After retiring from a long and successful career as a Fox Valley psychotherapist, Maureen McKane was looking for that next chapter in her life when she met Wilbert Walters. The event was a 2021 gathering at the Aurora Public Library of people interested in restarting Study Circles, a nonprofit to pr omote interracial community dialogue that she helped lead back in the mid-1990s. Among the 30-some attendees at that meeting was Walters, now 97 years old, who founded the Aurora Sundowners track and field club nearly a half century ago as a competitive and developmental program for area youth that, even after his retirement, is still is going strong. Sitting beside this “elderly, frail” man, McKane recalls him suddenly standing up to declare that, while it was admirable “we all showed up” for this push for a Study Circles reboot, why did those who were there not speak up in the past and call out overt racism. Intrigued by this intense passion, McKane invited Walters to lunch, which led to many more noon meals – once a week for four years, in fact – that culminated in a strong friendship and the publishing of her first book: “Walters Way: A Coach, his Runners and his Race.” “His is a story that just takes hold of you,” she said. “And I knew it was too important not to put my all into it.” “Walters Way,” which will be released by Koehler Books Feb. 9, is more than a biography of Aurora’s iconic African American coach and educator, who took his love for kids and sports and not only built a nationally-competitive track and field club but provided valuable life lessons for hundreds of minority youth, many from disadvantaged situations. That in itself is a tale worth telling. But what McKane also realized as this project came together were the valuable lessons to be learned from her own experience as a white female authoring a book about a Black trailblazer who had to navigate between a world where he was esteemed and rewarded and another world where he was invisible and at times sidelined by racial bias. McKane describes the book as written “in Walters’ voice,” as well as “the voices of his now-grown athletes,” and “where appropriate, my voice as a white female retired psychotherapist.” There is, she said, much to ponder  about the actual experience of a bright educated Black man negotiating 20th century Aurora. “It is an uplifting story about every man who persists and wins.” But it’s also about what it is like to “manage the world that is Jim Crow,” McKane continued, “a concept many young people today don’t even understand.” Walters’ early childhood – at the side of his mother, a young nanny and housekeeper for the wealthy Lawrence DuPont household – was unique in that he became so absorbed into this rich and privileged family, he “did not even know racism existed,” Walters told me, until he was much older. With a couple of college semesters under his belt, he dropped out to join the Air Force in 1948, the year after it was formed and the same year President Harry Truman ordered desegregation of all U.S. armed forces. Walters served four years in the military before returning to school to earn a degree in education at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He became part of the Great Migration — Black Americans from the South moving to Northern cities. But when he arrived in this state to work for the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles, he was surprised to find racism to be less overt but “more painful.” McKane described Walters as becoming part of an Aurora group of successful educated Blacks – beloved community activist Marie Wilkinson among them – who were determined to change that environment without causing a backlash. He worked at Waldo Middle School for a few years and coached the East Aurora High School girls track team, which won conference in his third year. According to Walters, it was after his daughter, a standout cheerleader at Franklin Middle School, was denied a spot on the West Aurora High School team that he decided to change the Sundowners drama club he had formed in 1968 for marginalized Black girls into a track and field club. After a few years it went coed and eventually went national, with the Sundowners frequently taking home medals at the National Junior Olympics. But the most valuable lesson he taught those hundreds of kids was “to be honest, to work hard and to respect authority,” Walters insisted, even when those in power did not always respect you back. Eventually he went to work as a coach and teacher for West Chicago Community High School, retiring after 13 years with plenty of good memories, he noted, but also with deeply hurtful experiences. The book, which McKane describes as a regional story about an “unsung Everyman Hero in Middle America,” brings to life some of those good and bad memories. McKane recalls that, even when she was a child, “understanding the injustices surrounding racism was always an itch to scratch.” In 1997 she headed the nonprofit board of the Aurora Community Study Circles and is currently a member of the Aurora Human Rights Commission, which was founded by Wilkinson, a local civil rights legend and Walters’ friend. One thing McKane said she took away from writing this book is “how if you really come to know the other person’s or other group’s experience, you can be you and they can be them. When you get to really know who people are, any awkwardness or a feeling of discomfort goes away.” McKane, who is also a leader at New England Congregational Church, will have a presentation and book signing at 7 p.m. Feb. 25 at the Aurora Public Library, at Yellow Bird Books in downtown Aurora at 3 p.m. Feb. 21 and at the GAR Museum downtown at 5 p.m. March 14. The more than two dozen former Sundowners McKane interviewed for this book referred to their coach as a legend, with the females noting how he always made them feel protected and challenged and the males, many of whom had absent fathers, noting how he taught them the right way to become a man, including respect for women. Walters is proud of how accomplished many of his former athletes became. Still, he has a few regrets: Among them, the fact he never got a master’s degree because, “I was too busy working in the parks and playgrounds.” But that advanced degree, McKane is quick to note, can’t “hold a candle to what he did succeed in doing. “He changed the lives of hundreds of people in the Fox Valley,” she said. “Mine included.” [email protected] ...read more read less