. “UT didn’t offer him,” says Saulsberry. “Not because he wasn’t good, but because he measured at ‘6-3” instead of 6’-4. We can get kids stronger and faster. We can’t make them grow taller.”

Saulsberry can also help get them noticed. After a game he adds more “film” to a players’ portfolio. “Exposure,” he said. “The more people know the better (a players’) chances are.” So Saulsberry creates a prospect list for all of his seniors and for some of the younger players he puts together a future prospect list and sends them out to college coaches, members of the media, and anyone else he thinks could be of help. “We use email, Twitter, Facebook, the Hudl app to get the word out.”

Hudl, a video hosting service on the web that assists high school teams with collecting and analyzing game film, has made Saulsberry’s life easier. Saulsberry recalls the days of putting players highlights on tapes and DVDs. “It would take a month to get it all done on VHS,” said Saulsberry of the process of transferring a players’ highlights to tape. “On DVD it went from a month to about two or three weeks. Now with (Hudl) it almost instant.”

With the help of Hudl, Saulsberry has most of his college hopefuls’ midseason highlights completed. But that’s just the beginning. “The key is to talk to as many schools possible,” he added. “I communicate with everybody. Rivals.com, Scout.com, 247Sports, ESPN.”

Still it’s no walk in a park for the coach of a team with 121 players this season alone. The Tigers are full of juniors and seniors looking to extend their football careers. So Saulsberry will take any edge he can get in getting his players notice. “Sometimes it helps to have a big fish,” admitted Saulsberry. “Everyone wants to come out and see that player and are able to get a look at some of our other players in the process.” The most recent “catch,” was senior linebacker Josh McMillon who committed to Alabama.

Most players won’t be as coveted as McMillon, resulting in more work for Saulsberry and his support staff. His efforts bleed over into the summer where he will travel with players and get them into off season camps, even coming out of his own pocket to help with the expenses. “Pretty much on my own dime,” he said the trips. “But I get some help from the school, boosters, and parents. It’s a group effort.” It is also the type of loyalty to players that does not go unnoticed by parents. It was one of the reasons former Whitehaven offensive lineman Thomas Burton choose the school. Well more like the reason Burton’s mother Toleda selected it for him.

“He was assigned to Westwood,” Toleda Burton said of her son. “And we considered White Station and Central. But I respected Coach Saulsberry for his discipline, his commitment to his players. (Thomas Burton) needed a strong role male model at school. He also needed a coach with good character and not someone who’s always cursing the boys out, but someone positive.”

The move paid dividends for Burton, who is now a red-shirt freshman at Tennessee State University. Burton’s mother said she was always confident her son would play college football regardless, but with Saulsberry’s assistance his options were more plentiful.

Saulsberry’s commitment to her son not only impressed Toleda, his words touched her. “He gave us a quote for Thomas’ scholarship application,” she said. “He said Thomas was the epitome of what an offensive lineman should be. He (wrote) he would teach other players at the position based on how Thomas played it. And that meant a lot to me.”

According to Saulsberry, every year during the start of the high school football signing period about 10-15 of his players sign with some college football team, which is much higher than the national average for a single school.

Still, despite Saulsberry’s efforts, some players will not get offers from Division I schools. It’s a reality he shares with players upon entering the Whitehaven program. “On day one (of practice) I talk to the older guys with the younger guys present,” he said. “We are not looking to crush dreams but tell them about the real world.”

Saulsberry also shares with them other options: Division II, NAIA, or junior/community college. The perception of junior/community colleges is that they are easy to get into. Saulsberry disagrees. “Because there are so many guys around the country with academic issues looking to play at a junior college and only a few junior college programs available, the competition is tough. The level of skill is high.”

Some community colleges, like Coahoma in Clarksdale, Mississippi, will only allow a certain number of kids from out of state on the team. Because Tennessee doesn’t have junior college football teams, several of Saulsberry’s players have signed at relatively nearby Coahoma.

Saulsberry will leave no stone unturned. For guys who will not play football in college, but want to remain in the sport, he will assist them in finding off the field scholarships. “I have several guys who work as trainers or members of the equipment staff at schools,” said Saulsberry. “Those guys are on scholarships too, some at (Middle Tennessee), Ole Miss, and Memphis.”

And when all else fails, “There’s always the academic scholarship,” said Saulsberry. “We tell (players) to use football as a means to an end, to get an education. It’s more important for (coaches) that kids get a college degree than get to the NFL.”

You can follow Jamie Griffin on twitter @flyerpreps.

Categories
Special Sections

Chenault’s Drive-In – THE Whitehaven Hangout

9b5e/1248986610-chenaultsdrive-inpc.jpg Mention Whitehaven High School to most people, and within a few minutes anybody who attended that school will bring up fond memories of Chenault’s, an extraordinarily popular drive-in on South Bellevue, just down the street from the school.

The Lauderdale Library contains a pair of postcards, showing this establishment from the inside and the outside. I can’t tell you, exactly, when the place opened, because I just don’t remember. And it’s confusing because there were actually two different Chenault’s, an old one and a new one. Most people seem to remember the new one (shown here).

I know this because I turned up a 1955 Press-Scimitar clipping announcing that Reginald “Rex” Chenault was planning to build a brand-new restaurant at 1400 South Bellevue, to replace his older and smaller establishment right next door. Calling it “an interesting modern building,” the newspaper observed that the new Chenault’s Drive-In “would include a public dining room of exposed brick and wood paneling, a private dining room, a tap room, and an upper level to be rented for private parties.”