One of the nation’s first Black marines, Raymond Murray Jr. was awarded the congressional gold medal for his World War II service with the Montford Point Marines.
But, to the boxers he coached in Chicago, he was a hero for other reasons.
Mr. Murray, who died of cancer last month at his Chatham home, was “always a father figure,” said former pro fighter Jeffrey Mason.
When Mr. Murray asked the boxers he trained at Fuller Park if they were doing their running, he told them they’d only be hurting themselves if they hadn’t been but told him they had, Mason said: “He’d say, ‘Son, this is not for me you’re doing this. You can’t cheat the man in the mirror.’ ”
When one of his fighters got in trouble and ended up at the Cook County Jail, he visited and tried to get him sent to a boot camp, according to Mr. Murray’s wife Esther: “He saw Ray come in there. He just cried and said his own father wouldn’t have come in to help him.”
“He showed me how to carry myself,” said Michael Hood, 58, who started training with Mr. Murray when he was 17. “He said boxing shows you how to think. He always said think before you did anything — think and figure out what’s wrong.”
If old boxers were down on their luck, “He was bringing fighters to the gym, making sure they had somewhere to go,” said James Dixon, a retired Chicago Park District boxing coach. “If they needed something, he would go in his pocket.”
And if the athletes he coached complained, Mason said, he’d remind them how hard things had been for the Montford Point Marines, saying: “ ‘You’re crying about how you’re working out, but we had to carry heavy military equipment and guns, and bullets were flying at us.’ ”
Mr. Murray, 99, was one of the 400 or so surviving members of the 20,000 Black marines who trained at North Carolina’s Montford Point camp, which was established to train African American recruits, from 1942 to 1949 and integrated the Marine Corps, according to retired Master Gunnery Sgt. Joseph H. Geeter III, spokesman for the National Montford Point Marine Association.
The Montford Point Marines “fought against the enemy during World War II while they also fought for their civil rights and the respect of their fellow Americans,” then-Marine Corps Commandant James F. Amos said when its members were awarded the congressional gold medal in 2011.
Mr. Murray was buried in his Marine dress blues, according to his wife and his stepdaughter LaDonna Bonner.
“This man was living history,” said Mike Joyce, the owner of Chicago’s Celtic Boxing Club and a boxing coach at Leo High School.
In 1943, Mr. Murray, a Wendell Phillips High School alum, enlisted and reported to Montford Point, the segregated base outside Camp Lejeune in…
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