Pastor was voice of calm during the L.A. riots
The Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray, a preacher who helped cool the fury that exploded across much of Los Angeles during its 1992 riots and later helped lead the city’s recovery through churchbased initiatives to address racial and economic inequities, died April 5 at his home near Los Angeles. He was 94.
For nearly three decades, Murray presided over the city’s oldest Black congregation, the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Los Angeles, turning a struggling community into an 18,000-member powerhouse that attracted politicians and celebrities and channelled millions of dollars into the poor, largely African-american and Latino neighbourhoods surrounding it.
When those neighbourhoods boiled over on April 29, 1992, a few hours after a mostly white jury acquitted four Los Angeles Police Department officers in the videotaped beating of Black motorist Rodney King, news media from across the country flocked to First AME Church, bringing national prominence to its charismatic pastor known for his commanding baritone and bristly eloquence.
The spotlight fell on First AME partly because it was at the epicentre of the riots. But it was also the spiritual home of Tom Bradley, the city’s first Black mayor, who agreed to convene a prayer rally at the church when brutality case verdicts were announced.
Murray turned First AME into a 24-hour command post and refuge that would shelter and feed thousands of displaced residents during and after the worst violence the city had seen since the 1965 Watts riots.
“If you’re going to burn something down, don’t burn down the houses of the victims, brother!” he exhorted before the verdicts were delivered. “Burn down the legislature! Burn down the courtroom! Burn it down by voting, brother!”
Days later, he wept when he saw much of the city on fire. His philosophy the church had to operate “beyond the walls of the sanctuary” was put to the test.
When he heard that firefighters were afraid to answer a call to save a landmark he mobilized 100 volunteers, who linked arms and shielded firefighters from a mob.
Later that night, Murray and his followers intercepted a group of police officers in riot gear. Rioters were throwing rocks and bottles, some of which hit the peacekeepers. When the officers ignored Murray’s pleas to back off, the pastor ordered his crew to line up with the crowd and face the police with them.
“When we turned to face the police, the rock-throwing stopped and the crowd went away,” recalled the Rev. Mark Whitlock, who worked under Murray at First AME and went on to head the Cecil Murray Center for Community Engagement at the University of Southern California.
The violence left more than 50 dead and caused $1 billion in property damage.
When the rebuilding effort began, Murray tapped government and corporate donors to launch an economic development program, FAME Renaissance.
The initiative created 4,000 jobs, 300 new homeowners and 500 new businesses, according to Whitlock, who headed the effort.
Cecil Murray was born in Lakeland, Fla., on Sept. 26, 1929, the second of three siblings.
He was a teen when he saw his father — “the most fearless person I knew,” he later said — confront three whites harassing indigent Black people for collecting food handouts. The whites reacted with their fists, leaving Murray, his brother and their father battered
After the encounter, the elder Murray dabbed his wounds to make with his sons a blood oath that they would always love and protect Black people.
Years after that episode, a tragic accident brought Murray to the second major turning point in his life.
He was serving as a radar interceptor and navigator at an airbase in Oxnard, Calif., in 1958 when his fighter jet crashed after takeoff, trapping him inside. He described feeling a force guiding him as he squeezed through an opening in the cockpit.
When he emerged, he saw the pilot had slipped into burning gas. Murray tried to smother the flames, but the man suffered severe burns. Before he died, he summoned Murray to his bedside “just to thank me, just to tell me he loved me,” Murray was decorated for valour
Three years later, he left the Air Force to enrol at Claremont School of Theology in California, where he received a doctorate in religion in 1964. He was a pastor in Pomona, Calif., Kansas City, Kan., and Seattle before moving in 1977 to an assignment in Los Angeles.
He was predeceased by his wife in 2013.