Discovering Faith Through Music and Education: An Inspiring Journey with Royce Stuckey

Royce Stuckey doesn't remember the first music lesson of his life. He was a toddler in his father's lap at church, and he knows about it only because his mother and others told him later: his small hands resting on top of his father's hands, trying to follow everything they did on the piano keys.

It's a fitting first image for a conversation that keeps circling one idea: at some point you have to take your hands off someone else's and play it yourself. Speaking with Dr. Anita Turner on Won't God Do It, Royce, now twenty years into a career in education, a musician at two churches, and the owner of a choir robe business, returns to that idea in nearly every part of his life. His father, who played the piano and organ, died when Royce was fifteen.

You have to know God for yourself

Royce says he was born and raised in the church, and he means it literally. People still tell him they remember his mother being pregnant with him in the pews.

But he doesn't let the phrase do more work than it can. Everyone is born and raised in something, he points out, whatever setting a family happens to be in. He could just as easily say he was born and raised in a school, since his mother was a teacher who brought him along with her.

Which is why being in the building settles nothing. Somewhere around ten, eleven, twelve, when he started questioning things and putting them together for himself, his parents were teaching him that you have to know God for yourself. Ushering, singing in the choir, serving as a deacon, none of it substitutes.

What he was after was what he thinks most preteens are after. "Everyone is searching for an anchor," he says, and he's blunt about the alternatives people find: drugs, or food as comfort. The distinction he draws is between "relationships versus religion," meaning not what you reach for when things go wrong, but what you seek daily, what sits in your spirit as the default.

The geometry class he failed

Royce fell in love with math around third or fourth grade. The numbers made sense to him. The patterns were a puzzle, a game.

He aced every math class through ninth-grade Algebra I. Then came second-semester geometry, and he was failing.

He's grateful for it. Most teachers, he notes, teach the subject they never struggled in, which means they've never sat on the other side of it. His own failure gave him something his transcript couldn't.

It also sharpened what he thinks the job actually is. "As a teacher you have to transition from proving that you know the subject to proving that you can relay it to others," he says. He can take a math test and produce the proof that he knows algebra. Getting that knowledge into someone else is a different skill entirely.

His method: "You have to teach math as if it's a new language." Break it down the way you would for a student who has never heard a word of Spanish or Korean. Connect it to what they already know and can talk about. Geometry won him over precisely because the shapes were everywhere and you couldn't get away from them. And know that students are assessing you from day one, deciding whether this person makes sense and is worth following.

Advocacy and accountability

Asked what parents can do, Royce offers two words.

The first is advocacy. Parents who feel unequipped, whether they are first-generation or unsure of the system, have more resources available than ever, and if they still don't know where to start, they can walk into the school. He has little patience for the claim that parents don't know how. "You know how to go up to the school. You found out somebody hurt your child," he says. Same location. Same front desk. Ask for a counselor and say you need help.

The second is accountability, and it comes from his last stretch as a site administrator overseeing discipline. What struck him was how often parents argued against their child being in the wrong no matter what evidence sat in front of them. "If you train your child to think that they are never in the wrong, what is that going to look like for them as an adult?"

He's grateful his own parents made him own things, including a first traffic ticket his mother made him pay. His warning to parents is plain: you will not be able to yell at a judge the way you might yell at an assistant principal.

The boy who sketched choir robes

As a kid, Royce was less interested in basketball than in what the choir was wearing. "I was not happy when the choir came in and did not have their robes on," he says. He sketched designs at ten, eleven, twelve, and pinned fabric onto little wooden blocks. He was teased for it, because it wasn't what a young Black boy was supposed to love.

He put the dream down for twenty years. Then a friend told him that if he saw an open door he should walk through it, because one day he'd look back and find it closed. At thirty-three, Royce, who sews, made a few garments, ran a photo shoot, found help with production, and started posting on Instagram and Facebook. One order, then another.

Eleven years later, Stuckey Exclusive Choir Robes has shipped across the country. He is careful to say the middle wasn't clean. Some years he lost money. Some years the quality was poor and he had to go back and fix orders. People start things, he says, and don't finish them.

His largest order to date was eighty-eight robes for a choir in Virginia. He flew out to watch them come down the aisle.

Not everything he hands on is that visible. He tells people to be a glimmer of hope, and insists it's small and tangible: a smile, a hello in the neighborhood, a text to someone you were praying for. "You never know what people are going through." Someone out there is looking for it, and they want it from you.