Victim of Racism Tells of His Road to Forgiveness
by Loretta Green
Friday, May 29, 1998

arl Ray is a living example of the San Jose Museum of Art exhibit titled, ''We Shall Overcome: Photographs From the American Civil Rights Era.''

Ray witnessed the slaying of his father in 1962 by a white Choctaw County Alabama racist infuriated because Carl hadn't addressed him as ''sir.''

He later suffered jokes about the killer ''bagging him one.'' Ray took years to work through his pain. He eventually forgave.

Saturday, the day before the exhibit closes, Ray, 53, will share his young manhood experiences in the South. Ray's topic will be ''Personal Reflections on Black and White.''

The display features 75 black and white photographs by internationally known photographers including Gordon Parks, Robert Sengstacke and Leonard Freed.

Anyone who has had a loved one killed knows that living on has to be a willful, personal decision.

It took Ray 22 years to talk about the death of his father, George. For a long time, he believed it was his fault. And the crushing weight of that guilt squeezed feeling and focus out of him. It caused blackouts where he in turn heaped violence on others.

Just before he was to leave for Tuskegee University, Ray, 18, exploded some firecrackers he found in a footlocker. A white man named William Carlisle began scolding him. Ray says he responded with an intermittent ''yes . . . no . . .'' instead of ''yes, sir'' and ''no, sir.''

''Oh, gosh he beat me,'' Ray said this week. ''He destroyed me. He pinned me down and came within an inch of killing me. He had his knife out to cut my throat. He started down and I was looking him straight in the eye and his hand just stopped. He let me up.''

Ray returned to his house near Butler, Ala., and told his father.

''Somebody was going to die that day, and my father knew it,'' Ray said.

As they were certain he would, Carlisle came to the house. He told the elder Ray that Carl had to leave town because he didn't know how to talk to a white man. When the 62-year-old father argued, Carlisle took a pistol from his pocket and attacked him.

The Sept. 13, 1962, issue of the Choctaw Advocate's headline says, ''Bond denied killer of elderly negro'' and describing the confrontation says, ''Carlisle then drew a .45 calibre automatic pistol and began to beat the man on the head . . .''

''I grabbed him and my daddy grabbed him and we tumbled off the porch,'' Carl Ray remembers. ''He shot my daddy six times in the chest, killing him.''

A later Advocate article on Nov. 8, 1962, reported that Carlisle was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to nine years for shooting Ray ''without provocation.'' Ray says he served only about two.

He says the ''sham trial'' focused more on blaming him for not knowing how to answer a white man than on the killing.

He recalls a courthouse where whites laughed and joked while in the segregated balcony, blacks were solemn and pained.

Here locally, many know Carl Ray as a hysterically funny professional comedian, a motivational speaker and the operator, with his wife, Brenda, of the small, private Courtland Esteem School in San Jose.

They also know him as the man who takes large numbers of local African-American high school students to historically black college campuses to encourage them to continue their education.

Not as many know about the traumatized, depressed and guilt-ridden, 18-year-old who arrived at Tuskegee after seeing his father shot to death. Many know that he has overcome, but few know what.

''Now when I see a tragedy happen and people say, 'I can't forgive,' I say, 'You are going to be a prisoner the rest of your life,' says Ray. 'If you don't do it, you are going to self-destruct.' ''

It is forgiveness, he says, that saved him.