Carl Ray returns to Alabama
Ray plans to watch march in Butler
by CASANDRA ANDREWS
Staff Reporter
Mobile (Ala.) Register
Wednesday, July 24, 2002

Forty years ago a black teenager watched his father shot to death by a white man in rural Alabama. Today, a documentary about the youth's story is in production.

Carl Ray , now 57, wrote the two-act play, "A Killing in Choctaw," about three years ago. The play chronicles his life growing up in Alabama in the 1960s - watching a white man kill his father, enduring the humiliation of a Jim Crow trial, and being locked in a hotel room and harassed by eight members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Ray 's father was riddled with bullets because the younger Ray didn't say "sir" to the white man. "I was looking for a way to elevate the play to another level," Ray said of the decision to work with director Chike Nowffiah on a documentary.

Ray said he went to a film festival in California and watched another documentary produced by Nowffiah, about the closure of black hospitals in America. He liked what he saw.

Ray has come with the director and a film crew to Alabama once this summer already for interviews with those who lend perspective to the production. Ray said he is selling shares in the production as a way to maintain control over the finished product.

He expects the project to be completed by the end of the year and hopes to market the hour-long show to cable television companies and universities.

He's making another trip to Alabama from San Jose, Calif., this week, though no cameras will record his actions. Instead, Ray will perhaps be the one looking on as members of the KKK march on the courthouse square in Butler, about 120 miles northwest of Mobile.

The Royal Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Carthage, Miss., petitioned the city and county in April for permits to hold a recruiting drive at the picturesque courthouse in the middle of town.

Officials in Butler begrudgingly agreed, with the caveat that members not assemble before 4:30 p.m. The courthouse will be closed by that time.

City leaders in Butler told the local newspaper there that they weren't happy about allowing members of the KKK to march and make a speech in the middle of town.

"We will not, and I emphasize will not, put up with any of their crap," said Butler Mayor Ben Smith in an April story in the Choctaw Advocate. "We won't put up with it out of the Klan or anybody else. Anybody who gets out of line will be arrested, and that's a promise."

Ray said he doesn't plan to disturb the peace or get in the faces of those he believes represent hate. He just wants to watch.

"Last time I had dealings with the Klan was in a hotel room in Meridian," Ray said of a time when he was a teenager and was threatened by men who identified themselves as members of the controversial group.

"I want to go. The fear factor won't be there." Ray said he wants to "just let go of some of the stuff that's probably still there. I want to be in a situation where I'm not fearful like I was that night. Kind of letting go of the past and moving on."

Images of the men in long white robes likely won't make it into his documentary. Over the last few years, Ray said, he's made a conscious effort to exorcise some of his demons: "It took me awhile to face reality about the amount of fear and how that altered my life. ... What happened to Daddy had a tremendous affect on my life."

After his father was shot, Ray left Choctaw County and enrolled at Tuskegee Institute. One scene in the play depicts Ray 's early days at Tuskegee, where, after flunking his freshman year, he said college officials enlisted an "army of old people" to keep him on the right track. After his father's death, Ray said he began to have blackouts. He attacked a college counselor, and he tried to run away. He went through 17 roommates in three years at the school.

Before leaving Alabama in 1967, he had a bachelor's degree from Tuskegee and an engineering job at Lockheed Martin in San Jose.

After more than a decade in engineering, Ray began working in stand-up comedy. He drove a cab during the day to help pay the bills. After several strange encounters with a man in his cab in the mid 1980s, Ray came to forgive the person responsible for his father's death.

Since then, he's made a habit of sharing his story. He's taken the one-man play from New York to Michigan to Georgia. His ultimate goal, he said, is finding peace.

"None of this would have happened without the forgiveness," he said. "You carry so much inside that you don't realize and the only person that's being damaged is you. It's amazing the release you have when you can let that go."