The Rev. Cecil ‘Chip’ Murray, voice during LA riots, at 94
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 Friday at his home near Los Angeles. He was 94.
The death, in the View ParkWindsor Hills area of Los Angeles County, was announced by the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture.
For nearly three decades, Rev. 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 channeled millions of dollars into the poor, largely African American and Latino neighborhoods surrounding it.
When those neighborhoods 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 G. 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 in part because it was situated at the epicenter of the riots. But it was also the spiritual home of Tom Bradley, the city’s first Black mayor, who had agreed to convene a prayer rally at the church when the verdicts in the police brutality case were announced.
Rev. Murray turned First AME, founded in 1872 by a former enslaved person, into a 24hour 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.
He had used his pulpit to warn against self-destruction: “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!”
A few days later, he wept when he saw much of the city on fire. His philosophy that the church had to operate “beyond the walls of the sanctuary” was quickly put to the test.
When he heard that firefighters were afraid to answer a call to save a South Los Angeles landmark — the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building, which was designed by revered Black architect Paul R. Williams — he mobilized 100 volunteers into a peacekeeping and arbitration force. Made up of parishioners and pastors in their best church clothes, the group linked arms and shielded the firefighters from a mob.
Later that night, Rev. 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 Rev. 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 Rev. Murray at First AME and went on to head the Cecil Murray Center for Community Engagement at the University of Southern California. “Cecil Murray had emotional intelligence. He’d trust his instincts and defuse a really bad situation.”
Rev. Murray offered an unsparing analysis of the causes and consequences of the violence, which left more than 50 people dead and caused $1 billion in property damage. From his pulpit, he denounced rioters who harmed their own community as well as the discriminatory institutions and systems that let them down.
“Maybe the record will show we didn’t set most of those fires. But we do have to confess we set some of those fires, to our shame,” he told parishioners in his first Sunday sermon after the unrest began.
“We are not proud that we set those fires, but we’d like to make a distinction to America this morning: the difference between setting a fire and starting a fire. We set some of those fires,” he said, “but we didn’t start any of those fires.”
When the rebuilding effort began, Rev. Murray tapped government agencies and corporate donors such as Arco and Disney for millions of dollars to launch an economic development program, FAME Renaissance.
The initiative created 4,000 jobs, 300 homeowners, and 500 businesses, according to Whitlock, who headed the effort. Under Rev. Murray, he said, the church “became this fueling station and social service agency that really helped heal the city.”
In 2004, Rev. Murray retired as pastor and joined USC as the John R. Tansey chair of Christian ethics. In 2012, the university created the center named for him that helps faith leaders tackle social problems in their communities.
Cecil Murray was born in Lakeland, Fla., on Sept. 26, 1929, the second of three siblings. He grew up in West Palm Beach, Fla., after his mother died and his father, a high school principal, remarried.
He was a teenager 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 Rev. Murray, his brother, and their father battered and bloody.
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 Rev. Murray to the second major turning point in his life.
In 1951, he received a history degree from Florida A&M University, a historically Black institution in Tallahassee, and embarked on an Air Force career.
He married the former Bernadine Cousin, a teacher, in 1958. She died in 2013. Survivors include a son, Drew.
He was serving as a radar interceptor and navigator at an air base in Oxnard, Calif., in 1958 when his fighter jet crashed after takeoff, trapping him inside the damaged plane. He described feeling a force guiding him as he methodically removed his bulky gear and squeezed through a small opening in the cockpit.