LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Cecil Murray : A Voice of Reason in a Time of Troubles

In the first night of the riot, a building was burning a half-block away from Pastor Cecil L. (Chip) Murray’s First AME Church, home of Los Angeles’ oldest black congregation. The fire, he recalls, “was burning like Dante’s inferno” threatening the 5,000 parishioners and community leaders gathered in response to Murray’s call for peace and justice.

“We felt utterly helpless standing there, those 5,000 people at the church meeting,” the 62-year-old pastor said, his booming baritone reduced to a sad whisper. “Soon the palm branches and the fronds would catch; it would leap across the street. We would be consumed.”

Murray, 62, an ex-combat pilot and Claremont Ph.D., who has led his congregation for 15 years, does not easily accommodate the sense of feeling helpless. When told the firemen would only come if guaranteed protection, he organized a group of more than 100 men to stand between them and the rock-throwing rioters for over three hours. There was no blood shed.

All in a night’s work for someone who believes, “The church exists to set the moral climate and moral program” for the community. But those are not the words of some commercialized and ever-safe television preacher. Murray has a long history in the trenches of his mid-City community, fighting to protect and educate a flock that extends far beyond his 7,500 parishioners. Some of them are famous--like Arsenio Hall, who, during the riots, had Murray close his show with a prayer for tolerance. But many of his followers are poor. These people are his main concern because, he explains, “It really takes an arrogant black person to fail to see that ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ ”

Murray is no pie-in-the-sky ameliorator of his people’s discontents. His capacity for outrage over the death blows of racism are never muted; they have proved to be ever channeled and thoughtful. The night the jury in Simi Valley debated their verdict in the Rodney G. King case, Murray, in a terribly prescient sermon, warned “Be cool . . . . Even in anger be cool. And if you’re gonna burn something down, don’t burn down the house of the victims, brother! Burn down the Legislature! Burn down the courtroom. Burn it down by voting, brother!”

His words did not still the night following the verdict. And while he understood the rage boiling up--he did not condone it: “Under no circumstances will we pretend that the looting, the burning, the arson are excusable. They are totally inexcusable. And in the same breath that we say that, we must say this miscegenation of justice in the court system in Simi Valley was injurious to us all. It is inexcusable. And the system that condones it is inexcusable. So while we’re handing out blame, guilt and default, let’s make sure we are an equal-opportunity employer. The blame belongs to more than just the people burning.” It is sad that, only after nights of death and destruction, men of power might finally pay serious attention to Murray’s message and to the community that he so obviously loves.

Question: Where are we this Sunday after days and nights of rioting?

Answer: By Sunday, the armed might of the state will have been demonstrated, and we will be at a different level, I tend to think, one of smoldering ashes and smoldering resentments.

Q: Do you see the violence and the fires as having an economic base?

A: I think everything in history is pulled by an economic engine: Our train of thought is pulled by an economic engine. To pretend that you can be poor and depressed and poor and racially discriminated against without an explosion sooner or later--that is Disneyland. There is no such existence.

Then, too, what’s happened among our poor in this city and in America at large is we have a rising level of expectations. As long as they weren’t exposed to something better, then you could keep a slave with a plantation mentality. But then when the plantation-mentality slave sees Paree, how you going to keep him down on the farm? People need a way to live. Even our middle-income people need a way to live. Apparently, our lawmakers need a way to live, given the way they’ve cheated on their check-writing; and our billionaires who pay no taxes.

Q: So you’re saying this was not just rage over a racist verdict?

A: People don’t burn down a city over a singular unique event. They burn down a city over 200 years of events.

Q: But the mood in poorer urban communities seems to have become particularly desperate in the last few years.

A: I quite agree with you. For the vast one-third below the poverty line, things are worse than ever. You can’t sustain yourself on $6,000 a year, $15,000 a year, $18,000 a year. Now someone will say, “Does that give me the right to go out and burn?” Of course not. And we’re not talking about right--we’re talking about reality. The people have been fed sour grapes and their teeth are set on edge.

Q: But after the riots of the ‘60s, there was the Kerner Commission and programs for change, including the War on Poverty. What went wrong?

A: We had 15 years of hope and then the reaction set in--Nixon, Reagan, Bush, trickle-down and benign neglect. If our leadership had set before us, courageously and with vision, a dream, we would have been floating by now as a country. But instead they pitted the haves against the have-nots. Imagine a President saying: Just treat them with benign neglect as one treats a recalcitrant puppy, one that you don’t want to be around. And another saying, “Give it to the haves, and it’ll trickle down to the have-nots”? What an absurd philosophy. And it could only be endorsed and condoned in a racist atmosphere, because racism blinds people. It did it in South Africa. It did it in the U.S. South. It did in south Los Angeles. Just blindness.

Q: It’s hard to comprehend what it means to be a 17-year - old living a block from your church. What are the prospects? What are the conditions?

A: Isn’t that the truth: Where do I go at 17, angry, alienated, too little space at home, little regularity, hypocrisy in the country, 60% unemployment rate, the chief cause of death in my age range is homicide, the second-leading cause is suicide. And so they’ll tell you: “Might as well die, die of something. Gotta die some time--might as well go out young, make a beautiful corpse,” All of that--which is just nihilism. It’s death. And we can do better than that. If we despise our young, we will not survive.

Q: The way it’s been reported in the media it’s made to seem that only a few bad apples, only a few punks, gang members. But there seems to be a much wider range of rage out there.

A: And I believe it’s universal. We saw it in Beijing. We saw it at the Berlin Wall. We saw it in South African apartheid. We see it in the United States. Nobody, in the late 1990s, is going to predominate over anybody else on a system of inequity. If the haves do not make room for the have-nots, then nobody will have. No one is going to be satisfied being spat upon or despised. However you do it: economically, emotionally, morally, deprivation of history, deprivation of culture, flaunting yourself above someone else. Nobody’s taking that any more; that day died.

Q: How do you answer those people who say, “Well, they had the opportunities , why didn’t they use them; we just coddle them with welfare?”

A: Lincoln said, “I feel sorry for the man who can’t feel the whip when it’s on another man’s back.” And that’s white America’s fault and pain--it cannot feel the whip on another person’s back. Right now the economy’s bad, and the plant layoffs and the $50,000-$60,000-a-year jobs are gone, and white America’s in a red-hot rage. Suppose they’d had that for two centuries? If the shoe had been on the other foot, and the situation had been reversed, this city would be smoldering ashes; white people would have burned it to the ground.

Q: But some things have changed since the Watts riots in terms of the black community. We have a black mayor, we have some . . .

A: We have some 800 black elected officials at high-level positions and another 800 at another. But one swallow does not make a spring. And that’s the thing--it’s a large degree of tokenism; the black bourgeoisie will make it anywhere. They are the best of black and the best of white. But it is totally unfair to ask a person to fight all the odds. If someone fights the odds and wins, you proclaim that person a champion; that’s what medals are for. But you cannot ask the normal run-of-the-mill person to fight upstream like a salmon all of his life.

Q: Are you telling me that since Watts, despite the riots that came after, and the Kerner Commission and War on Poverty, it has still been that kind of uphill swim?

A: It has certainly been. Look at what’s happening to affirmative action now. Twenty years of affirmative action and it’s struck down, just as some gains were being made. The Civil Rights Act under attack. Every gain whittled, step-by-step-by-step, as if we’re walking in reverse, and anybody who’s saying anything else just doesn’t know the facts. Economically, what are we allowed to own? Nothing. You try to produce, you run across red-lining, you run across insurance no-can-get, you run across bank loans no-can-get. We can own nothing. And you want to know why the rage?

Q: Why can’t you own?

A: Because of the financial setup of our country. It isn’t encouraged to advance money to blacks. It’s by banks, the red-lining--and anybody who tells you there’s not redlining is obviously an ingenue. Anybody knows that red-lining is going on, blacks have no access to capital.

Over the past year and half, we’ve been trying to rehab a number of properties that we still have not been able to get the money necessary to do that. Look at the clips in your own L.A. Times files on the study by the federal government, which showed that even the same income levels and credit histories, blacks get fewer loans than any other ethnic group.

Q: How do we pick up the pieces?

A: The problems are complex and our morals are no prayer books, but we’re going by with scars and what we know, and the problem is primarily economic. The problem is in the head of a white person who is an orthodox economic conservative. If only they could begin to see the potential in blacks and to see blacks in the truer light.

Now we are set back a little bit more. Every picture on television that shows the people scene shows young black people looting--it’s a part of the reality of what’s happening. It must be seen. But there’s nothing to offset that, because that’s all they’ve ever seen of blacks.

The truth of the matter is: I know we have to be among the most law-abiding Americans. I know black people do obey the law because we live among each other. Our criminal class is hard-core criminal, but that’s 3%, 4%, 5% of us. We need a new vision in the eyesight of white people. Then that will loosen up the purse strings and the means of earning a living.

Q: Where do we go from here?

A: Now, in rebuilding. What we’re asking is an economic power base: using federal, state, county, city resources to create job training and jobs. That is obviously a must. It is a necessity to develop a Marshall Plan for Los Angeles. That’s not rhetoric; it is a necessity.

Now that L.A. has become a prototype for the nation, we had better make this prototype succeed, because every time there’s a flash point in L.A., there will be a flash point in Philadelphia, New York, Detroit and Miami.

We have a unique opportunity in that we do not have the unhealthiest climate of opinion and finances in the world. It’s workable. And the book is still being written--it’s not closed--so that our racist attitudes are not necessarily locked in. Out of this burning must obviously come a yearning for an agenda for the 21st Century, to unite the 146 nations that make up Los Angeles. We cannot afford the smallness of our differences.

Q: So what should people of good will, who say what you’re saying makes sense and they want to get with the program, do?

A: Good, let us do something economically. Let the white power--which is magnificent once it gets to moving--it can put a Hubble telescope in space and look to the very beginnings of the universe; it can’t find a way to open up 5,000-10,000 job openings in Los Angeles?

After the Nazis tried to kill us, we go and revive Germany--and also Japan. It can revive Korea, where our sons lie buried beneath the soil? But it can’t do anything for the people here? Forty-six founders of Los Angeles, 42 of them were Native Americans and African-Americans. Pico Boulevard is named after the late territorial governor of this territory--he was black. So we are part and parcel of this community. Then, why aren’t we allowed to take our righteous share?

Q: On Sunday, after people read this, what should they go and do on Monday? What should they be calling for?

A: White people of good intentions--use your ingenuity to enable economically the depressed communities of our city, whether they are black, Latino, Asian or white.

But if you want to be specific, if you want to help black people, help us find a way to redeem ourselves economically and dispel yourselves of the notion that blacks are lazy or have no work ethic. We have been working longer and harder and without compensation than any other ethnicity in America. We are willing to work, we are willing to walk through the door. But for goodness’ sake, please unlock it.