MACON, Ga. — A Mercer University professor will be retiring at the end of this semester.
Professor Chester Fontenot has spent 50 years in total as an educator.
He taught at Mercer University for 25 years as a Baptist professor of English and the director of their African American Studies program.
After teaching his last class, he is retiring. However, his contributions to Mercer and the community will live on.
Professor Fontenot is from Compton, California and is known to have a deep passion for culture studies, specifically African American and Africana studies.
Fontenot has published 9 books, over 60 articles, and numerous book reviews and newspaper articles all relating to African American education.
During his undergraduate at Whittier College, he became the first undergraduate teaching assistant and he knew from there he could continue as an educator.
While obtaining his Ph. D. from the University of California at Irvine and post-doctoral study from the University of California at Irvine, he taught English classes centered on the African culture and diaspora.
From there, he went to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, then Cornell University for a number of years before being recruited to teach at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for 20 years before working at Mercer.
Fontenot says his time at Mercer has been a labor of love.
At Mercer, he traveled around the county and even brought his students along to different conferences.
"It's my passion. I'm wired like this," Fontenot said.
Fontenot has also helped uncover nearly 1,000 slave transaction records that exist in Macon-Bibb County.
He partnered with Erica Woodford and Stephanie Miller, Clerks of the Bibb County Superior Court, to develop a research project co-sponsored by the Clerk’s Office of the Bibb County Superior Court and the Africana Studies Program at Mercer University.
These slave records will be available to the public for genealogical, teaching, and research purposes.
"We're putting flesh and blood on them," Fontenot said. "We're bringing them almost back to life and adding their humanity that was taken from them. We're restoring it. It's important because so many lives have been told about what happened. These documents are data and you can't argue with the data."
Fonteno says as a pastor and an educator, his life is dedicated to ministry.
He says the community has welcomed him and being here for over 20 years he says he can call himself a Maconite, even though he's still a Los Angeles boy.
"It's gratifying to me having been in the field this long and seeing the development from the ground floor to where we are now and knowing that I have some small part in it makes me feel good," Fonteno said.
Addison Robinson is a law school student at Mercer University.
She majored in African American studies and says she has had a passion for civil rights and learning about her history.
"Dr. Fontenot is one of the professors that I know I could learn from and so it was just up from there," Robinson said. "He was once a 25-year-old just like I am and passionate about wanting to make a change."
After taking Fonteno's class, Robinson said knew she would be taking every class of his until she graduated.
She said he would help her with her writing and comprehension, and she even helped investigate the slave documents.
That experience is something she says will carry on forever.
"A lot of my success and my focus and my discipline to the values that I learn in Dr. Fonteno's class and also just learning about what he went through and his story is inspiring," Robinson said. "Just having that support is an example and you lead by example and that's what he is for me and that's what he is for a lot of people."
Although Fontenot says he's retiring from his office hours, he still plans to preach, lecture, and help out in the community as well as travel, visit his grandchildren, and cheer on the Mercer Bears basketball team.