Cecil Murray, 94, L.A. civil rights icon and spiritual leader
LOS ANGELES
The Rev. Dr. Cecil L. “Chip” Murray, who made the First African Methodist Episcopal Church the most prestigious Black pulpit in Los Angeles, attracting presidents, governors and mayors to hear his dynamic sermons, has died.
Murray died of natural causes April 5 at his home in the View Park-Windsor Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles County, his son Drew Murray said. He was 94.
“He was a man who gave God his all,” he said. “He was a devoted husband, and a loving and caring father.”
During his remarkable 27-year tenure as senior minister, Murray built the First AME congregation from several hundred members to more than 18,000 worshipers whose support was often courted by elected officials and political candidates.
Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton visited while Murray was in charge. California Govs. Pete Wilson, Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke from the pulpit. Los Angeles Mayors James K. Hahn and Richard Riordan stopped by regularly, and Mayor Tom Bradley was already a member of the city’s oldest Black congregation when Murray arrived.
Compassionate and charismatic, Murray emphasized taking Christian beliefs beyond the modern church building that housed his congregation, a structure that was designed by the pioneering Black architect Paul R. Williams on a hill near Western Avenue and Adams Boulevard looking out at the L.A. skyline.
“On his watch, First
AME became a church that went beyond the stainedglassed windows and the walls,” the late John Mack, head of the Los Angeles Urban League, said at the time of the pastor’s retirement in 2004. “It became a very important religious institution meeting pressing human needs.”
Murray, Mack said, led the church in helping feed the hungry, find jobs for the jobless and help those who “didn’t have money, were out of work, out of hope.”
Mack was among many prominent city leaders who worked with Murray on police brutality issues, public education, bridgebuilding with other communities and mayoral commissions addressing issues involving Black Americans.
Passionate about education, Murray helped the congregation start a private school, which is now named after him, and saw that thousands of students received college scholarships.
Equally determined about economic development, the pastor pushed the church to partner with government or corporate sponsors, especially after First AME became a center of L.A.’s Black community — and he became internationally known — during and immediately after the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
“I saw my father on television. I heard him on the radio. So many newspapers called the house, from Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., one lady even called from Australia,” his son, Drew David Murray, recalled at the time of his father’s retirement.
The leadership at First AME also developed longterm projects to increase the economic vibrancy of the neighborhood around the church and provide access to capital for entrepreneurs who were starting or expanding businesses that provided jobs.
“One of the things that Rev. Murray is going to be most noted for — not just the baptisms, the funerals he preached and the great sermons — but the lasting institutions, all the different housing, apartments and home loans,” Bernard Kinsey, a church trustee, said while planning the minister’s 75th birthday celebration. First AME is “a real diversified business of $60 million, and that just didn’t happen overnight.”
For example, under the minister’s leadership, First AME initiatives transformed crack houses and shabby apartment buildings into 2,000 affordable housing units for low-income families, seniors, disabled people and people with AIDS. The church also assisted thousands without homes, fed 5,000 families annually and helped hundreds of families get home loans and even purchase homes.
Jobs and training; employment assistance for ex-prisoners, welfare recipients and others down on their luck; free legal advice; AIDS programs; transportation services; adoption aid; support for foster children; emergency clothing — all this and more were available through First AME.
Its most ambitious undertaking, the FAME Renaissance Center, opened in 2001 to house the church’s economic development arm, which was intended to create jobs and provide hope in a neighborhood that had been depressed by civil unrest. First AME leaders — using millions from city, state and federal sources, plus* corporate contributions from Disney, State Farm Insurance and Wells Fargo Bank — transformed a 90-year-old building that had been a telephone switching station into a modern edifice containing 54,000 square feet of office and meeting space located around the corner from the church.
A fifth-generation African Methodist Episcopal, Murray often speculated that his family was related to Jane Murray, one of the worshipers who walked out of a white church in Philadelphia in 1787 during a controversy over where Black Americans would be allowed to pray. The long ago protest led to the founding of the first Black denomination in the United States, which Murray described as “the mother church of Black America.”
Murray’s roots were in South Carolina, where his mother’s grandparents were slaves. His father was born in 1900, just 35 years after the Civil War ended, yet he graduated from college at a time when most Southern Blacks still didn’t have the opportunity to even complete grade school.
A position as a high school principal led his father to Lakeland, where Murray was born on Sept. 26, 1929, and nicknamed “Chip,” as in “chip off the old block.”
The family moved to West Palm Beach when his father became a high school principal. There, Murray got his first hint that he had been born to be a minister. When a kerosene stove caught on fire in his childhood home, his brother ran to the backyard to fetch buckets of sand to smother the flames, while he remained behind praying.
He served as junior pastor of his childhood church, Payne Chapel AME, leading services and giving sermons from seventh grade through his high school graduation. His yearbook predicted that one day he would be a Methodist minister in California, a prophecy that would be fulfilled years after he took a detour.
At Florida A&M University, he majored in history, pledged Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black fraternity, and worked for the school paper.
After graduation, he joined the Air Force. He trained in jet fighters and served for a decade as a radar intercept officer and then as a navigator.
In 1961, when relationships between Southern whites and Blacks were often hostile, Murray was rescued during a fiery plane crash by the plane’s pilot, a white man from South Carolina. Murray would later say that his survival and the love of that pilot, who died as a result of the accident, proved to be a turning point. Believing that his life had been spared for a larger purpose, he could no longer resist the urge to minister.
In 1977, Murray took over the historic First AME church, the first Black congregation in Los Angeles.
Unapologetically Black, he took down an Italian art piece portraying a white Jesus, Mary and Joseph and replaced it with a mural that showed Jesus with kinky hair and brown skin. He elevated the gospel choir from second-class status and, blessed with perfect pitch and a soothing baritone, he often joined in the singing.
With church programs, street marches and community initiatives, he reached out to Black men, who were outnumbered inside a church filled with women and at a disadvantage in a world filled with obstacles. Men, from reformed gang-bangers to multimillionaires, joined as church membership increased by thousands.
Murray is survived by his son, Drew. His wife, Bernardine, who was Murray’s high school prom date and the daughter of his childhood pastor, died in 2013.