Calling for Social and Racial Justice
01-01-2022
Providential phone calls have guided James Ray's commitment to social and racial justice. They invited Rev. Ray, M.Div.'60, to attend the 1963 March on Washington, Hattiesburg, Mississippi to protect black people who wanted to register to vote, and other cities that needed to break down barriers that suppressed the love of God.
“Hey, Jim,” said a Presbyterian pastor who was on the other end of James Ray’s telephone line. “A bunch of us are going to the March on Washington in August. Why don’t you come along?”
“Count me in,” was Rev. James Ray’s reply on a day in January 1963. His response proved pivotal, setting a course toward a social and racial justice ministry that continues to this today.
In the fall of last year, Rev. Ray, M.Div.’60, received Ohio’s Simeon Booker Award for Courage. It’s named after the black journalist who first brought attention to the Emmett Till murder. It’s given to an individual who embodies a courageous and pioneering spirit in the pursuit of justice and equality.
As a young man, Rev. Ray hadn’t set out to be a social justice activist. He wanted to be a sportscaster and would have if he hadn’t been drafted into the army and sent to serve in the Korean War Prisoner of War Command from 1952 to 1953. While there, he got to know some of the prisoners he was guarding, and he saw the poverty that children were experiencing because of the war. These scenes turned his eyes toward a career in ministry, and once back in the U.S., he found himself at McCormick. That’s where he first heard Dr. King speak on the seminary’s northside campus in April 1959. “I even had the chance to shake his hand,” says Rev. Ray, “but I had never done any of the things Dr. King had initiated.”
That was about to change. It was now August 28, 1963, and Rev. Ray was part of a three-car caravan of mostly white male clergy who were driving from the Midwest at night to get to Washington, D.C. for what would become a seminal moment in the nation’s history.
“I had never been with that many people before,” remembers Rev. Ray about the crowd of 250,000 that had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial. “I had never been with that many black people before. When we got to the city, there were soldiers with rifles that had bayonets on them…gas masks were hanging around the soldiers’ necks. Some had thought that all hell was going to break loose, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I was a couple hundred yards from Dr. King when he gave his “I Have a Dream” address and it moved me in directions I never dreamed of. I heard Bob Dylan sing, “The Times They Are a-Changin,” and they certainly were for me!”
Calls for justice near and far
Soon after returning from Washington to his campus ministry position near the University of Illinois, Rev. Ray received another phone call. This one didn’t take him far from his Champaign, Illinois backyard. He only had to walk over to the chancellor’s residence at the University of Illinois and join a faculty demonstration that was protesting the lack of black employees at every level of the university’s system.
“The university began to change its hiring practices,” says Rev. Ray, “and that said to me, we can participate in a nonviolent protest; it will pay off.”
The next call invited him to Hattiesburg, Mississippi to be on a picket line that helped to protect black people who wanted to register to vote. During his 10-day stay, Rev. Ray and others were outside the courthouse so that black citizens wouldn’t be hassled while trying to exercise their Constitutional right.
Future calls invited him to the San Joaquin Valley in California to support farm workers who needed help organizing a union. A call in late 1970 led to a campus ministry position at the University of Pittsburgh and included the opportunity to meet and work with Fred Rogers who created and hosted the television show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. “Our families got to know each other well,” says Rev. Ray. “We joined the Community of Reconciliation, a multi-racial church, and we were engaged in that multifaceted ministry which was unique at that time. I’m glad that my children got to grow up in that environment.”
Called to care
The next noteworthy phone call occurred in 1983 and was not made to Rev. Ray but from him when he was looking for a new challenge. That call took him back to his home state of Ohio and the city of Youngstown where he served in campus ministry at Youngstown State University for 12 years.
Later, he also became involved with Sojourn to the Past, an organization that takes inner city children to civil rights sites throughout the South. On a tour in 2011, he found himself back in Hattiesburg, Mississippi at the home of a black civil rights leader he had met years ago. “His home had been firebombed some years before and his children were there to forgive those who had murdered their parents,” says Rev. Ray. “That was powerful. I realized to a greater degree that more of this work needs to be done.”
Rev. Ray sees that kind of work being done by McCormick through programs such as its Solidarity Building Initiative and the Trauma Healing Initiative. “I’m proud, grateful and glad that the funds I give to McCormick prepare students to help people in troubled places,” says Rev. Ray who worked for several years with the Program for Female Offenders in Pittsburgh to find alternatives to incarceration. “I think Jesus was about telling people we need to be involved with each other, regardless of our backgrounds. We need to care for each other…we need to break down barriers that keep us separated.”
Concerned about finding a just peace for Palestinians in the Middle East, for the past 20 years Rev. Ray has been involved with organizations focused on those efforts and has traveled to that region to meet with people on all sides of a complex issue. “As I have worked on social and racial justice issues all these years, I have discovered that McCormick biblically and theologically prepared me to relate with God’s people as well as engage with some of the most profound problems in God’s world,” he says. “I was given insight into what it means to take up the cross and follow Jesus and the truth that only love, compassion and forgiveness can ever pull our world together.”
“I think Jesus was about telling people we need to be involved with each other, regardless of our backgrounds. We need to care for each other…we need to break down barriers that keep us separated.”
Rev. James Ray