The Rev. Dr. Cecil L. “Chip” Murray, who made the First African Methodist Episcopal Church probably the most prestigious Black pulpit in Los Angeles, attracting presidents, governors and mayors to listen to his dynamic sermons, has died.
Murray died of pure causes Friday night at his residence within the View Park-Windsor Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles County, his son Drew Murray mentioned.
“He was a person who gave God his all,” he mentioned. “He was a faithful husband, and a loving and caring father.”
Throughout his outstanding 27-year tenure as senior minister, Murray constructed the First AME congregation from a number of hundred members to greater than 18,000 worshipers whose help was typically courted by elected officers and political candidates.
Presidents George W. Bush and Invoice Clinton visited whereas Murray was in cost. California governors Pete Wilson, Grey Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke from the pulpit. Los Angeles Mayors James Ok. Hahn and Richard Riordan stopped by recurrently, and Mayor Tom Bradley was already a member of the town’s oldest Black congregation when Murray arrived.
Compassionate and charismatic, Murray emphasised taking Christian beliefs past the fashionable church constructing that housed his congregation, a construction that was designed by pioneering Black architect Paul R. Williams on a hill close to Western Avenue and Adams Boulevard searching on the L.A. skyline.
“On his watch, First AME turned a church that went past the stained-glassed home windows and the partitions,” the late John Mack, head of the Los Angeles City League, mentioned on the time of the pastor’s retirement in 2004. “It turned a vital spiritual establishment assembly urgent human wants.”
The Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray celebrates mass on the First AME Church in Los Angeles. After 27 years, Rev. Murray retired in 2004 as head of one among Los Angeles’ most seen church buildings.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Instances)
Murray, Mack mentioned, led the church in serving to feed the hungry, discover jobs for the jobless and assist those that “didn’t have cash, had been out of labor, out of hope.”
Mack was amongst many outstanding metropolis leaders who labored with Murray on police brutality points, public schooling, bridge-building with different communities and mayoral commissions addressing points involving Black People.
Keen about schooling, Murray helped the congregation begin a personal faculty, which is now named after him, and noticed that 1000’s of scholars acquired faculty scholarships.
Equally decided about financial growth, the pastor pushed the church to associate with authorities or company sponsors, particularly after First AME turned an epicenter of L.A.’s Black neighborhood — and he turned internationally identified — throughout and instantly after the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
“I noticed my father on tv. I heard him on the radio. So many newspapers referred to as the home, from Philadelphia, Washington, D. C., one woman even referred to as from Australia,” his son, Drew David Murray, recalled on the time of his father’s retirement.
Murray did the “Right now” present. He did “Nightline.” He talked to Time and Newsweek, to Nationwide Public Radio and to reporters from all around the world.
“The publicity, in fact, introduced some constructive [images] about this Black church, some affirmation that the Black church within the Black neighborhood is the middle of assist in time of disaster and the middle of change when change is required,” Murray mentioned in a 2004 interview with The Instances. He networked with company CEOs and rich celebrities who supplied assist.
Amongst different issues, Disney put aside $1 million for enterprise loans, and former Arco chairman Lodwrick Cook dinner kicked in half one million. Singer Barbra Streisand contributed $50,000 for meals for many who had been affected by the riots. Arsenio Corridor helped procure a constructing for housing youth actions.
“So we started to have inroads and assets, a few of which have continued even to at the present time,” Murray mentioned in 2004.
The management at First AME additionally developed long-term initiatives to extend the financial vibrancy of the neighborhood across the church and supply entry to capital for entrepreneurs who had been beginning or increasing companies that supplied jobs.
“One of many issues that Rev. Murray goes to be most famous for — not simply the baptisms, the funerals he preached and the nice sermons — however the lasting establishments, all of the totally different housing, flats and residential loans,” Bernard Kinsey, a church trustee, mentioned whereas planning the minister’s seventy fifth birthday celebration. First AME is “an actual diversified enterprise of $60 million, and that simply didn’t occur in a single day.”
For instance, below the minister’s management, First AME initiatives remodeled crack homes and tacky condominium buildings into 2,000 reasonably priced housing models for low-income households, seniors, disabled individuals and other people with AIDS. The church additionally assisted 1000’s with out houses, fed 5,000 households yearly and helped a whole lot of households get residence loans and even buy houses.
Jobs and coaching; employment help for ex-prisoners, welfare recipients and others down on their luck; free authorized recommendation; AIDS applications; transportation providers; adoption assist; help for foster youngsters; emergency clothes — all this and extra had been obtainable via First AME.
Its most formidable enterprise, the FAME Renaissance Middle, opened in 2001 to accommodate the church’s financial growth arm, which was supposed to create jobs and supply hope in a neighborhood that had been depressed by civil unrest. First AME leaders — utilizing hundreds of thousands from metropolis, state and federal sources, plus company contributions from Disney, State Farm Insurance coverage and Wells Fargo Financial institution — remodeled a 90-year-old constructing that had been a phone switching station into a contemporary edifice containing 54,000 sq. ft of workplace and assembly area situated across the nook from the church.
Bush spoke there in 2002 on the tenth anniversary of the riots, praising the church’s faith-based applications as a way of serving to the neighborhood in “rebuilding herself with nice hope and nice promise.”
Trying again 1 / 4 of a century after the riots, Murray mentioned the scars of the turbulence had by no means totally light.
“Even immediately the strain is actual,” he instructed The Instances in 2017. “The police are our protectors and our defenders. However the query comes, who will shield us from our protectors? Who will defend us from our defenders?”
A fifth-generation African Methodist Episcopal, Murray typically speculated that his household was associated to Jane Murray, one of many worshipers who walked out of a white church in Philadelphia in 1787 throughout an argument over the place Black People could be allowed to wish. The way back protest led to the founding of the primary Black denomination in america, which Murray described as “the mom church of Black America.”
Murray’s roots had been in South Carolina, the place his mom’s grandparents had been slaves. His father was born in 1900, simply 35 years after the Civil Warfare ended, but he graduated from faculty at a time when most Southern Blacks nonetheless didn’t have the chance to even full grade faculty.
A place as a highschool principal led his father to Lakeland, Fla., the place Murray was born on Sept. 26, 1929, and nicknamed “Chip,” as in “chip off the outdated block.”
The household moved to West Palm Seaside when his father turned a highschool principal. There, Murray bought his first trace that he had been born to be a minister. When a kerosene range caught on hearth in his childhood residence, his brother ran to the yard to fetch buckets of sand to smother the flames, whereas he remained behind praying.
“I believe I used to be within the third grade then. Praying, and to today, I hear my brother say, ‘That is no time for praying. It is a time for placing out the fireplace.’ Oh, he was a prophet, however that sensitivity to God, that sensitivity to the results of prayer, I believe that was born in me,” Murray remembered.
He served as junior pastor of his childhood church, Payne Chapel AME, main providers and giving sermons from seventh grade via his highschool commencement. His yearbook predicted that at some point he could be a Methodist minister in California, a prophecy that might be fulfilled years after he took a detour.
At Florida A&M College, a historic Black faculty in Tallahassee, he majored in historical past, pledged Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black fraternity, and labored for the college paper.
After commencement, he joined the Air Pressure. He educated in jet fighters and served for a decade as a radar intercept officer after which as a navigator.
In 1961, when relationships between Southern whites and Blacks had been typically hostile, Murray was rescued throughout a fiery airplane crash by the airplane’s pilot, a white man from South Carolina. Murray would later say that his survival and the love of that pilot, who died because of the accident, proved to be a turning level. Believing that his life had been spared for a bigger function, he may now not resist the urge to minister.
With the blessing of his spouse, Bernardine — the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of AME ministers — Murray determined to attend Claremont College of Theology in Southern California, the place he had an uncle and a sister.
He earned a doctorate in divinity and, utilizing his sister’s dresser because the pulpit, pastored first at Primm AME church, which had solely seven members and held providers in a tiny constructing in Pomona. After a stint at Trinity AME in Kansas Metropolis, Kan., he moved on to First AME in Seattle.
In 1977, Murray took over the historic First AME church, the primary Black congregation in Los Angeles. Unapologetically Black, he took down an Italian artwork piece portraying a white Jesus, Mary and Joseph and changed it with a mural that confirmed Jesus with kinky hair and brown pores and skin. He elevated the gospel choir from second-class standing and, blessed with excellent pitch and a soothing baritone, he typically joined within the singing.
With church applications, avenue marches and neighborhood initiatives, he reached out to Black males, who had been outnumbered inside a church full of girls and at an obstacle in a world full of obstacles. Males, from reformed gang-bangers to multimillionaires, joined as church membership elevated by 1000’s.
Over time, Murray’s success would invoke envy from ministers who believed he bought all of the information media consideration and all the company and civic funding. Extra critically, Murray was the main focus of demise threats.
A yr after the Los Angeles riots, in 1993, a racist group plotted to assassinate him and bomb the church. Nonetheless, an informant infiltrated the group and its plan was thwarted by the FBI. A number of members of the group had been convicted in reference to the plot.
On the sentencing, Murray agreed to speak with two of the boys. At a gathering held on the Simon Wiesenthal Middle, one defined his racism by telling a narrative of an incident that occurred to him as a baby. Murray instructed a narrative of his personal, about how he had returned to Florida within the early Nineteen Sixties after his Air Pressure service, anticipating to be handled as a hero and, as a substitute, white individuals spat on him. Then Murray and the convict wept collectively.
“The hardened attitudes softened,” Murray mentioned. “I imagine we understood one another.”
On the church, Murray was often known as a courtly workaholic, in earlier than daybreak most days and infrequently in his book-filled research till late at night time. Of medium peak and common construct, he by no means weighed greater than 10 kilos over his Air Pressure days. Formal in method and costume — swimsuit, tie, polished sneakers — he demanded punctuality, preparation, consideration to element and brief, to-the-point displays from those that labored with him or needed one thing from him. Some missteps would trigger him to lose his mood and curse.
“The members would say my mouth must be baptized at occasions,” he joked.
Extra steadily, he confirmed a softer aspect — for instance, when serving to a suicidal homeless lady get again on monitor, or comforting an aged trainer who had misplaced his spouse earlier that day, or praying with and for others. At all times praying.
“He’d work 18 hours and count on you to work 19,” Joseph D. Simmons, a member of Murray’s first congregation in Pomona, mentioned shortly earlier than his minister’s seventy fifth birthday, the age at which AME pastors are required to retire.
In his final years within the pulpit, Murray refused to decelerate.
Cautious to by no means repeat a sermon, he continued to pack the church. In June 2004, he preached the funeral of singer Ray Charles.
And, lastly, on Nov. 7, 2004, his final Sunday as senior pastor of First AME, he mentioned goodbye to his congregation. Not with tears. Not with the phrase farewell, however with one other reminder that to whom a lot is given, a lot is predicted.
“When God has blessed you by waking you up this morning, how will you have a pity get together?” he requested. Exhorting the 1000’s who packed the church to wish “with their ft,” he repeated a favourite problem to transcend the partitions of the church.
But he watched in astonishment as a few of his exhausting work crumbled below the management of his successor, the Rev. John J. Hunter, and amid allegations of monetary mismanagement. Hunter was faraway from the pulpit in 2012 because the church took steps to re-embrace Murray’s imaginative and prescient.
In retirement, Murray taught at USC’s Middle of Faith and Civic Tradition and led a middle for neighborhood engagement named in his honor. He additionally appeared within the award-winning 2016 miniseries “O.J.: Made in America.”
Murray is survived by his son, Drew. His spouse, Bernardine, who was Murray’s highschool promenade date and the daughter of his childhood pastor, died in 2013.
Pollard-Terry is a former Instances workers author. Employees author Roger Vincent contributed to this story.
Rev. Dr. Cecil Chip Murray, left, and Rev. Mark Whitlock at First AME Church in 2017.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Instances)
