Sewickley Herald

              Sewickley
A Gateway Publications Nevyspapej-.
Vol. 95 No. 6
Bill Waugh Sr. and friends at Valley Care share some tender thoughts about love for all seasons. For more on their story, turn to Page 13.
Serving Aleppo, Bell Acres, Edgeworth, Glenfield, Haysville, Leet Leetsdale, Osborne, Sewickley, Sewickley Heights, Sewickley Hills
Wednesday, February .11-, 1997:
H Another marker takes its place on the record or celebration of Black History Month by area students.
Page 11
News
■ Meet the Herald's new editors as they introduce themselves. Page 6 & 7
Special
■ This issue includes a Pittsburgh auto show section.
Sports
■ The last regulation games for boys' and girls' basketball has been scored.
Page 21
INDEX
local Nows.............”
Opinion.............’...A
Lifestyles............11
Stiigtcn..............16
Sports..............'.21
Otoiuuriet............24
FREEDOM'S SONG
THE REV. Zedric Coaston, pastor of St. Matthews AME Zion Church in Sewickley, is passionate about a movement that he believes Is God-given.
Pastor shared jail cell with The Rev. King
By Tim Schooler
_________Staff writer______
With freedom songs still calling from the jail cells of his . past, the Rev, Zedric Coaston '' speaks of the sears on his ' 71-year-old body.
“I was beaten a couple of times. I have a few scars here and there," says the pastor of St. Matthews AME Zion, a church that recently celebrated 140 years of service in Sewickley.
“That’s some of the suffering 1 had to bear. Suffering is redemptive if you suffer for the right thing.”
Like lines on a map, Coaston’s scars lead his conversation into the eep south of the ’50s and '60s, where his memories of racial oppression run into a King with a dream and the social turmoil of what we now know as the civil rights movement.
For Coaston, the movement includes memories of bus boycotts and water blasting from police hoses, lunch counter sit-ins and marches, Jim Crow laws and segregated schools. His scars are always a reminder of his personal involvement in the mis-
sion of racial equality, an idea for which the Rev, Martin Luther King Jr. lived and died.
“It was the Zeitgeist... the spirit of the age that led Rosa Parks to not get up," Coaston says, recalling the famous bus incident that sparked a social revolution in
1957. “It was the best time in history that this could happen. God arranged all these things to come together."
And Coaston was
there. In Atlanta for a lunch counter sit-in. In Birmingham, Ala., where he was hosed down by police. In
Montgomery, Ala., and Jackson, Miss., where bus rides took dangerous detours into the history books.
Not only was Coaston beaten, hosed, and threatened, but he also was jailed five times.
“I had no idea I was going to jail and I was scared,” he says. “Every time I went to jail I was afraid. And I was more afraid each time.
“I stood there in Birmingham and watched * Bull Connor sic dogs on children. If he could sic dogs on ' children, what would he do to me?
“The Congress On Racial Equality’s bus was taken off the road. The people on it where beaten and the bus set on fire.
“If they would beat up bus passengers and set fire to a bus, what would they do to me?"
Fear gave way to awe
and privilege when Coaston was jailed in Birmingham.
It was there that he shared a cell with Dr. King just before the leader wrote his famous open letter from a Birmingham jail.
“He was a tremendous guy," he remembers of King. “You only get one person like that in maybe two or three lifetimes."
Coaston was packed into a jail cell with King and more than 20 others.
- — Continued on Page 2
Performance highlights special observance
▼ SCHOOLS
Celebration of Black History Month, February 1998, continues with a reception and performance by students from the Quaker Valley School District and Sewickley Academy in QV High School’s newly renovated auditorium on Feb. 21 at 6:15 p.m.
The program will include freedom songs, dramatic presentations reflective of the Civil Rights Era, poetry, essays and
vocal and instrumental performances.
This year’s theme is “Revisiting the Civil Rights Movement."
A string ensemble from QV Middle School will provide light chamber music at the reception.
Sewickley Academy teacher Julian
Braxton and Kenneth Powell, QV Middle School assistant principal, are coordinating this year’s commemoration.
Members of the Daniel B. Matthews Historical Society have volunteered to serve as tour guides for those wishing to visit the black history photography exhibit currently on display in the church basement. Tours can be arranged through the schools.