[REPRODUCED FROM THE CHICAGO TRIBUTE Oct 2, 2024]

I was a part of the Curie H.S. Advanced Male Chorus (AMC). In hindsight, this was not just a boys’ choir. It was a laboratory for accountability, excellence, love, and the village-ness that Black educators have created for centuries.

We were Black and Latino and Polish and Indian. We were GDs and Vice Lords and Black Stones. We were straight and gay and curious. We were football players, on the drama team, and bowlers. Some of us could sing, and some had no business in anybody’s choir. But to Ronald McCowan, it did not matter. Whoever we were, he took what we had and made us better. He loved us. He corrected us. And he expected us to be the men he knew we could be.  

He knew our families and our other teachers. Other teachers approached him when we were out of line. He came to our games and plays and got us summer jobs. He exposed us to culture and etiquette. And at meals at his house, he would make his mother’s recipe of ox tail stew.

In the spring of 97, I graduated from Curie without a plan. Mr. McCowan called me that summer and convinced me to take a chance on a partial music scholarship he had secured for several of us at an out-of-state HBCU. That call set in motion a chain of events that improved my life.

In March, my aunt called me one morning to tell me Mr. McCowan had passed away. More than ten years before I got to Curie, she was a member of the advanced girls’ chorus and had never been in one of Mr. McCowan’s classes. But like many Curie students of the 80s and 90s, she had her own stories of the power and presence of this Black educator.    

Mac was not a sports figure or a celebrity. He was a high school music teacher. But more important, he was a Black educator. To be clear, we had several excellent educators who happened to be Black. But Mac was a Black educator. He committed himself to the task of making us men and women. He embraced his responsibility to the culture and took on the mantle of bringing out the best in us.  

He changed the course of my life. He was a Black educator who mattered to me.

Donell Barnett, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist who serves as a senior behavioral health administrator and is the immediate Past President of The Association of Black Psychologists, Inc.